Another Reflection Another Week

Due to the snow day this week I don't feel like I have too much to reflect on this time around. We looked at different corpora which are always interesting tools, but we didn't talk about the readings much this week. When working with the COCA corpus I always seem to run into some sort of difficulty. Either the website is going too slow or not working at all, or my search brings up too many hits so they can't display my results or I can't figure out what to put into the search engine to find what I want to find. I feel that with more use of the corpus and a more detailed look at my options I could probably figure out what I am doing wrong and finally use the site correctly, but I feel that the individual use of a corpus is not designed for beginning learners, or young learners. I feel that trying to let either of these groups use a corpus to get an activity done by themselves would result in mass confusion and more problems than answers. Because of this  have decided that I will never use a corpus-based activity or task with those two groups of learners.

With that being said, I do believe that a corpus is a useful tool for the older and more advanced students of English. The use of concordance data can really help students learn about practical and accurate uses of the language as well as show them the differences between genres (spoken, written, academic, informal, etc.). This can be especially helpful for students who want to learn English for a specific purpose. If they want to learn English for academic reasons than looking at the data in the corpus for the academic genre can help, while students who want to become a fluent speaker can look at the conversation genre data. Additionally, I believe that a corpus can help build learner strategies in the students which can help them further their academic goals as well as their English proficiency.

I have created an activity below that explains one of the ways in which a corpus can be used with learners. It is similar to the activity we did in class except that it ties the use of the corpus to relevant vocabulary and previous knowledge that the students have gained during the previous classes. This lesson shows that corpora can be used effectively in the classroom, but one must be careful how and with what students the corpus is used.

Materials Development #1

Level/Course Name: High-Intermediate ELL’s in a University English Program (15 students from various L1 backgrounds)

Lesson Written by: Haley Winters

Lesson Objectives: 

• Students will become familiar with a new reading strategy
• Students will be able to reinforce word meanings they already know
• Identify unfamiliar vocabulary in a text
• infer meaning of unfamiliar words with the use of the COCA corpus

This lesson includes (check those that apply):

• Individual work
• Whole class discussion
• Comprehensible input
• Links to past learning
• Guided and independent practice
• Reading, writing and speaking skills

Pre-lesson Inventory:

• Things to bring to class: Handouts for reading activity and instructions for COCA post-reading assignment
• Equipment: Need to request to be in the computer lab
• HW to assign: FInish post-listening activity if couldn’t finish during class

3 mins: 

• Take roll
• Review class agenda  

Warm-up Activity (10 min.):  

Teacher brings in two words unknown to the students and plugs them into the COCA corpus to show how to use the corpus and find the concordances with these words. The teacher asks the students to try and guess the meanings of these two words based on the concordances they see in the corpus. Afterwards the teacher gives them a full definition of the words and they briefly talk about how close (or far away) their guesses were and some strategies for using the corpus later.

Transition: the teacher tells the students they will be using the corpus later to learn more vocabulary related to Soul Surfer and could they please take out their copies of the book.

Pre-reading Activity ( 10 min.):

The students have just finished reading the book Soul Surfer and for the pre-reading the teacher asks the students to discuss what happens in the last chapters  (since they last talked about the book) and how they would feel if they had been bitten by a shark. Would they go back into the ocean? why or why not? This gets the students thinking about the book and how they feel about what happened to the girl in the book.

Transition: the teacher explains that now the students are going to read about Bethany Hamilton’s feelings about what happened to her from an interview she gave with a person form the New York Times. 

Reading Activity ( 15-20 min.):

The teacher hands out the first handout which is an article from the New York Times in which the girl from Soul Surfer is being interviewed and they are talking about the movie that is going to be coming out based on her book/life. The students are asked to read the article and underline at least 5 unknown/unfamiliar words, or words they are familiar with but can’t quite remember their meaning. They are going to be using these words in the post-reading activity.

Transition: The teacher makes sure the students have finished reading the article and asks them to now open the corpus on their computers and he/she hands out the instructions for the next activity. 

Post-Reading Activity ( 20-25 min./rest of class):

For the first 15-20 min. the students will take the five (or more) words that they underlined and plug them into the COCA corpus. They will investigate the concordance data for each of these words and try to infer their meaning from the data. With this information they must type up their words, the inferred definition of the words and five sentences from the concordance data for each word to support their definition. If students don’t have enough time to type and print up their assignment they can finish it for homework. For the last 5-10 min. the teacher asks the students which words they found difficult, the teacher will write down the most commonly reoccurring difficult words on the board and then the teacher will explain more clearly what these words mean to the whole class.

Homework (5 mins): 

If the students were unable to finish the post-reading activity than they need to complete it for homework and bring it to the next class to turn in.  

Back-up activity (variable-time activity): 

 If the corpus is down/not working than the teacher will instead start playing the Soul Surfer  DVD that he/she has brought to class as a backup activity and the students will work with the corpus on another day.

Assessment: 

Students must type their list of difficult vocabulary words, write an inferred meaning for each, and include 5 sentences from the concordance that support their inferred meaning.This will help the teacher figure out if the students followed the directions, explored the vocabulary words and used critical thinking to connect the concordance results to a working definition.

Tools: 

The article found at the below link (a printed copy for each student):

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/03/sports/03seconds.html

Also instructions for the post-reading activity:

Soul Surfer Concordancing Assignment

1. Choose at least five unfamiliar words, or words you are familiar with but can not remember the meaning from the New York Times article. 

2. You will be using these words and plugging them into the COCA corpus. 

3. You will examine the concordance data for each word and deduct the meaning from context. 

Final assignment to turn in: 

1. Type your personal list of difficult vocabulary words.

2.  Write an inferred meaning for each word, and include 5 sentences from the concordance to support your definition.

3. Print out this assignment and turn it in at the end of class. 

(If you do not complete it in-class, this will be homework)

The last thing needed is access to the COCA corpus at:
www.americancorpus.org/

Overview:

         This lesson is designed for a class of upper-intermediate to advanced learners English. This class in mind contains between 14 and 20 students who are all international students at a University in their English language program. The class overall is an integrative skills class that focuses on all four major skills (reading, writing, listening, speaking) over the course of the semester with this specific lesson focusing on reading and writing skills, but integrating some speaking skills in too. The students come from a wide range of L1’s so the use of the students native languages by the teacher rarely, if ever, occurs. English is the language spoken for all aspects of the class from instructions to class discussions.

The purpose of this lesson is to help the students develop specific reading strategies as well as build relevant vocabulary and past lesson knowledge. The students h

ave just previously read the biographical story Soul Surfer and this lesson brings in the knowledge the students gleaned from this book in order to continue building vocabulary and reading skills. From this starting point the students will critically think and discuss topics from the book in the pre-reading activity and then read an interview that is between a New York Times writer and Bethany Hamilton (the girl the book is about). From this article the students will find new vocabulary to learn and use the COCA corpus to infer the meaning of these new words. 

The use of the corpus allows students to build their knowledge on how English words are used in context, as well as, teach them a good reading strategy of figuring out what an unfamiliar word means from only it’s context. This helps students learn how to rely on just the text they are reading and not always need to check a dictionary which can interrupt the flow of the reading and discourage students. This is also a valuable strategy when no dictionary is available or when students are practicing extensive reading because it can take too long to look up every unknown word and many times the context provides good clues as to the meaning of the unfamiliar word.

Reflection of Another Week in CALL

This week I have had a lot of ideas and thoughts flit through my mind about CALL activities. I have only limited teaching experience myself and sometimes I find it hard to see how an activity might work in a classroom and/or what problems my future students might have with them. I have also been looking at the websites we have been using in the classroom and trying to decide what I think about them and how I might integrate them into a future class. 

This Monday we worked with two different websites: Socrative and Grockit. These two sites have very differing purposes and probably would not be used in the same classroom on the same day. Socrative is a website that the teacher would mainly use and the students would only interact with while taking quizzes or playing the space race game. I think this site is helpful for a teacher to use because he/she can easily get the results from test sent to them after the quiz and the space races can be fun and motivating for the students. I would caution any teacher using the site though not to just use it for comprehension quizzes or make it the sole way to test the students in the classroom because I don't think you would get a very good idea of what each student has learned nor would you be incorporating different learning styles of your students into the classroom. Another problem is that you would have to make sure that each student has a smart phone/tablet/computer in the classroom and that they bring it on the day of the test. The students would have to make sure that their electronics are charged enough and reliable enough not to crash in the middle of the quiz or turn off due to low battery. I believe that many classrooms will have some students who do not have any usable electronics so in that case the teacher would be unable to use Socrative or would have to bring extra electronics to the classroom which would be expensive and there is always the possibility of them getting broken or stolen.

Grockit on the other hand has a few more uses and I believe can lead to other activities. Grockit uses youtube videos to teach students. The teacher can add questions to a video and send the link to the students who then can watch it and answer the questions. Or the students in groups could find a video and ask questions for other's in class to answer as a sort of task or project the teacher gives them. The questions can be anything you want them to be, but it seems like they will mostly end up being comprehension questions about the video because otherwise you wouldn't need to ask the questions during the video. I believe this is a good site to use as a beginning activity that could lead to a more in-depth discussion of a topic or another task that uses some of the information they learned in the video. On the other hand, as a stand-alone activity I don't think it is all that worth it to use because it is very basic and only lends itself to listening comprehension of the videos and wouldn't be very productive for a class by itself.

Upon these reflections, I have started thinking about my future classes, where in the world I might want to teach and the technology that may be available. There are many unknowns at this point so it is good to be able to be introduced to so many of the resources before I actually start teaching so that I have a lot to draw on when I teach a class of my own. 

Grockit Activity

https://grockit.com/answers/v/yt.mALkCGVA2BU.public

 When you click on this link it brings you to a Grockit page that is a video about how to speak with a Scottish accent. This video includes some questions that students can answer and it is a relatively short video so it wouldn't take up much class time. I believe that this video and activity would work well in an intermediate/advanced pronunciation class because it draws attention to different aspects of pronunciation and different ways that English speakers can say the same thing. Not only is it useful for students to be introduced to other accents and ways of speaking, but this video is also interesting and fun and I think that the students would stay engaged watching a video like this which also gives them listening practice. There are many other videos like this on youtube and this one activity could lead to other activities and student presentations on different English accents around the world. This could also lead to relevant cultural information for the students so I believe an activity like this could lead to many other tasks and activities that can be beneficial for an EFL classroom.

Philosophy of Teaching with the use of Technology

Teaching with technology is not an option anymore it is a reality. Students use the internet to turn in assignments, check their grades, write papers, do research, etc. and teaches update grades online, look at assignments through email, give presentations using powerpoint and projectors, etc.  IT is impossible to avoid using technology in the classroom just as it is impossible for students to learn a second language without ever hearing it. Their are many theories of SLA that can be used in the classroom and the web now offers us tools that can be combined with these theories so that our students have multiple resources to learn the L2.

Their have not been many empirical studies done in the CALL field that have a theoretical base in SLA, but these two fields are important to keep together because SLA theories can inform the use of CALL technologies. If a teacher focuses solely on the technology he/she wants to use in the classroom than it may not actually benefit the students in any way. The technology chosen for a classroom needs to first be analyzed using the framework for the class. If the technology does not support the goals and objectives of the classroom than it will not benefit the students to use it during that class. There is very little reason to use a listening lab on the internet in a classroom devoted to reading and writing no matter how cool the teacher thinks the website is or how fun the students might find the activity. The technology used must always fit into the curriculum and must be used in a way that it helps the students achieve the goals and objectives of the class.

After deciding which technological resources to use in the classroom the teacher must become very familiar with these resources before having the students use them. The teacher must be able to give very detailed instructions to the students before they use the software/website so that the students don't get hung up on the technological aspect of the site and instead can use it for it's language learning potential. The teacher must be able to provide multiple websites if there is a chance that the website will crash or be updating when the students need to use it. If the teacher isn't well-versed in the technology they should not use it because it will just cause frustrations for the students and for the teacher and little to no learning will actually be accomplished.

Once the teacher has met the above criteria with regards to the technology he/she will use in the classroom than the technology will become a great resource for the students. They will be able to accomplish the goals and objectives set out for them by the teacher as well as have fun completing the activities they are supposed to do. Technology is a great way to expose students to multiple uses of the target langauge. They can get access to native speaker recordings, authentic written material, websites where they can practice their writing, places to record their own speaking, and environments that promote interaction with other students and even native speakers of the target language directly. Technology should be used in the classroom, but it must be used correctly and successfully in order for the students to further their L2 knowledge.

Activity using Vuvox

This activity can be done in class or as homework. After the students complete their drawings they can compare them with other students and the teacher could even have them describe their own bedrooms to other students or the whole class. This is a good activity because it gets the students listening for a purpose. After the activity the students will have accomplished something and I believe this is more motivating for the students than just listening or just listening and answering comprehension questions.

Here is my groups advice for new graduate students and what they should do to have a social life in Flagstaff :-)

Digital Storytelling

This last week we looked at multiple sources that can be used for digital storytelling in the classroom and for supplemental activities outside of the classroom. I was surprised to see just how many resources are out there and how differing those resources were. Digital storytelling covers creating digital books with just word, no sounds; creating digital books with writing and sounds; small movie stories that use bubbles with words as the people you have chosen move or speak, these can either allow no sound or sound; also this includes collages of pictures that one can add video or background stories to, some collages move on their own and others you must move manually.
When working with the website Vuvox I realized some of the problems that students could have with this digital storytelling. The website was fairly easy to understand at first glance, but once I started creating my collage it became more confusing. I was unable to figure out how to embed video to play throughout the collage and was only able to put video at a specific point that the viewer would have to click on to see at a specific point in the collage. I also found it difficult to upload the video because it kept telling me there was an error, yet I couldn't figure out what the error was. Finally I was able to find the right type of video file to upload, but then when the collage was published it wouldn't play. This took too long to figure out to make it easy for students to use in the classroom and I feel there would be multiple problems if they used it outside the classroom as well.
Another issue with many of these sites is that you have to register to use the site and sometimes you have to pay for some of the different varieties of videos you can use on the websites. By having to register you have to memorize another password and if students have to use multiple sites then this can get frustrating and hard to remember all of the usernames and passwords. If students work in partners like we did in class than we either had to make register together and each know the usernames and passwords or we registered separate and had to figure out how to share the work with another member. This can get confusing in a classroom and students may have problems using the sites or remembering their login information.
On the other hand, digital storytelling can be very fun, motivating and beneficial for students to use. It is a unique activity that students will be engaged in and learn new skills by using. Teachers just must thoroughly investigate a website before using it in the classroom, as well as give the students lots of explanations and walkthroughs so they are easily able to use the website and finish the activity on time.