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Thursday, 25 November 2010

Get Students Checking Grammar and Collocation

Phras.in is a really handy site I saw today that allows students to check two different ways of saying the same thing, so that they can decide which is most likely to be right.

If you type the two different ways of expressing something into the two fields, the site checks these through Google and shows you which is the most popular. This is a great way to get students checking paired sentences with their common mistakes against against each other. Also great for getting them to check collocations to check that they have the correct combinations of words or how popular different collocations are.

What's also nice about the site is that it shows you the context in which it found the examples, so students can reinforce their learning by seeing some examples of the phrase used correctly in context. So you could also use this as a source of authentic materials to build grammar lessons around.
Students can even click through from the phrase the the source to find out where and how the expression was used. This is a great tool to get students editing or peer checking thier work together and to encourage more self correction.

I hope you find Phras.in useful.

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Nik Peachey
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3 comments:

  1. Buthaina Alothman26 November 2010 at 10:37

    WOW!! Fantastic, Nik. Thanks so much for http://phras.in/ - this tool is very good not only for students but for teachers also, especially when correcting assignments, quizzes, and exams as sometimes students write unfamiliar sentences and this is a fast way to check whether they're acceptable or not. I usually use google to search such sentences, but http://phras.in/ is faster and easier. Thanks a million, Nik.


    Love & Peace!

    P.S. I've just posted to my students and I'll also add it to my class wiki :)

    ReplyDelete
  2. bett2 December 2010 at 19:15

    Thanks Nik,

    It is a great site and I will use it for vocabulary and collocations.
    I work at Bilgi so I can let you how it works after I try it.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Unknown4 December 2010 at 12:17

    Hi Nick,
    I totally agree with Buth, sometimes students write phrases or sentences one has never read or heard.

    Besides, if find this is a good alternative for "decontaminating" ourselves from the many mistakes we read when correcting our students works. It happens to me, that after reading a mistake several times, I doubt about the correct form.

    I'll post the link to my students.

    Thanks a lot for taking time to find great tools and sharing them with us.

    ReplyDelete

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