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Review an app/ website that is related to study skills
Urban Dictionary
Advantage: useful when look up the definitions of neologisms, slangs and abbreviation.
One of the apps and websites that I want to recommend is ‘Urban dictionary’ which is a website and an application. As you can see on the name this is a dictionary, but it is not like other official dictionaries. Urban dictionary has a lot of definitions of neologisms, slangs and even abbreviations such as BRB (Be Right Back), which other dictionaries don’t have. Therefore, if you want to look up some strange neologisms or slangs, 'Urban dictionary’ would be helpful.
For example, let’s suppose that you want to find the meaning of a word, ‘sick,’ in the sentence, “Hey Jordan, the hat you wear is sick.”. If you look it up in ‘Cambridge dictionary’ it shows the definition like below. However, none of the definitions seem like a correct one in the context of the sentence. At this point, you can use ‘Urban dictionary’. If you go ‘Urban dictionary website or application and search the word, ‘sick’, you can see the definitions and example sentences like below. You could find out that among those definitions, the ‘TOP DEFINITION’ which is “Slang for cool or hawt or fabulous” is the right definition for the sentence.
Disadvantage: the definition might not be correct.
I guess that ‘Urban dictionary’ can be used to teach ‘vocabulary’ which is related to the real world rather than academic things. I think that teaching that a word can have more than one definition and it can be used in an official context or as slang would be interesting and educative to students. However, the definitions in ‘Urban dictionary’ can be uploaded by anyone like Wikipedia, so you might have to check the suggested definition thoroughly. And ’Urban dictionary’ only offers the definitions written in English, so those who can’t translate the sentences written in English might feel inconvenience. But apart from these, I assume that ‘Urban dictionary’ can be useful to learn and teach English.
Reflection
I use many websites and applications related to English learning, but this was the first time to analyze the advantages and drawbacks. When I first did this assignment, I didn't get why professor gave this assignment, but now I realized that this is the essential step before teaching using a website or an application. Teachers should be skillful with using the website and have knowledge of the website so that teaching could be more effective.
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