Skip to main content

SKELL

SKELL,  or Sketch Engine for Language Learning, 'is a simple tool for students and teachers of English to easily check whether or how a particular phrase or a word is used by real speakers of English.'

In other words, SKELL is a powerful online tool that can significantly enhance English language learning. It provides a unique way to explore and understand how words are used in real-world contexts. 

Here's a breakdown of its benefits:

Key Features and Benefits:

  • Corpus Analysis: SKELL allows users to search through massive collections of text data (corpora) to analyze word usage, frequency, and context.
  • Collocations: It helps identify common word combinations (collocations), which are crucial for natural-sounding language.
  • Concordances: You can find examples of how a word is used in different sentences, providing valuable insights into its meaning and usage.
  • Word Frequency: SKELL shows how often a word appears in the corpus, giving you an idea of its importance and commonality.
  • Semantic Relationships: It can help you understand the relationships between words, such as synonyms, antonyms, and hypernyms.
  • Grammar and Usage: SKELL can assist in understanding grammar rules and idiomatic expressions through real-world examples.

How SKELL Can Benefit English Language Learners:

  • Vocabulary Building: By analyzing word frequency and collocations, learners can identify important vocabulary and learn how to use it effectively.
  • Grammar Understanding: SKELL can help clarify grammar rules and usage through real-world examples.
  • Writing Improvement: By studying concordances and collocations, learners can write more natural-sounding and accurate English.
  • Speaking Fluency: Understanding word usage and collocations can improve speaking fluency and accuracy.
  • Academic Research: SKELL is a valuable tool for academic research, allowing students to analyze language patterns and trends.
Is it better than a dictionary online? See for yourself, try SKELL or any other corpora search engines:)

Just a side note, hope you don’t mind......

If you like my content, maybe you would like to support me and buy me coffee?

Also, you might want to check other materials I create for the English Bilingual Secondary Classes (C1) - I am sure some of them will be useful for the English B HL classes, for example BritSpeak or OpenBookCouples. 

Check out the shop at dwujezycznie.pl


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

SPEECH STATIONS

I have been looking for a way to spice up a bit the class I give in DP1 as introduction to speeches- both oral and written (paper 1). Then it dawned on me- why not get the students move and learn about the structure, language, rhetorical appeals rotating the stations in pairs?  I tried and it worked very well- have a look at   the stations  and the sample answers:) . The class is designed for 5 stations, but there is also an optional one on extra linguistic features- I’ve put them in my google disc as pdfs, but you can also create QR codes for them so that you don’t need to print the activities.  As for the class itself, you can ask students to compete against each other in their pairs, and check their worksheets yourself, or allow them accces to the sample key to encourage self-assessment or peer-assessment.  What needs to be done at the end is a wrap-up session on the text type that speech is- one idea might be ask students to elaborate on the titles of each s...
Post a Comment
Read more

HONY, honey:)

  There is a book, fb page, lots of articles, videos, interviews, lesson ideas on HONY- Humans of New York, and now there is also my extensive lesson plan-... Never heard of it? Humans of New York (HONY) is a popular photography project and storytelling  blog created in 2010 by Brandon Stanton. It started as a simple goal to photograph  10,000 people living in New York City, but evolved into a powerful collection of  portraits and personal stories. Each photo is paired with a short interview or quote  that reveals intimate, honest, and often surprising details about the subject's life. Over time, the project expanded beyond New York to include stories from many countries, covering diverse experiences and social issues. HONY offers a unique window into the lives of everyday people, encouraging empathy and understanding through storytelling. Interested? Check out  this handout    for reading, listening, writing and speaking ideas. Just a side note, ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Bloom’s balls!

​ You might think in a secondary classroom there is no room for such ‚primary school crafts’, which require the actual, not digital (!) cutting and pasting. Wrong! Students of all ages and levels should be encouraged to get creative and use all their senses and body to construct knowledge:) It is useful and fun:)  My students recently applied and practised lower and higher order thinking skills described by Bloom in his taxonomy (LOTs and HOTs).  The ‘Bloom’s Balls they created was a project to wrap up our reading of ‘The Giver’ by Luis Lowry (highly recommended for teenage groups, btw!). The students were given a selection of tasks labelled with the six tiers of Bloom’s taxonomy, and a template with pentagons to cut and paste:) You can find the template below- it is a picture, you might want to manipulate with its size to fit the page:)  Their job was to choose 2 tasks from each category, and complete them on their ‚ball’. The tasks were diverse, with different levels of...
Post a Comment
Read more