Grammarly to check and improve your grammar

Even the most confident of native speakers can sometimes have doubts about their spelling and grammar. As for learners of English, getting their writing to a really high degree of proficiency can be a real challenge. It’s great to have a friend to turn to in moments of doubt or better still someone who will proof read your work and give you a second opinion, but if you don’t have that luxury then the Grammarly plagiarism checker is probably the next best thing.

You simply copy and paste your text in, click and Grammarly will read through your work checking a whole variety of different criteria and give you detailed feedback on a whole variety of issues around your text.

Unlike most grammar and spell checkers, Grammarly can be set to be sensitive to your genre of writing and make suggestions based upon that.

Grammarly highlights areas of potential error and then makes suggestions for you.You can then work through the errors deciding whether you want to correct them or leave them as they are.

One really nice feature is the ‘Ask the community’ feature. So if you are really unsure whether you or Grammarly is correct you can post a question to the community and see what they have to say.

 Your question goes onto the Grammarly answers blog and this makes quite interesting reading for anyone with an interest in Grammar and error correction. This would be a great place to get your higher level students reading through problems and trying to decide how to help.

Grammarly also gives you explanations why the grammar needs to be corrected, so using this regularly can help you to better understand the rules of English grammar.


If you’re feeling that your vocabulary is a bit limited and repetitive, you can also use Grammarly to get suggestions for synonyms to replace some of the word you over use.

Grammarly is also a very effective plagiarism checker, so if you are writing a long assignment or dissertation and you are worried that you may not have cited all of your sources, Grammarly can check through for you and find the link back to any online source you may have missed.

Just out of curiosity I ran one of my previous blog articles through Grammarly. It came up with 72 potential errors. When checking through them, they weren’t all errors, but there were certainly a few, so knowing how hard it is to proof read your own text, I think I could be using Grammarly again.

There is of course a catch though as Grammarly isn't free. Whether you are prepared to pay for it though will depend on how much writing you do  in English and how important it is to you that it's absolutely accurate. I think for EAP students or teachers who have to do a lot or written work and marking of written work, Grammarly could be a very sound investment and save a lot of time.

Related links:

• Get Students Checking Grammar and Collocation
• Teaching Grammar Through Songs
• Crazy Comparatives & Superlative
• Create Image Books
• Using Word Clouds in EFL ESL
• Ask & Answer Video Questions
• 4 Similar Tools to Wordle
• Cloze Test Creation Tool

Best

Nik Peachey

A Great app for developing spelling

I've been a fan of SpellingCity.com for quite some time now and I was fascinated when I heard they had produced a free app. For those of you who don't know about SpellingCity, the website enables learners or teachers  to enter a word list and then automatically generate a range of interactive multimedia activities based around the words. The site automatically adds audio recordings of the words and example sentences to the activities it generates. There is a great range of activities that students can do within the site and they can generate certificates for their teacher or parent to prove they have done their homework.

The app is in many ways very similar to the site. There are some ready made word lists and you just click on one and then click on the type of game or activity you want to play. The app has six different activity types:



Spelling TestMe - In the activity students have to spell out the words from the word list. To do this they hear the word in isolation and then again in the context of a sentence. They then type the word into a field. At the end of the activity they find out how many of the words they spelled correctly.



If they got any of the words wrong they can go to the 'Teach ME' activity which spells the word for them using audio and text and gives them an example sentence containing the word.

The MatchIt activity tests the students understanding of the words by getting them to put the words into gapped sentences. Again the students don't get feedback until they have finished the activity, so this reduces the tendency to randomly try to guess.



Which Word is a multiple choice type activity and students have to choose the correct word to complete the gap in a missing sentence.




The Sentence Unscramble activity tests students understanding of syntax, by getting them to arrange the words from the sample sentences into the correct order. The students can get an audio hint on this activity if they are stuck.




My favourite of the activities though, and the one that is most popular with my students is the Hang Mouse activity. This is SpellingCity's own variation on the hangman game. Students try to guess the letters that spell out words and each time they guess, the mouse runs to tab some cheese. Each time they guess incorrectly, the cat starts to wake up, and if they get too many wrong letters the mouse gets trapped.



As you can probably tell, the app is aimed very much at the younger end of the learner market though the word lists do go up to grades 10 - 12.

To get the best from the app you really have to have a SpellingCity account as this enables you to import your own word lists and to manage and track your learners' scores. That said, you can create a basic account for free.

On the whole the Vocabulary SpellingCity isn't going to cause an educational revolution, but it is a good simple app which does what it sets out to do in a user friendly, engaging and intuitive way, so if your students' spelling and vocabulary needs some work then why not get them using it.

You can download the app from the iTunes store at: http://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/id538407602
Sadly there's no Android version available at the moment.

If you have used the SpellingCity app or something similar I would love to hear your comments and suggestions.


This post was sponsored by RM Education Shop a great place to buy all your educational technology hardware.


Related links:

• iPhone for Speaking Homework 
• iPad Apps for English Language Teachers
• Create Books for the iPad
• Getting Learning out of the Classroom with Augmented Reality  
•  Augmented Reality and Web 3.0
• Creating texting dialogues for students

Best
Nik Peachey

Create Spelling Games and Tests

Spelling City looks misleadingly simple but is really a fantastic site for creating or getting students creating their own interactive multimedia word tests, games and practice activities.

Students simply type in the words that they want to revise and then decide which of the three modes they want to use.

The three modes are:

1. Test - In test mode the students get a simple audio test. They can hear either the word in isolation or in a sentence and they have to type it into the field. This is a great test to use with words that sound similar as it can give students the opportunity to test their ability to hear the difference both in isolation or in the context of a sentence.
2. Teach - In the teach mode the students hear the word alone and in a sentence and then the word is spelled out for them.

3. Play - In the game mode the students have the choice of a range of games that they can use to develop their ability to use the word in context or just test the recall of the words and ability to recognise them.


Matching activity

Hang Mouse
How about using this with students?

• You can either get students working alone on Spelling City revising their vocabulary or if you have an interactive whileboard or data projector in class you can create the tests in class in response to the new vocabulary demands of your students during class. just collect any new words that come up during the class and towards the end of class or at the beginning of the next get the words up on the board and click to create some interactive tests live in class. Just add your words then click to test, teach or play a game. If you use a game you can click the small icon in the top right corner to see the game full screen on the board.
• Many of the games will also provide a print friendly version of the activity for you to print and use in class, so you caould also use this tool to creat a range of paper based word game activities too.
  

Spelling City is a great tool that can really help EFL ESL students with their spelling, vocabulary, listening and receptive pronunciation. Would be marvelous if you could download and save the activities that are generated, but I guess you can't have everything.

I'm also not sure how big the database of words and audio sentences is, so I'm not sure what kind of coverage this would have for higher levels, but for lower level learners and for kids, I'm sure it's a winner. Hope you find it useful.

• Here you can find lots more vocabulary activities for EFL ESL students

Related links:

• Create Image Books
• Create a Flickr Montage
• Great Time Line Tool
• Create a YouTube Carousel
• Interactive presentations
• A Picture's worth
• Picture phrases
• Make Your EFL ESL Yearbook
• Personalised flashcards
• Animating vocabulary
• Exploiting Image Sequences

Best

Nik Peachey