Vocabulary test

Everybody will love My Vocabulary Size.

My Vocabulary Size is an online tool to measure up the size of your vocabulary. My Vocabulary Size has teamed up with researchers at Victoria University of Wellington to bring English learners a way to measure their word knowledge. 


Users can take the tests by using Paul Nation's Vocabulary Size Test. These are the test instructions we must bear in mind before we begin the test:


• There are 140 questions in this test.
• Look at the word and an example of the word in use.
• Choose the meaning that most closely matches the word.
• Try to answer all the questions, even though you are not certain of the answer.
• You can not go back and change your answer.
• You will not be penalised for giving incorrect answers.


A native speaker of English is said to know 20,000 word families, but according to Nation, 8,000-9,000 word families are enough for getting by in reading, and 6,000-7,000 for listening.

Expressing obligation

Recursos Tic for Education is a site of the Spanish Ministry of Education we should get well acquainted with. Here we will find lots of online resources for students of all levels and for all subjects, English included.

Take, for instance, the online activity Society, where you have the possibility of practising the modal verbs of obligation and prohibition, both in the present and in the past, around three different topics:

• The environment
• Social behaviour
• Street behaviour

In the online activities we will find video, listening and reading activities which give the framework for the practice and consolidation of modal verbs to express obligation.

On the minus side, most of these resources require Java and the Malted Web 2.0 plugin in your computer. 

Nobel Prize

Nobelprize.org's educational section consists of 46 productions. Of these, 29 are interactive learning games of various sorts and degrees of difficulties. The subjects include Physics, Chemistry, Medicine, Literature, Peace, Economics. Most of them also include a "Read more" about the subject.

I know these resources will be mainly be of interest to those English students who have an academic or professional link with the subjects mentioned above, but the interactive learning games make an interesting read in English for everyone who is keen on developing their general knowledge, and the content is not too specialized.

You can also grab the opportunity to surf Nobelprize.org and find out more about the history of the prizes, Alfred Nobel and some other resources on the site.

H/T to Free Technology for Teachers.

All you need to know about Christmas

Christmas is an interactive book by Mrs Haquet that shows us everything we need to know about Christmas:

• Christmas vocabulary
• Christmas traditions in several countries
• Christmas-related listening activities
• Christmas-related reading activities
• A carol

If you want to find out about Christmas, drop by Mrs Haquet's interactive book and you won't be disappointed.