February 2006 Newsletter

Learning by example and recent changes in the REVIEW area of The Linguist.

I would like to talk about the power of examples in language learning. We learn by seeing and hearing words in use. The more examples we see and hear of words in use, the better we understand these words and the more likely we are to remember them. That is the reason why we have created the "examples" function in the Words I Am Learning and Phrases I Am Learning sections in REVIEW. I sometimes feel this function is not fully used by our learners so I want to talk about it a little at this time.

First of all let me tell you that we have changed the Words I am Learning section so that you can more easily see examples of words in use. Please go and have a look. You will see that the example sentences for your saved words now come not only from your My Files area. Examples are also shown from sentences in content you have not yet studied in the Linguist Library. You can now easily select these new content items for study while in the REVIEW section.

Please experiment by saving words and or even very short two word phrases that you are not fully comfortable using. Try saving some of these words to see what kind of example sentences turn up in REVIEW. Read these examples to make sure that you really have the proper feel for how these words are used.

I have bolded some words and short phrases in this text to give you a sense of what I mean. Even if you know these words, you may want to save them just in order to see what kind of examples you get both from your own content in My Files and from the Linguist Library. Please note that only the Words I Am Learning section has been changed. This means that the Phrases I Am Learning section still operates as before and will only show examples from your My Files section.

I look forward to getting feedback from you. I believe that exposure to many examples of words in use is a more effective way to learn correct structure than grammatical explanations. Of course, if you have grammar questions you can always ask your tutor via the Forum, via email or when you speak on your online discussions.

Content Provider

TheLinguist.com

Free resources for English learners. Learning tips, articles and podcasts plus a huge, free library of mp3 and text content.

All content on TheLinguist is licensed under a Creative Commons License if no Copyright or other License is mentioned anywhere in the content or content description.