The English Blog

Introducing iPad English

Among other things, the iPad is a wonderful tool for language learners. I've already posted several articles about iOS apps for learning English on The English Blog, but having recently become the proud owner of a new iPad (I had an iPod Touch before), I thought it would be fun to start another blog where I could talk exclusively about ways in which teachers and learners of English can use Apple's magical device. So, if you've got an iPad, or are thinking of getting one, head on over to iPad English (www.ipadenglish.net) and join the conversation.

Rolls Off The Tongue Cartoon Idioms Blog

Andy Martin sent me an email telling me about Rolls off the Tongue, a new cartoon idioms blog where you have to guess the English idiomatic expression being illustrated. See if you can guess this one (click here for answer):

COMMENT
The cartoons (which are great, by the way) are designed to show both the literal and figurative meaning of the idiomatic expression, but English learners might need a more detailed explanation. For that, you can consult IdiomDictionary.com or UsingEnglish.com. You should also check out the Rolls off the Tongue Facebook page.

Newsy Video: Library of Congress Archives All Tweets

Twitter donated its entire archives to the Library of Congress. Critics are questioning why the library would want to archive tweets. Read transcript >>

Cartoon: Ads on Twitter

This cartoon by Kipper William's from The Guardian refers to the news that Twitter is planning to let advertisers pay for tweets to appear in search results.

VOCABULARY
1. A tweet is a post or status update on Twitter, a microblogging service.
2. Ad is an abbreviation for advertisement.

READ MORE
• Twitter unveils 'promoted tweets' ad plan (Guardian)
• Twitter Ads Test Billion-Dollar Valuation (Wired.com)
• Twitter to launch advertising with 'Promoted Tweets' (BBC World Service interview with John Abell, New York bureau chief for Wired.com)

The Edulang Newsletter

Sometime last year Edulang, a French publisher of English learning materials, asked me to be the guest editor for their occasional newsletter. For some reason, I didn't get round to posting the results on the blog, so here it is now. Better late than never.

Wibiya Toolbar

 
After reading Nik Peachey's ecstatic review of the Wibiya toolbar on his On Blogging and Social Media blog, I was moved to install it on The English Blog. Read Nik's post to find out what the Wibiya widget can do.

Like Nik, I'm impressed. Unlike Nik, however, I don't think I'll get rid of the widgets in the sidebar—yet. I've got a feeling that users will take time to get used to the new toolbar (which you should be able to find at the bottom of this page).

Although I like Wibiya, I still think the best blog plugin is Apture, which allows readers to view images, videos , Wikipedia articles, maps, and a whole lot more without having to leave the page.

Slideshow: ELT Blogging

Karenne Sylvester of Kalinago English has posted the results of her blog carnival, which asked the question "What advice would you give to another TEFL teacher interested in becoming a blogger?" The accompanying slideshow contains a lot of useful information for budding bloggers.

English Language Teaching Blogging

View more documents from Karenne Sylvester.

Top 100 Language Blogs 2009: Results

 

Earlier today bab.la and Lexiophiles announced the results of their Top 100 Language Blogs 2009 competition. This year there were 473 nominated blogs from 26 different countries in four categories.

I'm delighted to report that The English Blog came fourth in the Language Learning Blogs category and fifth overall. Many thanks to all of you who voted for The English Blog and congratulations to all the other blogs which made the Top 100. You can see the complete list here.

Top 100 Language Blogs Competition—Last Chance To Vote

It's not too late to vote in the Lexiophiles competition aimed at finding the Top 100 Language Blogs. 

100 blogs have been selected in each of four categories to go into the voting phase, which ends on July 27th. The English Blog has been nominated in the Language Learning category. 

To vote, just click here or on the button below. The nominees are listed in alphabetical order so you'll have to scroll down to find The English Blog. Don't forget to click on the VOTE button at the bottom of the page.

The winners will be announced on July 30th. Fingers crossed!

Top 100 Language Blogs Competition

LexioPhiles has organised a competition aimed at finding the 2009 Top 100 Language Blogs. 100 blogs have been selected in each of four categories to go into the voting phase. 

I'm pleased to announce that The English Blog (this one) has been nominated in the Language Learning category. 

To vote, just click here or on the button below (the nominees are listed in alphabetical order so you'll have to scroll down to find The English Blog—assuming you're kind enough to vote for me!)

Video: Brit Starts 'Best Job In The World'

British man Ben Southall has started work on "the best job in the world" – a six-month contract as caretaker of the islands on Australia's Great Barrier Reef.

COMMENTS
It seems Ben got off to a shaky start when he misspelled the name of Hayman Island on his Twitter blog, referring to it as Hayward Island. You can follow Ben's regular blog here.

Free Download: The Official Dictionary of Unofficial English

Grant Barrett, co-host of A Way With Words, one of my favourite podcasts, has made his book The Official Dictionary of Unofficial English ($11.21 on Amazon.com) available for download at no cost. You can get it from his Lexicographer's Rules site.

Grant's reasons for giving his book away are interesting:

Since my book The Official Dictionary of Unofficial English is now available on the bootleg e-book sites ("pirate" is the wrong term, I think), I've decided to make it available for download at no cost. [ . . .]

By the way, the way these books get out there is usually simple. Sometimes the files leak from publishers, sometimes from authors, sometimes they're scanned from paper to pixels, etc., etc., Sometimes people pretend to be blind and contact the publisher to ask for a digital copy of a book so they can use it with their screen readers that translate the digital pages into something they can understand. The publisher sends a digital copy and in a few days it's all over the Internet.

COMMENT
It will be interesting to see if Grant's download offer results in increased sales of the hard copy version. I recently read that illegal downloaders of mp3 music buy more CDs than non-downloaders. (I've bought CDs of music I've discovered on Spotify.) Perhaps the same is true for books? After all, I would have thought that there's a much greater incentive to buy a book than there is to buy a CD after downloading the digital version. 

Posterous: Group Blogging Made Easy

Posterous lets you post things online fast using email. You just have to send an email to post@posterous.com and you get an instant reply with a link to your new Posterous blog. Attach any type of file and it will be posted along with the text of your email. Add other people's email addresses to any Posterous site you control, and they can then email stuff in too and receive automatic updates when anything is posted.

COMMENT

Posterous has fantastic potential as a platform for class blogging projects. You could also use it as a discussion forum. One of the problems I've had with blogging projects is that the students can't know when something's been posted, unless they're using a feed reader, and in my experience most students can't be bothered with that. With Posterous, not only does everyone get an email with what's been posted, but there's a record of all that content on the blog as well.  

Thanks to Mashable for the pic.

Cafebabel: The European Magazine

 

Created in 2001 mainly by Erasmus students, cafebabel.com’s aim is to stimulate and develop European public opinion through its online magazine, offering every day an in-depth coverage of political, cultural and social trends from a unique, European perspective. The contents are written and translated by a community of babelians and then edited by a team of professional journalists. The website also offers babelblogs, the first multilingual blogs, and babelforums, a spot for pan-European debate in real time. Be sure to check out the Tower of Babel, the weekly linguistic and cultural section. 

COMMENTS
I found some interesting original material such as this article about German nicknames for young European graduates, and this one about the film adaptation of the first book in Stieg Larsson's "Millennium" trilogy (which I've just finished reading). What's particularly interesting for language learners is that you can read the same article in English, French, German, Polish, Spanish and Italian. 

TIP FOR LEARNERS
Open an article in two browser windows so that you can see it in your language and the target language.

Onestopblogs: English Language Blog Aggregator

Onestopblogs is a new service from Macmillan's www.onestopenglish.com which brings together blogs from throughout the English language teaching community. Here's what they say:

Onestopblogs is a blog aggregator - which means that it pulls in feeds from any blog listed on the site. It does plenty of other things too, as long as it has plenty of content to play with. For example, if it spots the same terms and tags and keywords in several blog titles, it will aggregate them in the Top Stories section, meaning that readers can find out which common threads are getting teachers talking!

We started with 47 blogs, choosing blogs we read regularly and researching new ones. Our aim is to continue to add blogs over the coming weeks. This is a service which we hope will complement onestopenglish and which should help bloggers to increase traffic to their blogs and reach the wider TEFL community.

We've tried to aggregate blogs on a wide variety of topics and have created categories which you can filter the whole site by. There are technology blogs, ESL-specific blogs, linguistics blogs and even one ELT management blog. The idea is to make onestopblogs the portal for English teachers to read about issues in ELT.

COMMENTS

Although it's not the first directory of English language teaching blogs (see here and here), Onestopblogs is much more ambitious and looks certain to become the definitive source of information on this topic. I do have a couple of quibbles, however. Why are the top 50 blogs listed as 'Economics blogs' with rankings 'based on the number of incoming links from other indexed science blogs'? Bizarre. And although The English Blog (that's this one) comes third in the Most Active list with 82 posts over the past 90 days, the correct figure is well over 500.