Lexical tutor

 

Lextutor
http://www.lextutor.ca

This website is developed by Tom Cobb of the University of Quebec at Montreal (UQAM). The website contains a vast range of resources for both teaching and learning vocabulary and grammar. As this is quite a large site, with some sections more "finished" than others, it requires some trial and error exploration on the part of the instructor before employment in the classroom.

The Compleat Lexical Tutor is divided into three sections: Tutorial, Research, and Teachers. A good place for a newcomer to begin would be in the Research section, under Why & Wherefore/Research Base. Here Cobb explains the rationale for learners to use vocabulary lists: " . . . if you know the first 2000 [most frequently used English words] plus [the] 570 AWL words, then you know about 90% of the words you will meet in any academic text" (n.d., ¶ 16 ). Most of the nearly three dozen or so tools and activity builders are based on either the Academic Word list (AWL) or concordancers.