MacMillan Dictionary
http://www.macmillandictionary.com/
handiest online dictionary, with a thesaurus, examples, audio

Corpora:
COCA Corpus of Contemporary American English (USA)
http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/
BNC British National Corpus (GB)
http://www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/
How are your words generally used in context?

Word cloud generators:
Wordle http://www.wordle.net/
Tagxedo http://www.tagxedo.com/

How frequent are key words in a text you read or write? Copy it into a  word cloud generator that makes the more frequent words larger. Tips: In Wordle, create strings of words, or multiword units: Edit your text before you copy it in, joining the words you want to keep together with the tilde character: ~ (e.g. “cataclastic~rock”). Also, reduce the word output number (Layout/Maximum words) to simplify.

Just the word
http://graphwords.com/http://www.just-the-word.com/
This collocation thesaurus concordancer shows frequency and produces word clouds. Clicking on a given collocation gives you samples from the BNC. (e.g. precipitation)

Lextutor
A set of tools to analyze the text you copy in:
a. Concord Writer
http://conc.lextutor.ca/concord_writer/index.pl?lingo=English/
Work in progress: Write text in the window, and your text is dynamically linked to multiple examples as you write.
b. Vocab Profile (BNL)
http://www.lextutor.ca/vp/bnl/
A published article: Copy in your text, and the tool will output a word list.

Google Ngram Viewer
http://books.google.com/ngrams/
How has your word been used over time? Has it changed in meaning? Study a word over time based on the word’s occurance in the Google Books library (those published since 1800).

Netspeak
http://www.netspeak.org/
5 modes of search for collocations: find one word (e.g. the missing word in a phrase – e.g. verbs, prepositions, possible modifiers), several words, alternatives in the phrase (so: find a better synonym), and word order (e.g. adverb placement). Follow links to find sample sentences. Caution: the Internet is your database.

If a scientist wants to read just one article on writing a thesis: George Gopen and Judith Swan show that where you place information in a sentence makes a huge difference. Their article The Science of Scientific Writing was originally published in the November-December 1990 issue of American Scientist.

Some excellent websites to surf for university writing skills:

• Purdue Online Writing Lab (OWL)
• Andy Gillett’s Using English for Academic Purposes (UEFAP)
• Monash Writing in Science
• Jean-Luc Lebrun: Scientific Writing Skills

And when in doubt, try a grammar quiz:

Diagnostic grammar quizzes, especially recommended for connectors/ transition words http://www.grammar-quizzes.com/

These are not online tools, but books I recommend for the research library:

• John M. Swales/ Christine B. Feak: Abstracts and the Writing of Abstracts. The University of Michigan Press 2009.
• Christine B. Feak/ John M. Swales: Telling a Research Story. Writing a Literature Review. The University of Michigan Press 2009. (The answers to the tasks in these two books are available online.)
• John M. Swales/ Christine B. Feak: Academic Writing for Graduate Students. Essential Tasks and Skills. Second Edition. The University of Michigan Press 1994/2009. Also get the commentary by same authors: Commentary for Academic Writing for Graduate Students. Essential Tasks and Skills.
• Rowena Murray: How to Write a Thesis. Open University Press2002/2011.
• Robert A. Day/ Barbara Gastel: How to Write and Publish a Scientific Paper. Greenwood Press 2006.
• Michael McCarthy/ Felicity O’Dell: Academic Vocabulary in Use. 50 units of academic vocabulary reference and practice. Self-study and classroom use. Cambridge University Press 2008.

Do you have any resources to add?

PS: There is an online scientific writing tool called Swan, the Scientific Writing Assistant, http://cs.joensuu.fi/swan/. The concept was developed by Jean Luc Lebrun, formerly at Apple and now a scientific communication skills author and trainer. It requires Java version 6.0 or higher, and runs on various operating systems, working on Apple OS 10.6 and higher. I haven’t tried it out yet. Its USP is that it helps you organize your thoughts and content (rather than your language and grammar) by working around the placement of key words.

PPS: Graham Davies created a fantastic online site dedicated to Information and Communication Technology (ICT) for Language Teachers, initiated with EC funding in 1999-2000, which he has continued to maintain himself. It contains pretty much everything teachers need in ICT. I’m finding the section on using concordance programs in class and the one on corpus linguistics helpful. It makes me want to take a week off and do nothing but dip into this world, and finally read the books I’ve got on the subject from cover to cover. Graham also keeps a blog.

In discussing ELF, he quoted, among others, Alan Firth saying that the practice of communication has been overlooked by the general focus on lexico-grammar. Despite its relevance for our business clients, Evan said that teaching practice will presumably only begin to change when the big testing organisations budge and develop new standards. How exactly the level of skills in practical communication can be tested to standard levels is still unclear. Even so, a few key elements have become central in my teaching, and are learnable: Jennifer Jenkins’ Lingua Franca Core, being able to analyse and apply successful communication strategies, and successful listening comprehension across varieties. I can well imagine them becoming a part of a set of new testing standards that extend the old ones rather than throwing them overboard entirely.

I saw the relevance of prioritizing communication strategies again yesterday. I was teaching back office skills to a group of management and team assistants and administrators at Mundipharma in Limburg. They’re part of an international corporate group where 1/3 of the staff they normally address are based in Germany, and 2/3 are based in Britain. As they wrote practice emails and we went through them, it became very clear that it was far more valuable to discuss how their British colleagues would respond to their direct formulation of requests and orders, and how to reformulate them to reach both the Germans and the Brits, than to nitpick minor errors in their use of the tenses and prepositions.

ELF, or BELF, will also be the focus of the BESIG pre-conference event at IATEFL with Vicki Hollett, Chia Suan Chong, Almut Koester, and Mark Powell speaking. I’ve decided to go and am very much looking forward to this. Have to sign up today, I think, to still get an early bird discount. I’ve never been to Scotland…

After showing the students my communication triangle above (connect at the human, the community, and the (competitive, self-)marketing levels), I highlighted the skill of building and maintaining rapport. I used Bob Dignen’s lovely “Business with Bob” video, “Building Rapport”, where he explains mirroring and positive modelling. You’ll find it and the rest of his video series on the Business Spotlight site. (Link to the intro page to that series. Link to the video itself.)

Then I showed them Paul Graham’s great “pyramid of disagreement”, from the lowest, and least effective, ways (name-calling, ad hominem attacks) to those that promise most in every respect (refutation, and especially refuting the key argument). That article is well worth reading (Paul Graham, How to Disagree, March 2008).

Then we got down to business. I started with an activity from a great book I’m using a lot at the moment, by Jenny Guse, Communicative Activities for EAP (Klett/Cambridge University Press 2011, with CD-ROM, e.g. here). The activity is Discussion Trios, so: three to a group, they get a problem card, and have 10 minutes to come up with as many factors that contribute to this problem as they can. This gets them talking and practicing the language of coordination (and, as well, also, another one…). I took Jenny Guse’s material for this, namely a range of 10 environmental issues. Then we did Trios reloaded, where the same teams had to think of a new problem themselves (social, economic, cultural,…) and do the same thing again. They came up with issues like overpopulation, social inequality, corruption, but also having too many term papers to write in too short a time, and eating too much. Then they were ready to do the first extended task. I adapted an activity in Jenny Guse’s book, where she asks students to design a computer game for the elderly, and asks students to discuss and come to an agreement on the passions, values and experience of the elderly. This is to practice the language of agreement and disagreement. I preferred to have them work “closer to home”, and told them that they were to design a computer game for young adults like themselves to educate them to a pressing problem of our day and age. They were to determine the passions, values and interests of their target group that this game would appeal to. I put them in four groups of 5-6 each, and they started out by deciding on the problem, then outlining the values and passions, which each team presented, and they then went back into their groups to develop the game itself. These four games were then presented by a duo from each team:

• A stress-reduction game: The player moves through various environments where she makes healthy, fun, vitalizing choices to move from 100% to 0% stress.
• An urban life game: The player moves through urban adventures, where he has to “do the right thing” and is awarded citizenship and other bonus points and can become mayor or similar.
• An end terrorism game, where the player has to put together a team to end terrorism (a lawyer, a general…). Each profile has a different chance of success, and this is predefined, so depending on whether the player employs the members of the team the way the designers have determined them to be successful, the mission will succeed.
• An end organized crime game, in which players gain the necessary resources, which they then use as they try to infiltrate the criminal networks in missions, distracting and entertaining them to get inside.

After this entertaining activity, the students went on to “take a stand”. I showed them a cartoom that’s been making the rounds (“Dad, I’m considering a career in organized crime.” “Government or private sector?”) and asked them “Which sector is more corrupt?” The more outspoken in the class stood and spoke, and responded to each other with counter-arguments. They were great, and this I filmed, but unfortunately at over 13 minutes, the film is too long too share. (I have to break the film down to upload to our private channel, but this always takes time.) In a second round, everyone paired up, and one player expressed a standpoint, to which the other responded by agreeing with certain parts of the argument and disagreeing with others. This gave the less outspoken ones a chance to speak.

We didn’t get around to the big two team debate I had set up to end things, based on two groups, each reading only one side of an argument, and then engaging in debate, as the above activities took up the full three hours.

One thing that is rarely successful in these types of lessons is to get students to actually use functional language. I did hand out respective phrase bits and modeled them, but I didn’t actually give positive feedback when I heard them being used. The most effective feedback, I think, is when they are grasping for words and then get, from their peers or from me, the correct phrase (Comprehensible Output). I heard lots of that going on. But in my experience, as I say, it’s rarely the language usually defined as functional, it’s usually the words that carry more content. These students are using English as a Lingua Franca (ELF), at differeing levels of fluency, and they are collaborating towards an outcome, very successfully. I don’t think it’s wrong to point out functional language, it may ring a bell with some of them and come in handy, but I don’t believe in pushing it. I think it’s far more essential to internalize the principles of good communication, and that’s why a bit of a presentation and discussion of those, followed by loads of communicative activities to practice and get routine, is my favored approach. What I need to improve next time I do this sort of thing is to make sure there is a feedback slot at the end to revisit those principles.

Here is my presentation as a pdf. If you have done or do anything similar in classes, I’d love to hear from you!

MPM Discuss and debate

So push came to shove and on Saturday, with Helmut off on a business trip down South, I decided to get things fixed. I bought a “Portable WLAN Hot Spot” (TrekStor) that I can go online with. It’s essentially like the Fritzbox we would otherwise use (which ordinarily hooks up to the landline, DSL) in that it allows any laptop in the vicinity to log in, with the access code, and go online on my T-Mobile contract.

The only trouble is that the amount of data transmitted is far more limited than with the fast DSL connection we had ordered. It slows things down incredibly. I tried a few Skype calls, and you’re lucky if the conversation works. I hope it won’t be a big problem. But, for example, some downloads are just too big to go through wireless.

Still, after all the trouble we had I’m playing with the idea of getting rid of the landline alltogether. It sure would save a lot of money.

I’ve also splurged on an iPad. I’ll be teaching large college classes, and I want to be able to go online easily. At the TH Wildau they have a Moodle I’m supposed to use–, and I also want to show nice presentations. I’ll need to get my materials tidied up for the Moodle anyway, so then I can also put them into the iTunes format the iPad needs.

Anyway, I’m tickled pink to have successfully set up a local network, however weak the data stream. I’ve even sorted out my passwords. So I’m feeling quite the sys admin today!

We’re happily installed in our new nest in Berlin-Charlottenburg (thank you to Michael and Christof) and are ready to take it nice and slow for a few days. Happy holidays to all!
Here is my favorite jazzification of a venerable Christmas carol, Kommet Ihr Hirten by David Gazarov. Please excuse my copyright infringement, powers that be, and take it as a recommendation of a marvellous Christmas CD.

David Gazarov: Kommet Ihr Hirten

When asking students to do something in the future, I mustn’t encourage them to do a task that requires feedback and not leave enough time for that feedback in class. Any deferred written feedback can cause problems and has to be ancillary. I used to know this. But I am challenged by the quality standards I am setting myself.

In this case, I had great difficulty understanding the students’ presentations. Their accents are both my problem and theirs, and in fact I’m there to help them make their English more intelligible, and am challenged to become a better listener and teacher myself.

When we work on their written expression, I’ll need to factor in a first round of reading and feedback in class. I’ll also need to set aside a very clear window of time for the feedback, and not spend more time on each one than I have alotted. In my wish to do well by each individual student, I’ve neglected about a third. That musn’t happen again.

Now I’ve been chasing deadlines that keep me from providing it before December. This is a source of great embarassment, as I am deeply committed to teaching this group well, especially when we meet again in mid-December.