Fight fight fight

This article by Jamie Keddie from One Stop English is a really neat way of getting students to have fun while exploring language. It uses the Google Fight website to test out the frequency of different usages on the internet, so shows you, for example, which out of different to or different from would get more hits ("different from" wins with 27,800,000 hits, compared to 769,000 for "different to", by the way).

While the website is good clean fun, James Keddie's article puts it all in context and explains its use in the classroom, along with some of its potential pitfalls. But of course, every pitfall is just another way of asking students a few more questions about language, so they can be helpful in formulating clearer ideas about how to do research.