Kibbitzing with Kibbitzers

I fell asleep before posting last night.  Good grief!  Whether this is too late to count or not, I will post this morning.

 

Tim JOHNS' Kibbitzers are breakdowns of his research on written English in an academic setting using the Wordsmith Lexical Analysis software. Johns presents 34 Kibbitzers.   Using samples of authentic written English from student academic writing samples and questions, Johns researches the collocates of words and phrases  and presents a breakdown of the most commonly occurring uses of each word/phrase. He suggests the most common usage in academic settings vs non-academic settings and delineates between teacher and student applicationsm, which can vary greatly. His results are clearly presented and would be beneficial for classroom use.  This is a great idea teachers could easily be emulate with other words/phrases.

 

Springboarding from Tim Johns' work, MICASE KIbbitzers use authentic samples of spoken English and the Michigan Corpus of Spoken English.  The MICASE Kibbitzers are more scholarly than Johns' Kibbitzers.  Each Kibbitzer presents the procedures used to acquire lexical, syntactic, and discoursal data which is presented in charts and graphs which report basic usage, frequency of occurance, etc. The KIbbitzer presentations are in the format of an academic research paper with references listed.  These Kibbitzers would help teachers understand academic speech as it is evolving  and could help them use words and phrases appropriately in the classroom.

 

 

 

 

Corpus, Corpus, Corpus

For this week's assignment, I reviewed three corpuses . . . corpusi . . . corpora: The National American Corpus, The Corpus of Contemporary American English and The Cambridge English Corpus.  Here are my thoughts:

The American National Corpus contains over 14 million words drawn from authentic texts which are donated by contributors. The goal of this corpus is to enable software designers to analyze typical American English so that their products and the web will “handle [actual] American usage.”  This corpus is principled, authentic, accessible, and would be a good resource for business professionals in software and web design.

 The Corpus of Contemporary American English contains 425 million words collected from more than 175,000 sources including spoken, fiction, popular magazines, newspapers, and academic journals.  This corpus does not have any stated goals or explanatory information.  The “see notes” link to verify the authenticity of texts doesn’t work.  The corpus is downloadable and no membership is required to access the data.  This corpus might be great for an individual researcher.  However, I would not recommend it because the authenticity of the corpus cannot be verified.

The Cambridge English Corpus would be the best site for educators and language learners to use. The goal of the corpus is “to help in writing books for learners of English.”  This is a principled corpus.  It contains 1 billion, 760 million words taken from authentic sources: “newspapers, best-selling novels, non-fiction books on a wide range of topics, websites, magazines, junk mail, TV and radio programmes, recordings of people's everyday conversations and many other sources.”  This corpus consists of 8 corpora specializing in Spoken English in the UK, Business language, Spoken English in North America, Business reports and docs in the UK and US,  Legal English, Financial English from US and US, Academic English from the UK and US, and a corpus of student exam scripts from the Cambridge ESOL exams.

This corpus is ideal for educators and text book developers.  Only members have full access, but there are many features of this corpus that are available to the public.  The corpus provides learning materials including interactive quizzes and games free online. I will recommend this to my tutees.

Oh, Corpora!

Student Video Projects

For this week's blog assignment, I viewed the student videos posted at :

http://web.li.gatech.edu/~rdrury/600/oral/video/dictionary.html
and at:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8So6nTogjho

These projects have merit.  The students who produced them had to negotiate meaning and to create a lot of authentic language to complet their projects.  The results may not be impressive to a batuve English speaker, but I' m sure the students involved increased their meaningful output.

I think it could be possible to have the students in the class I observed create videos as simple as the ones I viewed.  Students could  use their telephones and/or cameras to record themselves. They could share equipment and use class time to complete their projects.  I'm certain the students I observed would enjoy the chance to creat their own videos and that they have the necessary skills.  Many of the students in the class I observed were bored, under-challenged and in need of ownership of their language learning.  They seem distracted and tired of filling out worksheets and supplying rote answers.  If they were to create videos that illustrate the grammatical rules they are learning, the students who talk out in class would have a chance to shine and receive praise and attention for legitimate language production.

If I were trying to use a video project in this class, I would put students in groups of four. I would assign jobs that the students would divide among them: 1. Script writer 2. Videographer 3. & 4 the actors.  I would ask the students to create videos that illustrate two or more examples of verb tense -- something they must master in order to pass their fluency tests.  All students in each group would help revise the script and create the stage directions.  Their scripts would have to be approved by the instructor for accuracy before production.

Collaborative Problem-Solving

To complete our group project, Tara, Antonio and I used SacCT, e-mail and our Wiki to communicate. We found out the hard way that we should have also traded personal e-mails and phone numbers and set up a time to meet online. Antonio had to go out of town and was not able to access SacCT. Therefore - he was inaccessible to Tara and I until late Sunday afternoon. This caused quite a few problems in our problem-solving process and it affected our overall product and grade. Technology is wonderful, but if the internet goes down, if someone's computer fails or if one member of the group cannot reach the others, everything will fall apart. If I were teaching a class, I would make sure students working in groups share their phone numbers as well as their e-mail addresses. That way, if the class is using a school-wide network for communication, they will have alternate ways to communicate should the network go down. I would also have group members set a time to meet online in a chat room. According to our text, chats are a great place for learners to try out non-academic language in an authentic setting. It would have been great if Tara, Antonio and I had set up a time for a chat. That way we would have been assured of at least one time when we were all working on the project at the same time. Still learning . . . .

Group Project 1 Evaluation

Group project 1, which you recently completed, was an example of a collaborative problem-solving task (where the problem was how to integrate technology into instruction for a particular group of students). Reflect on your experiences completing this project, and post an entry on your blog in which you discuss the following questions: 1.How did your group use technology to work collaboratively? We communicated through SacCT e-mail about the Wiki Tara created using the documents we e-mailed to her. 2.How could you have used technology in additional ways to help your work? We could have exchanged schedules and chatted in real time. We could have used the resources for communication Dr. Heather provided for your use as a Learning Group. 3.What did you learn about technology, collaborative work, problem-solving, and/or interaction by doing the group project? I have done many group projects via different electronic modes. I have used Google docs, e-mail, and chats. Through the project, I learned about Wikis - how to set them up, how to create hyperlinks and internal links -- those are new skills. I also learned that after 4 years of college group projects, I am able to work quickly and efficiently in a short amount of time to complete a project -- even one that seemed too involved to complete in one week. I think we did a good job - our lesson plans are thorough and practical and would also be interesting to students - a fairly high degree of authenticity. 4.How can what you learned inform your own teaching (either in the second language classroom, or elsewhere)? I definitely plan to use the information I have learned to provide students in any classroom with collaborative technology experiences. I think learning can be more fun and the results more polished.

Group Project #1

PeggyAntonioTara did a great job on our first CALL group project. Tara is the internet wizard. Check it out: https://sites.google.com/site/peggyantoniotara/

To Chat or Not to Chat . . .

Face-to-face, Synchronous CMC & Asynchronous CMS: All three methods of communication have their merits for language learners. Face-to-face small-group discussions give learners a chance to work on oral communication skills and to understand visual cues they receive through body language. No technology can replace live face-to-face interaction. Students learn how to work together to negotiate tasks which gives the an opportunity to use language skills they will need outside the classroom. Students are also much more likely to make friends in a face-to-face setting that is non-scripted and spontaneous. For shy students or for those whose language skills are low, however, face-to-face interaction can be intimidating. Synchronous CMC is useful in the classroom if students are working on projects together across the room or in environments that need to stay quiet. Chatting online is fun and non-threatening. Students who are more skilled with written language will have a chance to interact without worrying about their accents, and they will have more time to formulate responses. Chats can create problems, though. Students might assume a familiarity that does not exist offline and begin chatting off-topic or about inappropriate subjects. Synchronous chat can be a fast-paced environment. Asynchronous CMC is great for doing group projects when students can't get together face-to-face. This environment is good in that there is a record of all correspondence. Students can work together to create documents even though they can't be online at the same time. This allows students who need more time to process before writing the opportunity to succeed. Students can also share more than words here - they can share pictures, videos, web pages, etc. Students are less likely to waste time in this environment and to create work of a higher quality because they know their professor can easily check on their work.