Will Slade's Language Teaching Blog

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!

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: Word a