Collins ELT
COBUILD English Usage 4th Edition: Changes in vocabulary and grammar
In the second of our blog posts about the new edition of COBUILD English Usage, Penny Hands details some of the findings that came out of the team’s research into the ways in which new words and uses are created.
COBUILD English Usage 4th Edition: updating the examples
In the first of our blog posts about the new edition of COBUILD English Usage, Penny Hands details some of the changes she made to the examples to ensure they reflect changes in society, and ponders on how future-proof these changes are likely to be.
Where to start when softening your English accent
Changing an accent is not an overnight task and many people try and fail because they don’t know the best way to approach accent modification and become overwhelmed. The trouble is we talk all the time without even thinking about it, so when we try and think ‘how do I say that?’ we can’t answer.
Tips on how to use Collins Work on Your Accent in the classroom
Accents are muscular habits. As such, learning a new accent is like learning a gymnastic move, and any teacher should aim to balance the teaching need for muscular repetition with the learner’s need to feel they are making progress.
Problematic Sounds For Many Non-native Speakers
One of the most challenging sounds for non-native speakers of English is actually the most common sound in the English language! That sound is The Schwa. The schwa is a very subtle, quiet sound – you may barely have noticed it, but without it, you can never hope to capture the rhythm of English. Any written vowel can be replaced by the schwa if it’s in an unstressed syllable.
Why Accents Matter
We love accents! We make our living helping people learn a variety of different accents, and we celebrate all the different accents that exist. We also know that accents are a big part of our identities and who we are as individuals, so we definitely aren’t interested in teaching everyone to sound the same. However, there are certain occasions where accents can cause problems for understanding, and those are the times when we believe it’s important to work on your accent.
COBUILD: The Evolving Corpus – How corpus use has changed over the years
Size matters when it comes to corpora. At 220 million words of text, the corpus used to create the second edition of the COBUILD dictionary in 1995 was over ten times the size of the one used for the first edition, and 220 times bigger than the first electronic corpora developed in the 1960s and early 1970s. Yet it was tiny compared to those we use today, some of which amount to billions, not millions of words.
COBUILD: Shifting senses – How the meanings of words change
In the 30 years since the publication of the first COBUILD dictionary, a whole flurry of new words has come into the language and as they’ve caught on and become part of everyday usage, they’ve been added to the dictionary.
COBUILD Part 2: The Early Years – A dictionary from a corpus
By the time I arrived at COBUILD as part of the 1993 intake recruited to work on the second edition of the dictionary, the whole project had been fully computerised for several years. This meant working on screen at terminals linked to mainframe computers that hummed away in a separate room, still with the green text on a black background, as described by Andrew Delahunty in Part 1.
COBUILD: Design and Layout – Changes over the last 30 years
Where were you 30 years ago? I was in the middle of my university studies, still to embark on my ELT career, and as such, a smidgin too late to be part of the intrepid and free-spirited COBUILD dictionary team. Led by the late John Sinclair, this large young team was involved in bringing to life his vision: to create a dictionary for learners that was based on a large digital language database – or a corpus.
COBUILD Part 1: The Early Years - Where it all began
I have always counted myself as incredibly fortunate to have worked as part of the COBUILD team at the time that I did, between October 1983 and the end of 1986. I was not quite 24 when I arrived in Birmingham, not knowing one end of a dictionary definition from another. By the time I left I was pretty sure lexicography was going to be my career and, over 30 years later, I’m still doing it.
Encouraging IELTS students to read beyond the course book
It comes as no surprise that reading widely is proven to increase reading fluency. However, many students are still in need of a little encouragement and guidance to build the skills required to read confidently outside of the course book. Here are a few ways you can incorporate authentic readings into your IELTS preparation course to engage students and help them better prepare.