Tdol's English Language Blog

Twilocity

Mon, 05 Jan 2009 08:41:05 +0000

I submitted a couple of pieces of writing to Twilocity, a site that reviews and checks MS Word documents by running the writing through some macros. They were returned in a short time and the results were good. The blurb on the site says that their review should take you up to the next grade level and is aimed at American college students, but there's a lot in the report that comes back that could benefit ESL learners.

Zotero

Fri, 29 Feb 2008 11:42:40 +0000

For people using Firefox, there's a superb add-on Zotero to help you organise your research, create bibliographies, reference lists, etc, complete with a number of styles.

Who will judge the ESL Judge?

Tue, 15 Jan 2008 13:07:24 +0000

ESLJudge claims to be a site that 'allows ESL schools and teachers to resolve disputes professionally and fairly', which is a laudable aim. However, it certainly does not live up to its lofty aims and is unlikely ever to do so. It was launched far too early, which in itself is probably enough to strangle it at birth.

Job Adverts in our Forum

Thu, 13 Dec 2007 11:09:46 +0000

We will delete any ESL job adverts that appear in our forum. Our forum is for language discussions and not a free place to advertise jobs.

Lingro- a translation tool

Tue, 20 Nov 2007 08:46:14 +0000

Lingro is a site that offers a useful translation tool. Enter the URL of a site or page, then choose the language you want to translate words into and you can click on the words you don't know and bring up a pop-up box with a translation.

I am Spartacus

Mon, 29 Oct 2007 15:17:16 +0000

Over at the TeflTrade blog, Sandy McManus has received another legal demand for material critical of a school to be taken down from his site. This time, his blog host received a letter alleging defamation from Mr Paul Lowe of Windsor TEFL, who appeared in this blog here and also replied to what I said here. In the first case, Abbey College, Malvern demanded that a post that contained a critical description of their summer schools was removed. The original text had appeared on Dave's ESL Cafe and Sandy had reposted it after it was pulled from Dave's.

Comments in polls

Fri, 26 Oct 2007 12:08:24 +0000

The language polls area of our site allows comments and they are displayed immediately without moderation. This does mean that we get some comments that are nonsensical or just plain rude. Having made it impossible to post links, we no longer get spam comments, but we do occasionally get someone who thinks that is funny to type random letters or rude words in the comments. We can check the list of latest comments and delete any nonsense we get.

Nova

Thu, 27 Sep 2007 09:13:51 +0000

When I was living in Japan, it was virtually impossible to avoid Nova advertising; they were all over the subway, in my newspaper and on TV. For the last few months, the company, the largest of the eikaiwa schools in Japan, has been in free-fall, ever since they got into trouble over their refund policies. The company now seems to be in its death throes.

Idioms

Tue, 14 Aug 2007 22:20:33 +0000

The idioms section has had a display problem recently, with some html code appearing, so people may have seen entries with same strange bits using < >. Sorry for this; I have been going through and removing them.

More brilliance in Corpus Linguistics

Fri, 03 Aug 2007 12:02:01 +0000

Professor Mark Davies of the Brigham Young University set up a superb site to access the British National Corpus (BNC). Easy to use, fast, packed with features and intuitive, it is by far the best concordancer on the web in my opinion.

The Professional Association of Teachers

Wed, 01 Aug 2007 13:07:57 +0000

They are definitely firing on all cylinders at the Professional Association of Teachers (PAT) conference this year. A motion was put forward yesterday that

deplores the very real problem of cyber bullying in schools and demands the closure of sites encouraging such behaviour

Simplified Spelling

Mon, 23 Jul 2007 10:35:21 +0000

The Simplified Spelling Society recently had a discussion with Professor Vivian Cook about whether English spelling should be simplified. English spelling is chaotic, but I found the society's arguments weak.

Crash and burn

Wed, 04 Jul 2007 13:06:49 +0000

Though the term information superhighway seems to have been consigned to history, the internet, in many ways, resembles a demolition derby more than a sleek road. Every year I clear out the dead links from our ESL links database; even though we add a new link most days, we now how forty fewer links than we did at the start of the year.

Interactive whiteboards

Mon, 02 Jul 2007 13:47:29 +0000

Interactive whiteboards, heralded as a breakthrough in teaching, have come under fire as possible risks to eyesight. While the claims that TV and computer screens would ruin people's eyesight have largely not been shown to be the case, it is possible that there is a risk here.

The plot thickens

Fri, 15 Jun 2007 13:46:36 +0000

An extremely lengthy thread about Mark Smith and Smith's School of English, Japan on the AACircle ESL Blacklist was closed by the administrator on the grounds that he had seen 'indisputable documentary evidence' that Mr Smith was innocent of all the accusations made against him.