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.