New Moodle project for students and teachers of English

The latest version of my moodle site is now open for guests. It’s a new project for academic English based around short excerpts from videos and audio podcasts. Somewhere in the space between general academic language and “English for Specific purposes” in the fields of Law, Business, Philosophy and Human Sciences.

The site’s designed to be a by-product of all the things I’m interested in, including those specialised fields and also corpus linguistics, Moodle and interactive exercises. The materials will be OER, although I’m asking users to register with the site to access some of the exercises. I will also invite teachers to re-use the materials or discuss them with me.

I’m going to analyse the chosen recordings using the work of Dr. Charles Browne, Dr. Brent Culligan and Joseph Phillips who created the NGSL and a new “academic word list“.

At the moment, I’m not sure whether the most important target language will turn out to be the New Academic Word list, or more specific language for the specialised fields. In the first lesson, the key vocabulary mostly lies in the third part of the NGSL “New General Service list” with frequencies in the range 2001-2801. (if you are not used to this kind of information: Imagine a long list of words organised according to how often they appear in English. At the top are “the, be, and” – numbers 1, 2 and 3… and at the end are “2799 – ashamed, 2800 – found and 2801 – thirst“.)