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English and ICT: Corpora

Corpora are websites that are based mainly on material collected from pages on the World Wide Web (some printed texts, such as academic journals, have been used to complement certain thematic areas). Represents all types of English, from literary novels and specialized magazines to spoken language. They are very useful to determine if an expression is correct and if it is usually used or not in the context that you are using. Parallel Corpora as Linguee also give you the translation of phrases with the searched term in different contexts. I had doubts about the preposition I should use with the word "related". I did not know which one, "related to" or "related with", was correct. In British National Corpus "related with" it only shows 8 results while "related to" shows more than 4000. It is obvious which is the correct expression.  "Related with" results:  "Related to" results: In  L...

English and ICT: Thesaurus

Thesaurus are dictionaries of synonyms and antonyms. It is common to find lists of antonyms and synonyms in online dictionaries, but if you need a more detailed description of each one and know which is the one that best fits in your context you can use them. On the website Thesaurus I searched for the term "accurate" , an adjective with two possible definitions. Thesaurus gives you for each definition a list of synonyms that you can sort by relevance or alphabetical order and filter the synonyms by level of complexity, length and formal or informal use. You can click on each of the synonyms and it takes you to the definition of the term and another list of synonyms which allows you to know which one best suits your context. It also includes below a list of  antonyms for that word. In my opinion, it is a good resource if you don't want to repeat the same word in your texts and expand your vocabulary.

English and ICT: Dictionaries

I'm going to do a comparison of some English dictionaries as a useful source of information for the students that are in a CLIL subject. In this comparison I have chosen the word "atom" due to it's importance in Physics and Chemistry. The results of the entries on the dictionaries are: Oxford Dictionary:  It includes a short principal definition of atom  followed by a large explanation and other uses of the word even minority uses in some regions or countries. It includes also a large amount of sentences with the term, a list of synonyms, the origin of the word and it's pronunciation. Webster Dictionary:  I think this website it's a more complete option than Oxford dictionary for CLIL students. In addition to the included in the oxford dictionary for the word atom , if you scroll the page it also has a section called "Did you know?" that gives a short encyclopedic information, a section with links to websites that have used this te...