Archive
Pictolang, another flashcard site for vocabulary learning
- Distinguishing mark: Pictolang is based on the Culturally authentic Picture Lexicon. Here is an overview of the currently available languages and imagery:
-
Language Region # Images German 2631 Mandarin China 2336 ESL North America 2074 Russian 1420 French France 1231 Spanish Southern Cone 1022 Spanish Mexico 1000 Spanish Central America & Caribbean 872 Spanish Peninsular 579 Arabic 287 Special Collections 151 Ukrainian 139 Japanese 106 French Canada 47 Arabic Oman 11 - You can focus vocabulary your study on specific topics, which will likely integrate it better with your core textbook material (often divided into topical chapters).

- Suitable for self-study, the use of CAPL makes this an especially interesting tool for preparing work/study/travel abroad. It also allows for playing a classroom flashcard game in language culture and area studies, where the teacher can provide context and background information in the images from the target culture.

- Example o the Word Match Game right answer feedback:
- Wrong answer feedback:

Ipatrainer.com community provides free phonetic transcription tables with sounds and exercises
- This is looking good, but …
- There seem to be some coding issues, I am getting server errors 500 after registering.
- The site is advertisement-based.
- There is no content beyond the IPA sound which would put these bare basics in phonetics into language learning context and practice.
- Site Contains:
- tables for teaching your language – complete with phonetic symbols and sound samples

- and exercises for your students (e.g. Memory games, Identifying characters



, places,
and sounds.
- tables for teaching your language – complete with phonetic symbols and sound samples
- You can
- Create your own, after free registration,
- or assign one of the ones from many other teachers.
- Most popular ones are listed here: http://www.ipatrainer.com/user/site/?language=, and if the use numbers are accurate, there must be really some serious IPA learning going on here…
- I see no way to browse other tables without having the username of the teacher who created and assigned it.
- There is also a phonetic writer.
- And a user forum, in its infancy.
How to use archive.org’s US-English news collection as a language learning corpus with QUIK-like speaking samples
- Much of TV news nowadays seems to amount to not much more than a constant stream of sound bites – however, exactly this brevity,
- the large archive and simple search interface:

- the research/browsing capabilities visible on the left here, including the varied sources – of which Arabic and French and other European TV likely provide a somewhat different perspectives on Edward Snowden –

- and the caption-like transcription, make it all the more accessible for intermediate learners of English.

- video clips of only 30 seconds length is hardly enough for instruction, however, you can have students work with corpus-QUIK-like spoken samples, and have them string a news history together if you design webquest-like research assignments – with the major added benefits, that this corpus is spoken and trains listening.
- For more background info on archive.org’s transcribed TV news, consult this NYTimes article.
Query treebanks with Fangorn for English SLA?
To provide inductive empirical examples, SLA classes have benefitted from query interfaces to target language text corpora in SLA. But corpora are usually POS-tagged – and queried – at best, which constitutes a certain “impedance mismatch” to what SLA classes actually teach. The Fangorn very large treebank query language beta demonstration page
looks already interesting for analyzing English in SLA (hover over tree elements to highlight the corresponding text), including, thanks to its capability of editing and refining queries graphically from the search results, for demonstrations during face-to-face classes. Wondering whether other corpora than Penn Treebank, Wikipedia (5k and 5000k sentences) will be made available online, and other languages but English will be supported.

