TESL Malaysia » Vocabulary

Clockwords – A Fun and Speedy Vocabulary Game

TESLMalaysia Admin — Mon, 18 Jul 2011 05:18:17 +0000

Clockwords is a flash-based game that test one’s vocabulary as well as typing skill. It is supported by Dictionary.com. Set in a Victorian age, your task is to think and type as fast as you can to fend off invaders that attempt to steal your secret machine. The game is fun and engaging for learners to learn vocabulary and at the same time practise their spelling ability since they need to type the word accurately in a short period of time.

This game can be used as part of a game-based lesson or simply introduce it to the students to play it at home.

Note: The introduction part of the game can be quite lengthy.

Try it Now

Top 1000 Words in Academic and Business Writing

TESLMalaysia Admin — Tue, 05 Jul 2011 11:20:40 +0000

Teaching students to read and write academic texts may be a daunting task and often makes teachers unsure of where to start. Well, if you are teaching average (and below) students, then you might want to start ‘drilling’ them with the most common words used in academic writing. Of course, drilling here means meaningful drill, with the correct usage.

To help you figure out the most common words, Vocabulary.com has listed the Top 1000 words appearing on business and academic writing, which are obtained from their corpus of billions of words from edited sources. 1000 may seem to be a big figure, but it is not when you divide it by 10 words per day. You’ll probably make your students master all these words in 100 days.

Vocabulary.com also list the words with its meaning and you can click each word to get further descriptions of the word!

Click Here for the Top 1000 Words List

And if you’re looking for other lists, feel free to browse through this useful website. It serves as a good self-learning website for students too.

Teaching Idiomatic Expressions Using Comic Strips

TESLMalaysia Admin — Sun, 26 Jun 2011 17:06:13 +0000

While it may be culturally-biased, some comic strips can be greatly utilised as a source of motivation for English language learners. I recently discovered a creative teacher (Mr. Frank Degenaar) teaching in Brazil who have compiled a great list of comic strips for the teaching of idiomatic expressions and phrasal verbs. He updates his blog almost every day with new comic strips plus explanation on the expression used.

One example from his blog is:

You may want to visit his blog (Natively Speaking Comics) to explore his collection of useful comic strips.

Useful Verbs and Adjectives List for Writing

TESLMalaysia Admin — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 21:58:25 +0000

This is a compilation of useful verbs and adjectives that can be given to your ESL students in helping them to describe. You can also create activities based on the words list.

[download#9#image]