Review of Vocabulary Learning Websites

After reading the chapter 1 i.e. Vocabulary from the book of Chapelle & Jamieson's (2008) Tips for Teaching with CALL , I have found 13 website links. In the chapter, before the website instructions, there are two paragraphs e. g. 'what research says' and 'what the teacher can do' which explains the opinions of researchers and the initiatives of teacher that how teacher can instruct student's vocabulary learning. And I have accessed all the sites and had a lot of experiences and instructions as well as I enjoyed my testing and having scores. Sometimes the practices were easy and sometimes difficult to match the words with the appropriate pictures or synonyms. Moreover, selecting appropriate websites and practices for the intermediate Bangla medium students is one kind of challenge in our country because the different institutions and settings has different types of teaching and learning instructions. All Bangla medium intermediate student's competency are not almost same. The rural and urban students have different level of competency and the madrasha students are weak in English ( Rahman & Kafi, 2013). Now, I would like to discuss about three websites that teacher can use for the Bangla medium intermediate students.

 

First of all, http://www.lextutor.ca/ is a very resourceful website for vocabulary learning as well as for other language related learning. The author of the site is Tom Cobb who started it in 2004 and it is a free browsing site. The products of this sites are concordancer, vocabulary profiler, exercise maker, interactive exercises, and much more. There are three separate criteria for the learners, researchers and teachers. The dictionary, grammar checker and lot of practice tests are included in this site. That is why learners have many scopes to learn a lot of things at a time. They do not need to access those separately. In addition, using this site can save learners and teachers time. In terms of searching examples, there are many examples in this site. However, this site is interrelated with many factors and looks like a mess and students may be frighten to watch it for the first time and lost their interest. And teacher need to introduce it with the help of  video and  audio supports. There are some audio and video demo of this site. In terms of pedagogical instructions, there are two types of vocabulary test for the learners e.g. frequency based tests like recognition and productive and word associates test. The tests are included some filling the gap and word matching activities which are helpful for the learners but there are no picture based practice test for the intermediate learners in this website. Also there is no audio or video based practice tests. So, instead of some weaknesses our teachers can use this site for our intermediate Bangla medium students to teach English vocabulary.

 

Second, www.vocabulary.com is another dynamic website I have found where different types of tests are included e.g. using pictures, filling gaps, matching synonyms, questions and answers etc. This site is also very much easy to access and students may like it very much. The words and the practice tests are related to academic study. Here, students can easily use it and the tests are like game. Students can use it individually, with the friends and connect with facebook account. So, there are many scopes for interaction and engagement. Though the site is a very smart site for learning vocabulary but it has no audio or video related tests and the dictionary gives detail information only when learners makes any mistakes to answer the questions. And at last I can say that this site is really very much fascinating and it would be useful for Bangladeshi intermediate learners.

 

 

Finally, http://www.wordsmart.com/wsc_d/statistics.html is another great website for vocabulary learning. This site is based on two skills e.g. reading and listening. Here, peer comparison and challenging statistics is an interesting aspect and this is a completely gaming website. It has a rewarding option like earn dollar and connect with facebook account and also measurement of progress rate. The site looks very attractive and some emotional smileys and very easy to use. So, it covers a lot of engagements and interactions as well. This game provides performance chart where three stages are used e.g. below average, average and high performance. The game is not that much easy because some questions, gaps or synonyms are quite difficult. But this site can be helpful for our intermediate learners who already used the first two mentioned sites.

And I would like to mention some other websites which are also helpful and I think appropriate for the intermediate learners like http://iteslj.org/cw/3/ck-dolch01.html where crossword puzzles are given and it is also interesting vocabulary game. Another site http://www.rosettastone.com/learn-english is also interesting and where students can learn grammar as well but this site is not free for all. In addition, http://www.vocaboly.com/vocabulary-test/ is also applicable for intermediate learners where SAT, GMAT, GRE, TOEFL and VOA vocabularies are given. Basically there are many learning websites are available in the internet and to choose the appropriate practice tests are significant for the teachers and learners.

Reference:

Chapelle, C. A., & Jamieson, J. (2008). Tips for Teaching with CALL: Practical           Approaches to Computer-Assisted Language Learning. USA: Pearson Education, Inc. 

https://www.scribd.com/doc/28681752/English-Language-Teaching-and-Learning-in-Bangladesh