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Issue #023 -- Week 12/10/14-18/10/14 October 20, 2014 |
Hello,Greetings and General InformationA warm welcome to our new subscribers! I wish you will find My English Club fun and instructive and I look forward to welcome you as a new valued member soon. Read, learn and communicate around the world! Please feel free to contribute to these pages when you have a minute. They are meant to be a platform for exchanging ideas, stories and opinions - an ideal medium for practicing your English, which should be used to the full. Together, let's bring it alive, let's make it the welcoming community you wished for, when you joined. You and your friends can subscribe individually through the form on My English Club. If anybody mentions to you that they are interested in receiving it, please tell them this - many thanks. Also, they can read the previous issues on Back Issues for English Corner E-zine. Month 2 ~ Lesson 8We started studying three subjects this month: pronunciation and grammar for improving your communication skills, as well as website design and development, for applying your English in practice once you get skilful in English and website building. You will find our past lessons as follows: Pronunciation: Pronunciation ~ The R-Controlled Vowel SoundsHaving studied the CVCs, CVCCs and CCVCs, the sight words, as well as the difference between long/short vowels so far, today we shall look at the r-controlled vowel sounds, which are one of the sound categories that give students a lot of trouble in learning and using fluently. The secret about these is that the letter ‘r’ that follows a vowel makes the sound of that vowel long. You would need to tap twice on your desk, for pronouncing that vowel, if you’re using the tapping method. There are only 3 types of these long vowel sounds: \ɑr\, \ər\ and \ɔr\, but there are many words containing that sound and you would need to pronounce it well, if you wish to speak English correctly. Following is a list of the r-controlled vowels: Spelt 'ar' and pronounced \ɑr\, as in: are, arm, bar, car, far, jar, scar, dark, mark, lark, park, jar, shark, stark, remark, artist, archery
Spelt 'er', 'ir', 'ur' and pronounced \ər\, as in: butter, better, hammer, shutter, spider, mother, father, easter, earlier, flower, power, older, younger, slower, faster, longer, shorter, bigger, taller, worker, teacher, singer, writer, bugler, bird, word, herd, heard, preferred, heard, third, occurred, dirt, blurt, shirt, squirt, skirt, circus, concert, desert, dessert, alert, purse Spelt 'or' and pronounced \ɔr\, as in: cork, fork, pork, stork, born, corn, form, horn, torn, for, four, award, bored, board, cord, ford, lord, sword, ward, adored, toward, ornament Grammar ~ Expressions of FrequencyThese are used for answering the questions “How often?” or “How many times?” On a vertical scale, the upper limit of the concept of frequency is expressed by ‘always’, meaning ‘on every occasion’. The lower extreme is occupied by ‘never’, meaning ‘on no occasion’. Between these two extremes, we can have a variety of frequencies, ranging from most frequent to least frequent, as follows: - Nearly always, almost always These are the adverbs of frequency mostly used in speech. However, sometimes we need to be more precise about the measurement of frequency, and this is when we use the definite frequency adverbs. We can use these in three ways, as follows: - Once a day, three times an hour, several times a week They ate only once a day. - Every day, (= ‘once a day’), every morning, every two weeks, etc. We had English every day, when I was in high school. - Daily (= ‘once a day’), hourly, weekly, monthly, yearly, etc. These can also be used as adjectives: I read ‘The Times’ daily. [adv.] She went to the seaside monthly [adv.], for the fresh air. He visits me weekly/every week/once a week.
[adv.] We can also express frequency by using quantifiers, like ‘some’, ‘any’, ‘most’, ‘many’: Some days he goes to the park during his lunch break. Website Design with SBI! ~ Real Supply and Value DemandThe two guidelines in the last lesson taught us that demand must not be too low and supply must not be too high. Of course, if demand is low, it means that not enough people are searching for that word and if supply is too high, it means that too many people are using that word, so your will not fall very well in a search on the www. Your goal is to see if you can quickly rule out any of your 3 potential Site Concepts as either too competitive (too broad) or too narrow (very little overall Supply, which often indicates a niche without enough opportunity for income). By using the SBI! System, this activity becomes very easy: In the MKL, we click on the Real Supply label at the top of its column of numbers. That will sort the keywords with lowest Supply at the top. Click again to see the words sorted by Supply with highest at the top. In the example with the seed word “caribbean”, the MKL looks like this:
It looks like we'll rule out "caribbean." That leaves us with "anguilla" and "antigua", of which "anguilla" has a reasonable Supply. Supply Good? What About Demand? What we are looking for here is the number of keywords with high Value Demand numbers. Click on Clear All in Seed Words to return all the keywords in your MKL. Then click on the All Keywords button in the Basic Task Bar to reset your MKL (clear all the sorting). All Keywords is the first of the four basic pre-set tasks in the "Basic Task Bar":
The All Keywords pre-set task erases all previous filters and sorts for the selected Seed Word, restoring all keywords brainstormed by the selected Seed Word, in alphabetical order. We’re not going to use the other pre-set tasks until later, to weed out weak keywords from your MKL. They are set to help you find particular types of keywords. Each of them consists of a series of filters and sorts, and you can customize the values of the filters and the sorts after running a task, giving you extra flexibility and power. A pre-set task works on all keywords, based on your Seed Word selection. If you clicked on no Seed Word (or clicked on Clear All), then these tasks work on every keyword in your MKL. If you select "anguilla" as your Seed Word, these tasks work on every keyword associated with "anguilla" (i.e., Vertical and Lateral keywords). Until then, we shall look into how to use the MKL's filter tool next time. This tool does some "heavy lifting" during the simultaneous comparisons of all potential Site Concepts.
This Is It, Folks!I hope you find this information useful and not too confusing. Even though you're in the stage of building on it, have patience at this point in your learning and you'll be able to reap the fruit of your work later on, whichever aspect of our lessons you are concentrating on. Please feel free to comment and suggest your ideas by replying to this email - I look forward to hearing from you. Those of you who did write back during this week, but haven't received a response from me yet, please rest assured that I will write to you this weekend. As I said, it was an extremely busy week, but it's over now. OK, I wish you all a good weekend and a great week ahead. Have fun, as always! Lucia da Vinci Founder of My English Club |
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