Prince Philip, My Dear - Mighty Sparrow - Song lesson

On July 9th 1982, a man managed to climb up to the roof and get into Buckinham Palace, for the second time in a month. But this time, he also managed to get into the Queen's bedroom, where the Queen was sleeping alone. This lapse in security caused a big scandal in Britain at the time, and inspired Trinidadian calypso singer Mighty Sparrow to write a song very loosely based on the event. Do a couple of exercises and listen to the song.

Word families

King's College, Cambridge - photo by Andrew Dunn at Wikmedia Commons

Complete the word families from the word given. Based loosely on the Academic Word List (AWL), these exercises will give you some practice in word formation.

Finding language in context - 'academic' words

King's College, Cambridge - photo by Andrew Dunn at Wikimedia Commons

This post helps you find collocations and examples in context of the most common so-called academic words, based on The Academic Word List (see below). You can:

• look up the words in a selection of dictionaries
• look for collocations and real life example sentences with Just the Word
• look for real life examples on a variety of websites using Google Site Search.

But I'm not interested in academic English!

These words don't only appear in academic texts. They are more generally used in 'educated' English, and so appear frequently in newspaper and magazine articles, etc, and in TV news and documentary broadcasts. They are therefore useful for any advanced students wishing to increase their vocabulary, and especially useful if they are considering doing any advanced exams.

Homophone quizzes

Oxford Dictionaries Online define homophones as "each of two or more words having the same pronunciation but different meanings, origins, or spelling". But in these exercises, we are only interested in when two (or more) words sound the same but are written differently and have different meanings. Remember that some spellings, such as read, bow can have more than one pronunciation.

Try these two exercises, the first based on a bank of over 300 homophones.

Finding collocations and language in context using web tools

In this post I take a look at finding collocations and lexis in context, using free online corpus-based web tools. First we'll look at what lexis is and what a corpus is, and how they can help us consolidate our vocabulary.