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Content Type: 1
Title: Ceri Jones - Pronunciation: focusing on sounds from day one
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From: http://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/blogs/cerirhiannon/ceri-jones-pronunciation-focusing-sounds-day-one
Ceri Jones shares some ideas on how to easily look at problematic sounds for our learners right from the beginning by using people's names in the target language. There are examples in Welsh and English, but it could be adapted to any language. The context is a monolingual one where students share the same L1, so it makes it easier to focus on common difficult sound(s) for speakers of that language. She also suggests other possible ways of exploiting the idea:
"1. Looking at how English speakers "mangle" the pronunciation of L1 names (including place names).
2. Contrasting the pronunciation of international/borrowed words in L1 and English (e.g. tennis, spaghetti, karate)
3. Contrasting the pronunciation of brand names in L1 and English (e.g. Pink Lady apples, Adidas or J&B)"
Access the article at http://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/blogs/cerirhiannon/ceri-jones-pronunciation-focusing-sounds-day-one
Source: Teachingenglish British Council and BBC
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Title: Reading Comprehension Exercise: Sharjah World Music Festival 2015
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From http://blogs.transparent.com/arabic/
This blog post by Fisal, an EFL teacher and Fulbright Fellow with experience teaching Arabic as a Foreign Language, provides a short reading activity for Arabic students. It's a shortened version of an article about the Sharjah World Music Festival written in Arabic and includes comprehension questions in English with answers provided in Arabic. It also includes links to more information (in Arabic) about the festival and about the city of Sharjah (in English).
Access this activity at http://blogs.transparent.com/arabic/reading-comprehension-exercise-sharjah-world-music-festival-2015/
Source: Transparent Language
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Content Type: 3
Title: Digital Tools for Learning to Listen
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by Julie Sykes, CASLS Director
Learning to listen includes the development of skills to aid in the comprehension and analysis of a variety of types of language. Skill development enables learners to engage with listening needs ranging from the interpretation of an interlocutor's turns during interaction to a formal, academic research talk. Digital tools offer a number of possibilities for enhancing and expanding learners' listening repertoire.
First, the explosion of digital content makes listening passages more accessible and varied. The impact is the existence of digital collections as a critical resource for providing learners with language samples along the entire continuum of listening possibilities. For example, YouTube offers a wealth of possible video and audio samples ranging from informal commentaries to professional news clips and documentaries. These digital resources can be viewed individually and/or sorted into collections based on theme, genre, or text type. Furthermore, the comments sections allow for multi-modal analysis of each resource and the ease of content creation enables learners to create their own resources as an extension of their understanding of the text. While YouTube is just one example of thousands of resources for collecting and disseminating audio and video in digital contexts, it is a representative example of ways learners can explore, examine, and extend their understanding using a digital tool.
In addition to traditional texts and speech samples online, teachers now have access to a wide-range of digitally native content allowing them to extend the types of discourse their learners are able to understand. For example, TED Talks, while delivered live for recording, are essentially digital resources created for wide dissemination of information. These can be compared with other resources delivering the same information to help learners better understand how what we listen to also shapes content. Furthermore, machinima (digital animation and production) offers a completely digital genre that can enhance learners' listening abilities through both exploration of existing products as well as the creation of their own.
Finally, the digital nature of these resources makes manipulation of the discourse possible based on each individual learner's needs. Possibilities include repeating the passage, slowing down the text, glossing individual components, and delivering customized collections to different groups of leaners. As a result, learners gain the skills they need as they go. A learner who is highly proficient can move to the next resource that is more difficult. Simultaneously, a struggling learner can continue to work with a listening passage until they have mastered the skills needed to move on.
When used thoughtfully, digital tools can open learning spaces to new, interesting, and relevant frontiers.
Source: CASLS Topic of the Week
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Content Type: 4
Title: Using Digital Tools to Explore Current Affairs
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by Renee Marshall and Patricia Roldan Marcos
Listening is a tool for learning. Students can listen to videos or audio tracks as many times as they need to in order to get the information they need. They can pause, rewind, fast forward, use captions or subtitles, etc. There is software that can help them slow down audio tracks (e.g. Audacity) or take notes in a video (e.g. videonot.es). All sources of digital information are not created equal, so in addition to using digital tools to their advantage, students need to also develop online literacy. Where did I get this source? Who created it and for what purpose? Is it objective? How is it useful to me? This activity has students explore and analyze two authentic videos on the topic of Cuba-US relations by identifying key ideas and vocabulary and thinking critically about the sources and type of genre. A way to extend this lesson would be to ask students to create their own video or audio file using one of the sources as a model. These activities would be appropriate for intermediate-advanced level and they can be adapted to explore any current affairs topic.
Objectives:
- Students will be able to identify key ideas and vocabulary while watching two authentic videos on the same topic.
- Students will be able to analyze and discuss the characteristics of the video genres and think critically about the level of subjectivity in each.
- For the extension activity, students will be able to record their own video or audio file following one of the sources or finding their own.
Resource: Using Digital Tools to Explore Current Affairs handout
Procedure:
Part 1 – Explore:
- Pre-viewing: Ask students to answer questions 1, 2 and 3 on a separate piece of paper.
- Then ask them to discuss and compare their answers in pairs. Get some feedback from the whole class and clarify vocabulary as needed. They should have the brainstormed vocabulary ready to use for the next activity, while watching the videos.
- While-viewing: Give students the Note-taking Guide handout, which will help them organize their notes on both videos (i.e. all the while and post-viewing activities).
- Make sure they understand they need to complete activities 5 and 6 while watching the video. Note: if students can work on computers individually, they would be in control of the videos, so they could pause, forward, rewind, etc. You could also show them how to use Audacity [1] to slow down the audio, or how to take notes on videonot.es [2] instead of using the handout, although videonot.es doesn't support videos from all websites.
- Get students to check and compare their notes in groups of three. Then whole class feedback to ensure all students understood the gist of the videos. You could write down the key vocabulary on the board and clarify meaning as necessary.
Part 2 – Analyze:
- Post-viewing: Tell students they're going to analyze the genre of each video and the different characteristics of each genre. Go through the various aspects in the handout (format, audience, purpose, etc) and the examples to make sure they understand what the analysis will involve.
- In pairs, ask students to answer questions 1-6 for both videos. Then get some feedback from the class and discuss what aspects of each video were objective or subjective and why.
- Finally, get students to compare the two videos on a separate piece of paper.
Part 3 – Extend:
- If you want, you can get students to find another source on the same topic and complete the above activities to analyze it. This could be done in class if they have access to computers, it could be set as homework for the following class, or it could have been set in the previous class in preparation for this one (i.e. "For the next class, find a video on the topic of...")
- Alternatively, you could also ask students to create their own video or audio file following one of the genre models analyzed in class.
[1] Here's a video on how to slow down audio using Audacity: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OggzE7s2d7Y
[2] Here's a demo video on using videonot.es: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8aA04ayL1oA
Source: CASLS Activity of the Week
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Content Type: 5
Title: Farewell to 2014-2015 OIIP Cohort
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CASLS would like to congratulate the 2014-2015 cohort of the Oregon International Internship Program! This group of seventeen students from China completed a five-month study, internship, and home stay experience. As part of the program, they lived with host families and took courses at the University of Oregon. This was coupled with an internship program in local elementary, middle, and high schools where they shadow local teachers and work with students. At their farewell gathering, all of the students noted how this hands-on experience had made a significant impact on their understanding of educational systems around the world. We wish them all the best as they return home and move on to the next stages of their professional careers.
Source: CASLS Spotlight
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Content Type: 3
Title: Corpus-Driven Instruction
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Nina Vyatkina is Associate Professor of German and Applied Linguistics at the University of Kansas. Her scholarly interests include language teaching and learning research, applied corpus research, computer-mediated communication, and interlanguage pragmatics.
Interest in using corpora, or large electronic collections of texts, in language instruction has been rapidly growing over the last few decades (see Römer, 2011, for an overview). Corpus-driven applications can be either indirect or direct. In indirect applications, instructors can use corpus-based reference grammars, textbooks, and dictionaries that include attested language samples instead of invented examples (e.g., Biber et al., 2002; Dodd et al., 2003). In direct applications, also called Data-Driven Learning, or DDL (Johns & King, 1991), teachers and learners explore corpora themselves.
DDL is grounded in usage-based theories, according to which language is learned inductively through repeated exposure to and practice with specific language models. Corpora can help teachers as a rich repository of such models, especially in foreign language teaching contexts, where authentic language samples are hard to come by. Furthermore, perceptual salience of corpus samples is enhanced by their graphic representation: corpus search results typically come in the form of concordances, or stacked text lines with the search words highlighted and placed in the middle (see Figure).
Figure. Concordances with the search word Deutsch (‘German’) from the DWDS corpus (http://dwds.de/).
Due to these characteristics, corpora lend themselves to an inductive approach to language teaching and learning, in which learners more or less independently engage in “pattern-hunting” and “pattern-defining” (Kennedy & Miceli, 2010, p. 31) with the teacher assisting them as a facilitator. DDL research has shown that corpus-driven instruction is at least equal to or more efficient than more traditional, deductive teaching methods for a number of instructional targets (Boulton & Pérez-Paredes, 2014; Cobb & Boulton, in press). However, for DDL to be successful, teachers should carefully guide the learners and sequence the tasks from less to more autonomous. More specifically, corpus-driven instruction at all language proficiency levels should start with teacher-designed corpus-based materials (e.g., concordance printouts) and progress toward independent learner corpus searches.
Teachers and learners can especially benefit from freely and publicly available language corpora, such as Corpus of Contemporary American English (http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/), Corpus del Español (http://www.corpusdelespanol.org/), Digital Dictionary of German (http://dwds.de/), or Russian National Corpus (http://ruscorpora.ru/en/index.html/). Notably, these corpora are equipped with various built-in search and analysis tools beyond simple concordancers, which allow teachers to design a wide variety of instructional tasks. Learners can be instructed to find, analyze, and compare selected words, phrases, or parts-of-speech. Other possible tasks include comparing word usage in different genres (e.g., fiction and journalism), exploring semantic prosody of a word (the tendency of near-synonyms to appear with different or similar attributes), and investigating waning and waxing of the popularity of a word over decades and centuries. For guides and models for designing specific DDL activities, please see Bennett (2010), O’Keeffe et al. (2007), and Reppen (2010), as well as CALPER Corpus Tutorial (http://calper.la.psu.edu/corpus_portal/tutorial_main.php).
References:
Bennett, G. (2010). Using corpora in the language learning classroom: Corpus linguistics for teachers. Michigan: University of Michigan Press.
Biber, D., Conrad, S., & Leech, G. (2002). The Longman student grammar of spoken and written English. London: Longman.
Boulton, A., & Pérez-Paredes, P. (2014). Editorial: Researching new uses of corpora for language teaching and learning. ReCALL, 26, 121-127.
Cobb, T., & Boulton, A. (in press). Classroom applications of corpus analysis. In D. Biber & R. Reppen (Eds.), Cambridge handbook of corpus linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Dodd, B., Eckhard-Black, C., Klapper, J., & Whittle, R. (2003). Modern German grammar: A practical guide (2nd edition). London: Routledge.
Johns, T., & King, P. (Eds.) (1991). Classroom Concordancing: English Language Research Journal, 4. CELS: University of Birmingham.
Kennedy, C., & Miceli, T. (2010). Corpus-assisted creative writing: Introducing intermediate Italian learners to a corpus as a reference resource. Language Learning & Technology, 14, 28–44.
O'Keeffe, A., McCarthy, M., & Carter, R. (2007). From corpus to classroom: Language use and language teaching. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Reppen, R. (2010). Using corpora in the language classroom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Römer, U. (2011). Corpus research applications in second language teaching. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, 31, 205-225.
Source: CASLS Topic of the Week
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Content Type: 4
Title: Corpus Activity: German Verb-Preposition Collocations
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by Nina Vyatkina, University of Kansas
This activity serves as an example of the principles discussed in Dr. Vyatkina's InterCom Topic of the Week article Corpus-Driven Instruction.
Target structure: German verb-preposition collocations
Target audience: English-speaking intermediate learners of German
Rationale: Some verbs subcategorize certain prepositions in many languages, including German and English. These verb-preposition collocations are notoriously difficult for learners because of form-meaning mapping mismatches between languages. For example, the English collocation to wait for is translated into German as warten auf and not für (a default translation of for). An additional difficulty with German is that either the verb or the preposition also assigns a specific case to the following noun phrase.
Goals:
- The learners will become aware or reinforce their knowledge of selected German verb-preposition-case collocations.
- The learners will use selected collocations in written sentences and in short oral partner exchanges about themselves.
Pedagogical sequence: The triple I approach: Illustration-Interaction-Induction (McCarthy & Carter, 1995). Learners will analyze corpus samples with selected collocations and, in interaction with a partner, induce what preposition and what case each verb is taking. During task monitoring and debriefing, the teacher makes sure that all learners have arrived at accurate collocation patterns.
Format: partner work, interactive
Materials: worksheet with corpus samples and directions
Reference: McCarthy, M., & Carter, R. (1995). Spoken grammar: What is it and how can we teach it? ELT Journal, 49(3), 207–218.
Source: CASLS Activity of the Week
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Content Type: 2
Title: Corpus-Driven Instruction
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Our InterCom theme for February is corpus-driven instruction. This week, Robert Poole of the University of Arizona introduces the use of corpora and includes an activity using the Corpus of Contemporary American English. Next week Nina Vyatkina of the University of Kansas expands on this introduction with a discussion of two different uses of corpora for language teaching and exemplifies in-class corpus use with an inductive activity for German learners. Gena Bennett of Kailua, Hawaii, will tell us more about using corpora in the third week of February, and in our final week InterCom editor Lindsay Marean will write about making her own corpus to learn some new things about a language she studies.
Source: CASLS
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Content Type: 2
Title: Work for CASLS as a Research Assistant!
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The Center for Applied Second Language Studies (CASLS) is seeking qualified applicants for its open research pool. Positions are limited duration appointments potentially renewable for up to a total of three years. In limited circumstances, there is the possibility of renewal beyond three years based on programmatic need, funding, and performance.
CASLS is one of fifteen National Foreign Language Resource Centers across the country and home to the Oregon Chinese Flagship Program. Candidates would assist the center with grant-funded research and development projects. This work will relate to language teaching and learning and may include conceptualizing, developing, and verifying the efficacy of practical language learning tools or developing technology-based tools for language learning and testing.
Requirements: 1) BA or BS; 2) knowledge of curriculum, assessment, and pedagogy OR experience in educational software development and delivery, website design and interface, or programming experience.
The pool will remain open through January 31, 2016. Screening of applicants will take place as positions become available and continue until positions are filled. Some hires from this pool may require a background check.
View the full job posting at http://jobs.uoregon.edu/unclassified.php?id=5006
Source: CASLS
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Content Type: 1
Title: STARTALK Master’s Degree Scholarship Program
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The School for Global Education & Innovation, Kean University is pleased to invite you to submit an application for the STARTALK Master’s Degree Scholarship Program which provides full funding for 2- years of coursework, valued at $20,000, leading to an M.A. degree in Hindi and Urdu Language Pedagogy from Kean University. Additional information about this program can be found in this application packet.
Source: HINDI-T
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