词汇大师(Wordmaster)--Learning English Online

MUSIC: "My Internet Girl"/Aaron Carter

(lyrics) "You've got e-mail ... "

AA: E-mail is just one of the benefits of the Internet. I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on WORDMASTER we look at learning English online.

RS: Charles Kelly is an English professor who has devoted¹ countless² hours to three Web sites for students and teachers of English as a second language. He's an American who's been teaching at the Aichi [ah-ee-chee] Institute of Technology in Toyota, Japan, for twenty years.

KELLY: "Up to and even five years ago, six years ago, people who wanted to read a lot of things in English would have to buy things at a bookstore or mail-order books or magazines. But now they can go right online and look up any topic they're interested in and find things they're interested in reading. And of course one advantage of studying things you're interested in is (that) it increases your motivation to study it. So by reading in English about topics you're interested in, you tend to learn the vocabulary and the sentence patterns used to discuss that topic."

AA: Charles Kelly says that there is really only one potential hurdle³.

RS: And that is the cost of connecting to the Internet.

KELLY: "More and more countries are offering unlimited⁴ access, so I think the future looks better. But at this point many countries -- for example, Japan -- people are paying per-minute on the telephone, so unless they have an unlimited account they're not likely to stay on the Internet a long time."

AA: "Do you have any advice for people who may see this as a big downside to trying to reach out to the rest of the world?"

KELLY: "One thing people can do to lower the cost is to find sites they're interested in, they can go right to the site and download two or three pages and hang up the phone, and then read those pages offline. That's a possibility. Some of the radio stations out there allow you to download the RealAudio file and listen to it offline."

RS: Charles Kelly operates one Web site with his older brother, Larry, who also teaches English at the Aichi Institute of Technology. The address is: w-w-w dot manythings dot o-r-g.

AA: And "many things" are exactly what you find there, from tests on slang⁵ and proverbs to a lot of other activities.

KELLY: "We have games, quizzes and puzzles -- things that tend to be fun. There are word search puzzles where a person would see a whole page full of letters and then they try to locate the hidden words within the letters. We have traditional grammar quizzes, multiple choice."

AA: Charles Kelly also edits⁶ a monthly online journal for teachers of English as a Second Language. It's called The Internet TESL Journal. That address is ... i-t-e-s-l-j dot org.

RS: And his third Web site is a-4-e-s-l dot org. That's the letter "a" followed by the number 4, then e-s-l dot o-r-g. It contains more than 1-thousand activities for learning English.

AA: Yet even with so much potential for using technology to learn a language, Charles Kelly says it's hard to predict the future of English language learning on the Internet.

KELLY: "I think from a commercial point of view, probably the universities that offer online courses might do better than companies that are trying to offer online courses, just the same as a lot of the dot-coms went offline a year or so ago, a lot of the English-teaching dot-coms did the same, they went offline."

AA: "And one thing I notice about your sites, it appears there's no advertising⁷."

KELLY: "We decided⁸ a long time ago that that was a good idea. The a4esl.org has a lot of teachers that volunteer their time and send it quizzes and activities that we post on the Web, and as long as there are volunteers that are willing to share their time, we're willing to share our time."

RS: Professor Charles Kelly, speaking to us from the Aichi Institute of Technology in Toyota, Japan.

AA: And that's all for Wordmaster this week. If you'd like to reach Rosanne and me on the Internet, write to [email protected]. With Rosanne Skirble, I'm Avi Arditti.

1 devoted   

adj.忠诚的，忠实的，热心的，献身于...的

参考例句：

• He devoted his life to the educational cause of the motherland.他为祖国的教育事业贡献了一生。
• We devoted a lengthy and full discussion to this topic.我们对这个题目进行了长时间的充分讨论。

2 countless   

adj.无数的，多得不计其数的

参考例句：

• In the war countless innocent people lost their lives.在这场战争中无数无辜的人丧失了性命。
• I've told you countless times.我已经告诉你无数遍了。

3 hurdle   

n.跳栏，栏架；障碍，困难；vi.进行跨栏赛

参考例句：

• The weather will be the biggest hurdle so I have to be ready.天气将会是最大的障碍，所以我必须要作好准备。
• She clocked 11.6 seconds for the 80 metre hurdle.八十米跳栏赛跑她跑了十一秒六。

4 unlimited   

adj.无限的，不受控制的，无条件的

参考例句：

• They flew over the unlimited reaches of the Arctic.他们飞过了茫茫无边的北极上空。
• There is no safety in unlimited technological hubris.在技术方面自以为是会很危险。

5 slang   

n.俚语，行话；vt.使用俚语，辱骂；vi.辱骂

参考例句：

• The phrase is labelled as slang in the dictionary.这个短语在这本字典里被注为俚语。
• Slang often goes in and out of fashion quickly.俚语往往很快风行起来又很快不再风行了。

6 edits   

编辑( edit的第三人称单数 )； 剪辑（电影、录音磁带、无线电或电视节目、书等）； 主编（报纸、杂志等）

参考例句：

• He edits the literary journal, Murmur. 他编辑了《私语》这本文学杂志。
• She edits the file and verifies that her change is correct. 她编辑这个文件并且验证她的变更是否正确。

7 advertising   

n.广告业；广告活动 a.广告的；广告业务的

参考例句：

• Can you give me any advice on getting into advertising? 你能指点我如何涉足广告业吗?
• The advertising campaign is aimed primarily at young people. 这个广告宣传运动主要是针对年轻人的。

8 decided   

adj.决定了的，坚决的；明显的，明确的

参考例句：

• This gave them a decided advantage over their opponents.这使他们比对手具有明显的优势。
• There is a decided difference between British and Chinese way of greeting.英国人和中国人打招呼的方式有很明显的区别。