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Places to see art and beautiful sunsets: I think seeing beautiful places and art is valuable for its own merits, but I would also highly recommend these activities to someone who is visiting or living in Austin and working on their English. These can be inspirational and they can lend themselves to meeting people, making friendships, and engaging in stimulating conversations! - Mozart’s Cafe (nice coffee, snacks, and sunset!) - The Blanton’s Ellsworth Kelly installation (new art space/building.  Closed on Mondays) - The Oasis (beautiful sunset at this restaurant… I’ve never been there; it’s a little far northwest on Lake Travis, but people recommend it highly) - The MexicArte Museum displays Mexican art and culture in Downtown Austin - “Skyspace” art installation by James Turrell on UT Campus in the Student Services Building (location) .   Go at sunrise or sunset for a really amazing light and color experience. - More Art recommendations ...
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Online English Listening and Podcasts

Online Listening Opportunities and Podcasts ESL Lab This has a ton of Beginning, Intermediate, and Advanced English conversations with questions and activities. English Central -- listening, spelling, vocabulary, speaking -- although a short trial, it requires you to pay for most of the services. Eng Vid --  Great material on grammar, spelling, pronunciation, and you listen to it to get the lesson! Modern Family on ABC and on Hulu   (this is the TV show we started watching together) BBC Learning English -- If you want some exposure to a British accent PBS Learning Media   has a variety of subjects for any interest. These Podcasts are favorites of mine.  They are more advanced than the listening above: Radio Lab is an excellent NPR show from New York that specializes in fascinating, unusual scientific stories.  In class, we have listened to this episode about technology , and I like this long one one about the environment and ...
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Revisiting Improvisational Group Story Telling and TPRS

One of my first posts was on collaborative story telling as used in language classrooms under the name TPRS.  I shared  Blaine Ray's site about TPRS and TPRStories.com and mention how people promote it as relating to Dr. Stephen Krashen's Input Hypothesis, which suggests that we learn languages receptively through high-interest, meaning-focused input that is just a little more difficult than we can produce (i + 1). Since then, I've come across this series of blog posts about TPRS , and here's a link to my colleague and friend Nancy Meredith's blog with a great video of a second rehearsal of a story that her students composed together using aspects of TPRS. Try it out in your class!  It's good stuff, especially when combined with other styles and techniques of teaching!
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Corpora revisited! More and better options!

Corpora can be amazingly powerful tools to determine whether two words work together nicely or whether the word or phrase you want to use is appropriate for the meaning you intend and the context in which you want to use it. Here is an overview of some of the most useful and powerful corpora that I know.  Many props to Mark Davies and the scholars at Brigham Young University for making it and sharing it: https://corpus.byu.edu/variation.asp#x2 And here are some useful corpora: https://books.google.com/ngrams https://www.wordandphrase.info/frequencyList.asp https://corpus.byu.edu/coca/ For years, I used the corpora with just really basic searches, and there are great things you can learn, but recently I finally watched some tutorials and there is SO MUCH MORE you can do!  Watch this Youtube tutorial to better understand how to use COCA: How to Use the COCA And this one to see how to analyze longer passages (reading or your own essay writing) using Word and Phrase:...
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Songs and lists for Simple Past Tense

I stumbled on this awesome animated music video about a shy man named Mr. Morton , which is trying to focus on subjects and predicates, but does a really nice job with past tense verbs too. My students found it funny and useful to listen to and re-tell. Here's another nice one that's more of a pattern chant. For the different pronunciations of -ed in regular past tense verbs, here's a nice list . For irregular past tense verbs, I like giving a fairly complete alphabetical list and then shorter lists grouped by patterns . That's all for now!  Have a great day!
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Phonetics Pronunciation App

Check out the University of Iowa's Sounds of Speech App.   It gives great animations, descriptions, and videos of how the mouth forms the sounds of English. Also Pronuncian has some great resources and strategies for pronouncing difficult sounds, words, and phrases.  Please comment with any other resources you would recommend!
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Kids Songs for Spelling and Vocabulary

I'm a big fan of songs for learning in general.  You can learn vocabulary, phrases, rhythm, slang, grammar, and so much more!  Here are a few songs that one of my classes listened to and sang a long with last week.  Yes, they're for children, but they're still useful! Vowel Spelling and pronunciation song (short and long vowels!) Head Shoulders Knees and Toes Health Vocabulary I'll add more as I find them! Will
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