October 07, 2017
This cute video series gives a very thorough explanation of many grammar and punctuation topics. It is accessible to all Southwestern College students and faculty.
October 03, 2017
Great strategies for getting out of the translation rut.
October 03, 2017
This website lists a collection of concordance tools. Concordance software takes a corpus—a collection of texts—and processes it so that the user can then search for individual words to get a sense of how a word is used, what words are used frequently in a particular discipline or academic work generally, what combination of words are appropriate. This is a wonderful tool for language learners.
January 17, 2017
This website has a long and varied list of helpful websites for ESL students and faculty on topics including Listening, Writing, Reading, Grammar, Study Skills, Speaking, and more.
October 09, 2016
Contains grammar explanations and autograded practice quizzes for many high-level grammar topics, including run-on sentences, fragments, comma splices, and more.
December 09, 2016
Southwestern College has tons of Hollywood movies, documentaries, and more- all with English Language subtitles (it's like a free Netflix!) They provide excellent materials for nonnative English speaking college students to develop their language skills. Download the Swank App and watch films on a mobile device!
Current students and faculty can access these videos on campus, or follow the instructions to log in and view films while off campus.
October 09, 2016
This Academic Vocabulary List (AVL) was derived from a 120-million-word academic subcorpus of the 425-million-word Corpus of Contemporary American English by Dee Gardner and Mark Davies at Brigham Young University. To see the top 3,000 "core academic" words or the top 2,000 word families in academic writing in COCA, click on: "Acad Vocab List" or "Word Families."
October 09, 2016
The SWC ESL department recommends the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English Online to English language learners. It is a great free resource. It contains simple, clear definitions, and helpful information for nonnative speakers, such as like collocations and images.
October 09, 2016
Excellent resource for both students and instructors. Includes a wealth of linguistic, pedagogical, cultural, and academic information.
October 09, 2016
Faculty can use these error codes when giving feedback to ESL students on their writing in order to give them guidance to correct their own errors. There are many such codes available, but here is one example that is used in the ESL department.
October 09, 2016
Resources, information, language activities and more for students and teachers.
October 09, 2016
This corpus of authentic language (More than 520 million words in 220,225 texts, including 20 million words each year from 1990-2015) will allow you to do your own linguistic research to learn about language. The possibilities are endless, but here are a few great ways for ESL students to use this corpus:
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To see many authentic examples of vocabulary in use: Type word you want to learn about into the text box, and then click on “Find matching strings.” Click on your word in the results under “context.” You will see authentic examples of uses of the word you searched from the corpus. Click on any one to see it in its larger context.
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To find frequent collocations of a word: (*Collocations are words that are frequently used together). Click on “Collocates” above the text box. Type a word into the box. Click “Find collocates.” The results will give you words that are commonly collocated with the word you searched. Click on one of them to see authentic uses of the terms together from the corpus. Click on any one to see it in its larger context.
To compare how two words with similar meanings are used authentically: Click “compare” above the text box. In the “Word1” and “Word2” text boxes, type two terms. Click “Compare Words.” The results will show one two side by side lists of common collocates for each word. Click on a collocate to see authentic examples.
October 09, 2016
Copy and paste any text into the text box to analyze the terms used in the text and their frequency in the English language.
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Students: use this tool to determine which words are most crucial for you to know (blue and green) and which words may be more technical (yellow).
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Faculty: use this tool to determine which words ESL students are unlikely to know, and can be pre-taught or provided to students and tutors for study help. (Click on “see lists” for lists of words in each category.)
October 09, 2016
ESL students can use this list of topics to practice writing essays.
October 09, 2016
PBS is a great resource for free and interesting films to practice academic English.
October 09, 2016
National Public radio is a great place to practice academic English Listening skills.
October 09, 2016
These popular and interesting short talks provide good listening practice for ESL students with academic English.