Online Reference Tools

• dictionary and thesauruses

in the classroom the teacher and the students can have the dictionary
available at all times to check the meaning of words. it provides a
powerful resource for students woeking on their own and also it can be
used at all levels. thesauruses are more suitable to the intermediate
and adcanced levels where more language is new to the learners.

• concordances and corpuses for language analysis

a concordance id similar to a search engine in many respects. it is a
small program that can examine large quantities of text for patterns
and occurances of particular words or phrases. there are many
concordance programs such as www.monoconc.com. when choosing
concordance, the main evaluation will be the type of language you want
to work with: spoken or written, American or British. these choices
will influence which corpus the teacher decide to query. there are
some well known corpuses such as www.natcorp.ac.uk

Blog, Wikis and Podcast

• blog

a blog is a web page with regular diary or journal entries. blog can
be used in teaching language. blog used in education are known as
edublogs. an edublog can be set up and used by a teacher, learners. a
teacher may decide to use a blog to provide their learners with news
and comments on issues, extra reading practise or homework, online
links, a summary of a class for learners.

• wiki

a wiki is like a public website, public web page, started by a person
but which subsequent visitors can add to, delete or change as they
wish. a wiki is more dynamic and can have multiple authors. the best
way to start using a wiki with a group of learners is to set up a
simple collaborative writing project.

• podcast

a podcast is an audio and or video file is broadcast via internet and
can be downloaded to a computer or mobile device such as MP3 player.
podcast can be authentic or made for language learners. there are two
main uses of podcast in teaching. firstly, learners can listen to
podcast made by other and secondly, they can produce their own
podcast. the language teacher can direct their learners to podcast
already available on the internet.