In this video, we are going to look at one powerful way to combine Vocabulary.com, And NPR. NPR stands for National Public Radio, a not for profit radio network that emphasizes high quality, in depth news and conversation. For advanced English language learning, the NPR website and apps for iPhone, iPad and Android are a goldmine for working, and listening, vocabulary, and even pronunciation. Virtually all content can be downloaded for free. There are hundreds of different voices to listen to. A large proportion of audio files are transcribed word for word within 24 hours of original broadcast on air. Here, we're going to look at mining these audio files and transcripts for vocabulary learning opportunities. And using vocabulary.com to harness the vocabulary learning potential. There are three steps to this process. The first starts with vocabulary.com. We need to set up a free account with vocabulary.com so let's do that now. First, click sign up. There are several ways to set up a free account. We'll se tup a student account via email. We fill in these fields. There's no form of payment to fill in because Vocabulary.com is free to use. Then we sign in. The second step is to go back to npr.org, do a search for a topic that interests you, then, narrow results to heard on air. This is the process that we did a little bit earlier in the video. We click search, and to see most recent things first, click sort by date. Choose from among the list of conversations something that you'd like to listen to. This one looks fun, Before Cars Come In, Bikes Accompany Bison In Yellowstone. So we see here that we could download the sound file for free. We can also click on transcript to see, not just a summary of the article, but the exact words that everybody said. So this step is to copy that transcript. Select all, I'm going to copy, and then I come back to vocabulary.com. Here we're going to do the third step. We need to start a new list at vocabulary.com. To do that, we click on lists on the front page of vocabulary.com. On the left click on the green button with the words start a new list. In the empty text box paste the transcript from your clipboard into the box, and click the green Next Step button. Here's a list of 88 words that were found in the transcript, with example uses pulled from the transcript. When a word appears more than once in your transcript that you pasted in like spray has five uses. You can choose which of the uses you want to import into your vocabulary.com list. The ten words that Vocabulary.com thinks are most topical, relevant, or difficult, are highlighted for you already. And then you can click the checkboxes next to any other words that you'd like to add to your Vocabulary.com list. Once you're done, you can give your list a title. Let's call it, bison and bicycle words. And in the description, I like to go back to NPR and to copy the URL for that transcript and paste it into the description, so that I know where the words came from and anybody I might share this list with knows where the words came from. And I'm not plagiarizing the NPR content. Then I click the Learn These 20 Words button. This process launches your first quiz on the list. Here my first question is choose the best picture for herd. It says Correct! It gives me some more information. Brief means to furnish money for? No, I thought it meant short, but I don't see anything here that means short, wonder if it's this one? Well, this is short, short, short as a noun. As a verb, brief means to give essential information to someone, like the president gets briefed on important matters I hadn't thought about that definition. So that's just a demonstration of how the quiz works in vocabulary.com. If you want to look at your list itself, you can click on the back to list button, or you can just scroll down And click on 20 Words to see all of your words and your examples. You can click on the Edit tab to add particular notes. Hibernation Is not usually used with people in science, but I heard my professor talk about coming out of hibernation last wee. when the weather warmed up to remind yourself how you've heard words used. Any time you want to quiz on this list, you can click practice. If you want to be quizzed on this list every time you check into vocabulary.com, you can click add to learning program. And then, whenever you're signing into the homepage or you click Play, some of the words that are supplied to you will be from that list. The other words supplied to you will be based on vocabulary.com's ongoing assessment of which kind of questions you're getting right and what you're getting wrong. And it will try to adjust the difficulty level to match exactly where you are. In this video, we combine two powerful resources, NPR.org and vocabulary.com, to illustrate some of the best features of each. You can, of course, use each of these resources separately. And you can see how Vocabulary.com could be combined with any text to create a custom word list.
