If you are interested in learning English and improve your English level, you should practice it almost everyday. But what are the best ways to practice? One of these methods are using different tools.
In this lesson, I’m going to introduce 10 online tools that you can use to practice your English for free. So stay with POC English in this article.
1. Dictionary
Dictionary is the most basic and fundamental tool to practice your English and a language learner must be able to use. A dictionary can tell you many different things. For example:
- The meaning of a word
- Example sentences
- The pronunciation of the word(whether in an American or British accent)
- Extra information (countable or uncountable/formal or informal)
Cambridge online dictionary is my personal favorite. It’s very convenient and easy to use. To visit the website, click here.
2. practice your English (Ozdic.com)
A dictionary can help you with single words. But not everything is about single words. Natural English consists of the ways in which words interact with each other. (The ways certain words sit together to make a natural English sentence).
A group of words that often go together is called collocation. For example, the word “crime” is a noun. What adjectives can you use with the words crime? Horrible crime, horrific crime, violent crime?
How can we find out the collocations for certain words? How can we understand what adjectives or verbs or what nouns often go together? Here comes the ozdic.
3. Pronunciation practice
With an online dictionary, you can listen to words’ pronunciations and you can repeat them for yourself. But how can you check whether your pronunciation is correct or not?
To practice your pronunciation and see if you are pronouncing different words correctly or incorrectly you can search “definition” in google and type the word you want to practice.
Learn more: There are several ways that help you improve your English pronunciation. Click on the followig link to learn about them.
English pronunciation practice
Practicing your listening skill
Now it’s time to practice your English listening skills. As an English student, you must be able to understand both the American accent and the British accent. One of the best ways of improving your listening skill is by listening to English podcasts. First, let’s begin with British podcasts.
4. practice your English (British podcasts )
There are many podcasts available on the internet, but the best and the most standard British podcast I have ever seen is the BBC 6-minute English podcast.
5. American podcasts
If you are an admirer of the American accent, you can use VOA podcasts to improve your listening skills of the American accent.
Now that you are introduced to these two podcasts, do you know how to use them to improve your listening skill effectively? If you’re doubting, click here and watch this video!
6. Practicing your writing skill
A very important aspect of writing skills is grammar. When you are writing a text, there are many different online tools that can check whether your grammar is good or bad. Whether there are any grammatical inaccuracies or not. Quillbot is one of my favorite grammar checkers online!
Checking your grammar is very important. But do you know what is even more important? Learning grammar! There is a video about the best way of learning English grammar that you can watch and with its help, learn grammar in a more efficient way!
7. The art of changing sentences
A very important skill in writing is paraphrasing. Paraphrasing basically means saying the same thing in a different way, but with the same meaning. Look at this example:
- We love plants because they produce oxygen and clean our air.
Now let’s paraphrase this sentence by keeping the meaning and changing the structure.
- Producing oxygen and purifying the air are among the reasons why trees are loved.
As you might have noticed, using synonyms and changing the order of the sentence are different ways of paraphrasing.
There are many different ways to paraphrase a sentence or a paragraph. But are there any online tools to help us in this process? Of course, there are! Quillbot can help you again!
8. Practicing your speaking skill
To improve your speaking skill, you need to talk about a subject. This website that I’m going to introduce, is going to give you a lot of different subjects with many interesting questions so that you will be able to talk about all those. Just go to ESL discussions to see for yourself!
So by using this website you have many subjects and many questions to talk about. But if you don’t have a partner, how are you going to practice? Or even if you have a partner, how are you going to practice speaking? There is a video that shows you the best way to improve your speaking.
Learn more: common mistakes in english
Practice your English while having fun
practice your English is not always about reading books and doing exercises that are boring and difficult. You can also practice by playing games and watching movies! The next two tools that I’m going to introduce are going to be really fun!
9.Yarn.co for movie lovers
If you are a movie lover you can have some fun practicing the new idioms, new words, and new collocations that you have learned from your movie! How? Let me show you.
Let’s say you have learned this new idiom today: “as busy as a bee” which means to be really busy. Do you know how I can understand which movies have used this idiom? By visiting Yarn.co you can easily search for that idiom or that particular phrase that you are looking for in the movies in which it has been used.
Learn more: Are you interested in watching movies? Can you describe movies in English? click on the following link to learn about the ways of describing movies in English.
describe movies in English
10.Games to learn English for gamers
What about games? Playing computer games can help improve your English. But apart from computer games, there are some online games designed specifically for students of English to improve their skills. One of them is games to learn English!
Conclusion
Here are all the tools that I mentioned in today’s lesson.
✅Cambridge online dictionary
✅Ozdic.com
✅BBC 6-minute English podcast
✅VOA podcast
✅Quillbot
✅ESL discussions
✅Yarn.co
✅Games to learn English
Don’t forget to use them to improve your English and don’t forget to practice!
You are amazing teacher Maddy. Thank you so much for your generous.
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Dear Maddy,
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