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Ultimate Phrasal Verb Book

Phrasal verbs are verbs combined with prepositions or adverbs. Familiarity with phrasal verbs and understanding their use as nouns (breakup, showoff, etc.) or adjectives (spaced-out, broken-down, stressed-out, and many others) is essential to ESL students. Updated information includes:

  • The most commonly used phrasal verbs
  • Activities and examples that reflect our current technology and the world around us
  • An expanded introduction for the teacher with a thorough breakdown and explanation of phrasal verbs
  • A discussion of separable and inseparable phrasal verbs in Unit I, and more.

This book’s hundreds of examples in context and hundreds of exercises will be extremely useful to ESL students who are preparing for TOEFL or who simply wish to improve their English.

IMPROVING VOCABULARY ACQUISITION WITH MULTISENSORY INSTRUCTION

The purpose of this action research project was to improve student vocabulary acquisition through a multisensory, direct instructional approach. The study involved three teachers and a target population of 73 students in second and seventh grade classrooms. The intervention was implemented from September through December of 2006 and analyzed in January of 2007. The goal was to gather evidence of a marked improvement in the number of vocabulary words that students recognize, understand, and use. Pre and posttests gathered data on student knowledge of fifty key content area vocabulary words. Three interventions based on brain research were implemented: specially designed graphic organizers, classical music, and Brain Gym® exercises. The gathered data indicates that students clearly understood and could define over five times as many words after this intervention (from 378 words to 1,941 words). The project results show that a multisensory, direct instructional approach improves student vocabulary acquisition. Educators need to increase their knowledge of brain research and implement direct instruction of vocabulary through the use of multisensory methods. (Contains 10 figures, 34 references, and 11 appendices)

Online OXFORD Collocation Dictionary of English

A completely new type of dictionary with word collocation that helps students and advanced learners effectively study, write and speak natural-sounding English. This online dictionary is very helpful for the education of the IELTS, TOEFL test.

Level: Upper-Intermediate to Advanced
Key features of oxford dictionary online

  1. Collocations/collocation – common word combinations such as ‘bright idea’ or ‘talk freely’ – are the essential building blocks of natural-sounding English. The dictionary contains over 150,000 collocations for nearly 9,000 headwords.
  2. The dictionary shows words commonly used in combination with each headword: nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, and prepositions, common phrases.
  3. The collocation dictionary is based on 100 million word British National Corpus.
  4. Over 50,000 examples show how the collocation/collocations are used in context, with grammar and register information where helpful.
  5. The clear page layout groups collocations according to part of speech and meaning, and helps users pinpoint speedily the headword, sense and collocation they need.
  6. Free Download — OXFORD Collocations Dictionary

The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World

This book argues that the division of the brain into two hemispheres is essential to human existence, making possible incompatible versions of the world, with quite different priorities and values.

Most scientists long ago abandoned the attempt to understand why nature has so carefully segregated the hemispheres, or how to make coherent the large, and expanding, body of evidence about their differences. In fact to talk about the topic is to invite dismissal. Yet no one who knows anything about the area would dispute for an instant that there are significant differences: it’s just that no-one seems to know why. And we now know that every type of function – including reason, emotion, language and imagery – is subserved not by one hemisphere alone, but by both.

This book argues that the differences lie not, as has been supposed, in the ‘what’ – which skills each hemisphere possesses – but in the ‘how’, the way in which each uses them, and to what end. But, like the brain itself, the relationship between the hemispheres is not symmetrical. The left hemisphere, though unaware of its dependence, could be thought of as an ’emissary’ of the right hemisphere, valuable for taking on a role that the right hemisphere – the ‘Master’ – cannot itself afford to undertake. However it turns out that the emissary has his own will, and secretly believes himself to be superior to the Master. And he has the means to betray him. What he doesn’t realize is that in doing so he will also betray himself.

The book begins by looking at the structure and function of the brain, and at the differences between the hemispheres, not only in attention and flexibility, but in attitudes to the implicit, the unique, and the personal, as well as the body, time, depth, music, metaphor, empathy, morality, certainty and the self. It suggests that the drive to language was not principally to do with communication or thought, but manipulation, the main aim of the left hemisphere, which manipulates the right hand. It shows the hemispheres as no mere machines with functions, but underwriting whole, self-consistent, versions of the world. Through an examination of Western philosophy, art and literature, it reveals the uneasy relationship of the hemispheres being played out in the history of ideas, from ancient times until the present. It ends by suggesting that we may be about to witness the final triumph of the left hemisphere – at the expense of us all.

The Tyranny of Words

The pioneering and still essential text on semantics, urging readers to improve human communication and understanding with precise, concrete language.

In 1938, Stuart Chase revolutionized the study of semantics with his classic text, The Tyranny of Words. Decades later, this eminently useful analysis of the way we use words continues to resonate. A contemporary of the economist Thorstein Veblen and the author Upton Sinclair, Chase was a social theorist and writer who despised the imprecision of contemporary communication. Wide-ranging and erudite, this iconic volume was one of the first to condemn the overuse of abstract words and to exhort language users to employ words that make their ideas accurate, complete, and readily understood.

Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics

Selections from Science and Sanity represents Alfred Korzybski’s authorized abridgement of his magnum opus, Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics. This second edition, published in response to the recent Korzybski revival, adds new introductory material and a revised index, providing an accessible introduction to Korzybski’s arguments concerning the need for a non-Aristotelian approach to knowledge, thought, perception, and language, to coincide with our non-Newtonian physics and non-Euclidean geometries, to Korzybski’s practical philosophy, applied psychology, pragmatics of human communication, and educational program. Selections from Science and Sanity serves as an excellent introduction to general semantics as a system intended to aid the individual’s adjustment to reality, enhance intellectual and creative activities, and alleviate the many social ills that have plagued humanity throughout our history.

Language in Thought and Action

Renowned professor and former U.S. Senator S. I. Hayakawa discusses the role of language in human life, the many functions of language, and how language – sometimes without our knowing – shapes our thinking in this engaging and highly respected book. Provocative and erudite, it examines the relationship between language and racial and religious prejudice; the nature and dangers of advertising from a linguistic point of view; and, in an additional chapter called The Empty Eye, the content, form, and hidden message of television, from situation comedies to news coverage to political advertising.

Handling Unicode Front to Back in a Web App

Understanding encoding is all fine and good, but there are many gotchas involved in actually building a complex system consisting of many moving parts that uses anything but ASCII characters. This article shows how to get a PHP web application with a MySQL database set up to handle UTF-8 data front to back and explains common pitfalls.