Thursday, February 25, 2010

Writing/editing using computers

Gaskell's article about how to use online concordances was really interesting to me. One thing that they said was that their research did not conclusively prove anything--of the 20 students who participated in the project, only 8 self-reported feeling better about their writing (and their skills actually increased), whereas 11 students actually showed MORE errors in their writing. It seems to have helped those 8 students, and when I put myself into their shoes as a language learner, I think I would fall into the category of the 8 successful students for several reasons.

I like being able to understand a pattern myself. When a teacher gives me a rule to follow and uses a lot of meta-language, it is like having to remember the original rule PLUS all the other rules associated with it. I once conducted a classroom observation of a volunteer instructor where I used to work and watched a class took a drastic turn towards confusion as a teacher was trying to review the differences between "because" and "because of." She wrote the word "adverb clause" on the board and told students that they were to use what they had learned the week before--because is always followed by an adverb clause and because of is always followed by a noun, common or proper.

Students were supposed to be focusing on when they used the different types of "because," and instead spent most of their time trying to recall the definition of an adverb clause and bickering over the differences between common and proper nouns. There were MANY other issues associated with this, but I could see where if students would write a couple of sentences in a computer program attempting to use because/because of and used Gaskell's concordance generator, I think they would have been able to *see* the rule (without it being told to them) and realize, "when because is followed by a complete sentence, its one type; when it is followed by a person, place or thing, its another type."

Gaskell also pointed out that this is a time consuming process because the student is responsible for figuring out *which* of the generated uses matches what they are trying to say, and then how exactly to fix what they were trying to say to make it correct. In many ways, its moving the learning from a passive paper-correcting mode to an active grammar and syntax learning mode. Overall, I would give it a try--it seems like with more time, most students would really benefit.

Tuesday, February 16, 2010

American Football: Gameday!

Interested in learning about American Football in Special English?

Look no further! Also, includes a short vocab list. Follow the link to learn about NFL football:

http://ling487indomay.podbean.com

Exercise 1 - Before listening, review the vocabulary words listed below. If you don't already know the word, click on it and read the definition provided. Do you know other sports where some of these words might be use to describe the sport? If so, which sports and how are these words used? Write or say to a partner at least one sentence using 5 words from the list.
New Vocabulary

(words not found in the VOA Special English Word List)


1. regular season
2. playoffs
3. depend
4. schedule
5. tournament
6. "I get it." "I see."
7. take place
8. advance
9. quarter
10. offense
11. defense
12. touchdown
13. field goal
14. quarterback
15. weekend
16. make it
17. unfortunately
18. awesome

(For questions about words that do not appear on the new vocabulary list, check the Voice of America Special English Word Book at http://www.voanews.com/specialenglish/wordbook-a.cfm )

Exercise 2 - While listening to the podcast try to listen to the words or phrases that aren't linked to definitions (1, 2, 6, 12, 13) and write your own definitions of the words as you understand them from the explanations provided or the context in which the words are used.

Exercise 3 - Think about the New Orleans Saints and their success in the NFL this last season. Can you think of other sports that have similar process of elimination for determining the best team? Can you explain how it's similar or different than the process the NFL uses?

Created by Christina Indovina and Nicolas May

Thursday, February 11, 2010

Voice Threads

In many ways, this software provides a way for students to collaborate in groups to produce an authentic task, something that Robinson found to be highly effective in language production. The students in Brazil who put together the slide show for the Brazilian EFL teacher's voice thread worked on an authentic task to produce an item that was then publicly posted for the world to comment on. This also looks like it would be fairly straight forward to put together, so students would potentially not be met with an overly complex task that would produce anxiety.

Using Chapelle's criteria for evaluating a good CALL speaking tool, it does seem to provide a "good fit" for the learner since it is all recorded externally, so students would be exposed to whatever range of dialects that teachers see fit. The voice threads that I watched all appeared to be based around photos, so there is not really any explicit teaching happening. I could see this working if there were photos of people working on how your mouth should look when producing a certain sound and then having students record their own attempts at doing this. There is certainly a lot of interaction with the computer, and potentially with other students via a computer, so these all seem to play in favor of using voice threads. Also, the voice recordings that students leave would allow the instructor to evaluate student performance. As for feedback, I am not sure how successful that would be in such a public forum. However, the program definitely allows students to explore outside the classroom.

My personal opinion about Voice Threads is that they could have many different uses in a classroom. I could see them functioning very well in a setting where distance-learning was an issue, or if a teacher wanted to ask students to work collaboratively on a project (similar to responding to a post in Blackboard or in a Wiki). It seems like the instructor would have to plan this out very carefully for it to work effectively. Also, it seems like students would have to become more familiar with the software--several participants were having obvious issues understanding if they were being recorded or holding the mic close enough to their faces. Overall, I think that this has the potential of being a very successful outside of classroom tool.

Wednesday, February 3, 2010

Sign language and Air Force One

I reviewed two videos using YouTube.

The first one is in a language I am not very familiar with--ASL, or American Sign Language.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7cayMkVidpc&sns=em

ASL is great for video since it is 100 percent visual. I thought that I couldn't go wrong with any video that I watched since it's visual, right? I found that the answer wasn't as simple as I had thought. First off, all of the expertvillage ASL videos are incorrectly--I was excited to learn the word for mother and father, and instead learned how to say I stopped the clock yesterday, sorry. I found the woman to be easy to follow, If I were a student, I would have felt good about everything this woman was telling me. She was slow, clear, and even though I questioned her methods (or lack thereof) of chunking relevant materials, I felt success at the end of several 2 minute sements. And then I read user comments like this lady doesn't know what she's doing, her As and Gs are all wrong, go back to school, etc. It made me realize that as a student, this is a GREAT medium...as long as you have someone to guide you toward high quality material. Perhaps this is the use of teacher playlists?

The second video I watched was clearly marked: Listening, vocab with quiz! English meeting lesson-Air Force One.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lzSMvNjit5I&sns=em

Since the video first starts with this guy pretending to be the president of the USA, my first thought was, oh man this guy is cheesy! But I figured he had 9 minutes to get more interesting, so I kept watching. The intro ended up fitting well with the theme of a visit to the Ronald Reagan Library. After the cheesiness and before the footage of the library, he introduced a few vocabulary words that he thought might be useful for students. Once the footage of the library started, he used natural (non-ESL) speech to talk about interesting things that he saw at the library. He followed this segment up with a series of questions that seemed to be geared towards students taking notes on what they thought were the main ideas. I really liked the first 7 minutes of this video--I thought that even though the intro was silly, it kept my attention and made me have some fun with it. I could not see using the whole 9 minutes of this, but I thought that the visit to the library might provide good footage for intermediate students who are in an EAP class learning how to take notes.

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