This week I am going to introduce a useful website that provides absolutely authentic use of English in a real-world situation. Here we have YouGlish.
YouGlish basically functions as a search engine that can target a word or phrase that users type in, and then identify the input occurring in online videos—mostly form YouTube. The most fascinating feature is that it also provides the subtitle for learners to read. Learners are able to pause, rewatch, and listen to as many different videos as YouGlish has found. The following image shows 58,132 results by searching the word technology.
For educational practitioner, this could be very helpful in demonstrating different uses of certain words or even phrases, especially in terms of the pronunciation. For example, in my teaching experience in Taiwan, it is not easy get the concept of stress in compound nouns through the class, as learners are unfamiliar with the patterns and have little input from native speakers. Learners tend to put equal stress on the two nouns in a compound noun, for example, convenience store, where naturally only the first noun should be stressed and the second should be unstressed.
Instead of drilling students to say the word/phrase repeatedly, having them watch the clips and read out the sentences actually used by native speakers and try imitating the native-like patterns of speaking would be more effective and communicative for language learning.
Besides, by using YouGlish, learners are not only exposed to the use of certain words or phrases, they are also learning possible collocations, related words, and varying registers. Interestingly, it categorizes the sources into three accents, American, British and Australian, whereas the majority falls in to American English.
In an over all perspective, I've found this website highly useful in teaching English, whether as materials for pronunciation teaching, or as a supplement for a particular task. Being fairly user friendly, learners should be capable of using it even without the instruction from teachers. Just as first I came cross this website in class, learners may be intrigued to watch different clips themselves and in turn become motivated to learn target words/phrases of their interests.
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