Leverett, T. (2011, Mar.). Add technology, delete skills? thisisyourbrain weblog. http://thisisyourbrainonweblogs.blogspot.com/2011/03/add-technology-lose-skills.html.
___ (2010, June). Tell it to the machine. thisisyourbrain weblog. http://thisisyourbrainonweblogs.blogspot.com/2010/06/tell-it-to-machine.html.
(story of cell phone altering typing patterns)
___ (2010, Jan. 7). Grammar checkers - one more time. This is your brain weblog. http://thisisyourbrainonweblogs.blogspot.com/2010/01/grammar-checkers-one-more-time.html.
___ (2010, Jan. 7). More on grammar checkers. This is your brain weblog. http://thisisyourbrainonweblogs.blogspot.com/2010/01/grammar-checkers-one-more-time.html.
___ (2009, Nov.). Grammar-check theory. This is your brain weblog. http://thisisyourbrainonweblogs.blogspot.com/2009/11/grammar-check-theory.html.
___ (2009, Nov.). Grammar checkers revisited. This is your brain weblog. http://thisisyourbrainonweblogs.blogspot.com/2009/11/grammar-checkers-revisited.html.
Green line to the commons includes these:
Leverett, T. (2009, Nov.) Noticing and the processes of learning.
http://tomsources.blogspot.com/2010/03/green-line-to-commons-noticing-and.html.
___ (2009, Nov.) Grammar-check theory..
http://tomsources.blogspot.com/2010/03/green-line-to-commons-grammar-check_24.html.html.
___ (2008, Dec.) Still more questions.
http://tomsources.blogspot.com/2010/03/green-line-to-commons-still-more.html.
___ (2008, Nov.) Voyage pf discovery: The questions.
http://tomsources.blogspot.com/2010/03/green-line-to-commons-voyage-of.html.
___ (2008, Nov.) Green line to the commons: Grammar-check takes esl for a ride.
http://tomsources.blogspot.com/2010/03/green-line-to-commons-grammar-check.html.
Saturday, March 5, 2011
Monday, January 17, 2011
Teaching Writing
Useful Writing links:
- Academic Writing Resources (UC Berkeley - excellent)
U. of Toronto's Teaching Writing page
Univ. of Ohio's Teaching Writing Page
International Institute for Speech and Hearing
Education and teaching writing, Internetwriter's links
Purdue OWL's links
SLCC Online Writing Center
Diane.com, Readers & Writers' resource page
Forums for Written Instruction, Michael Krauss
Bedsford St. Martin's online resources
Advice on Writing, Univ. Toronto
Pedagogy
- ITESL-J's Teaching Techniques page
Bibliography of Teaching Methods
Implementing the writing process
Process Approach to teaching writing
Responding to student writing, Highline Comm. College
Encouraging critical thinking, same source
Miyoko and Beth's On-line ESL Composition in Cyberspace, a lesson on narrative writing
CESL lesson resources
UCDavis' or John Stenzel's paper grading criteria
Sentence Composing, Don and Jenny Killgallon
Calibrated peer review
Gallaudet Univ.'s Guide to mapping
Using the web
- Teaching writing in online and paper worlds (TESOL 2008)
Integrate the web
Use the web to fight plagiarism (CESL)
Weblogs for writing teachers
- Teaching Writing in an Online World, Nick Carbone
Kairosnews
Invisible Adjunct
A Writing Teacher's Blog
Organizations of writing teachers
- Teachers and writers' collaborative
NAWE (National Association of Writers in Education)
Assoc. of Writers and Writing Programs
Research:
Teaching Speaking & Pronunciation
Pedagogy
- Teaching Methods Resources
ITESL-J's Teaching Techniques page
Teaching Pronunciation and Speaking: Links
- Ohio U.'s Speaking Resources
Vance Stevens' Pronunciation resources page
E.L. Easton's Pronunciation links (recommended)
Sounds of American English, with videos to practice
ESL.About.com links
Sunburst Media Pronunciation Resources
ITESL-J's Pronunciation links
Articles and Research on Speaking and Pronunciation:
- Some Techniques for Teaching Pronunciation, D. Dalton, ITESLJ
Richard Cauldwell's publications
Teacher's bibliographies
Teaching Reading
Reading Links for teachers:
- Extensive Reading Pages
Reading Links for teachers (CASLT: Canadian Assoc. of Second Language Teachers)
Sites for teachers (millions)
Vance Stevens' Reading, Vocabulary, & Cloze Page
1-language.com's sites for reading teachers, mostly k-12 oriented
Ohio University's Teaching Reading Links
EFL Reading for students and teachers
LiteracyNet's Instructor page: simplified news stories to read, watch or listen to
John Nemes' Literacy links
Glennys Hanson's Reading and Writing resources
Reading Online
Teaching Reading (Pedagogy):
- ITESL-J's Teaching Techniques Page
Bibliography of Teaching Methods
Create clozes and activities
- Use the Teacher's Workshop to make materials on the web.
Teaching Vocabulary
- Ohio Univ.'s Teaching Vocabulary page
ITESL-J's Vocabulary links
Word surfing discussion list with archives
Teaching Reading: Theory and Articles
- Reading Matrix archives
slawbr, Second Lang. Acq. resources
Teacher's bibiographies
Other Resources
Teaching Listening
Listening Links
- Ohio Univ.'s Teaching Listening page
Vance Stevens' Audio resources page
Glennys Hanson's Free Listening Exercises Online for teachers and students
Listening Activities
- PBS Online, Public Broadcasting System's vast warehouse of stories and audio clips
LiteracyNet Instructor's Page: simplified news stories to read, watch or listen to
Sources for authentic materials
- Environmental News Network
Historic Audio Archives
Radio Canada International
History Channel, speeches
favorite poem project
This American Life
Living on Earth
Voice of America
NPR, American news
CBC, Canadian news
BBC, British news
NASA
Find a radio station
ubuweb
Listening Pedagogy
Making/publishing materials
Listening Research and articles
Teaching Grammar
this page appeared on http://www.siu.edu/~cesl/teachers/know/grammar.html but was removed and restored here in 2010/2011
(being restored)
Teacher's bibliographies
Grammar Quiz Sites
Other Useful Link pages:
- Ohio U.'s Grammar links, organized by Basic, Intermediate, and Advanced
General ESL Grammar Sites
Guide to Grammar and Writing
ITESL-J's Grammar and English Usage links
Net Grammar
Ruth Vilmi's Grammar help page
GWYNI (Grammar When You Need It)
Lingua Center Grammar Safari
CNN Newsroom grammar exercises
1-language.com's grammar exercises
Kathy's Grammar Links
Grammar Links for teachers
ESL Cafe's Grammar links page (rates entries)
Ohio Univ.'s Teaching Grammar Page
Azar Grammar Exchange
CESL Grammar help:
(being restored)
Grammar lessons to use
Grammar and Poetry:
Pedagogy and Pedagogical Grammar
ITESL-J's Teaching Techniques page
Bibliography of Teaching Methods
Web project: Experiential Skills (Pedagogical Grammar) project (1999)
Research
Teacher's bibliographies
Saturday, January 15, 2011
Chat and the language learner
Chat and the language learner
Thomas Leverett on the concerns of internet chat and its effect on language learning
If you are learning a language and have an internet connection, a temptation is open to you: should you seek out chat situations, and learn to chat in your new language, typing LOL like everyone else and laughing as you do it? It is not an easy question. If you are young, you may be much more comfortable using chat, the keyboard-typed version, than learning with the more traditional methods of reading articles, stories, or reading exercises that appear in English textbooks. Chat at least gives you live people to talk to, young people who speak your new language, but be careful: they're using shortened versions of words, misspellings and abbreviated grammar; they're leaving out punctuation and capital letters; is this good for you?
Language learners who have tried it are cautious about the power of computer chatting and its cousin text-messaging, though they may have mastered both chatting and their new language simultaneously. They are not so sure that it was good for their reading or their writing in the formal language, though they'll be the first to say that they learned to type faster, they read more, and they were able to participate actively in a new language. The influence of time spent chatting is considerable, and should not be taken lightly. You may, in the end, know more chat slang than anything else, just due to time spent in heated discussion with people who have become your close friends. Will this actually hurt your ability to learn and master formal English? I believe that it probably won't. People learn several languages at once, successfully, and become bilingual or trilingual, relatively fluent in more than one. Chat slang is like another language: you may have to struggle to separate it from other things you are learning; it may get in the way of your conscious production of your new languages, or even your native language, but it won't prevent you from learning anything. Your fluency in your new language, English for example, will be determined by how much time and energy you put into English, and won't be set back too badly by the fact that you are learning other things as well.
There are several problems associated with chatting that you should be aware of, however. The most obvious reason that chat itself carries a kind of stigma, is that it is associated with pedophiles and people who stalk the young and innocent for their own purposes. This is in fact a problem in virtually all chat rooms worldwide, anywhere where access is open to anyone, or anyone who can pretend to be someone else. Though there are many kinds of chat, formal and informal, for various kinds of people, there are also many kinds of people taking advantage of the anonymity of the chat room, for their own purposes. Be careful; follow the advice of the wise, don't reveal too much of yourself, and don't spend time in places that have proven to be trouble.
Further, as you may be aware, chat and text-chat slang carry a kind of stigma themselves, as you turn around to try to communicate formally, in virtually every language. If people in the formal English world catch you spelling "you" as "u," for example, which can happen very easily, they will associate you with a generation of young people who are versatile with chat slang but have trouble with commas, periods, and proper spelling; teachers at native-speaker high schools and middle schools have been railing against this problem for some time, and may have lost patience with students who can't or don't distinguish between slang and the proper language. You may have to work twice as hard to separate the two yourself, since both are somewhat new to you; you are in effect learning two different languages, though they are kinds of dialects of the same language. Do you have the time and patience to learn two different languages at once? Do you have the time and patience to sort out two similar, yet different, sets of rules, spellings, and customs? You'll have to. Mixing them will be easy, but dangerous, especially putting chat slang into the formal world.
This leads to your final problem, which is simply your own use of time and brain power, which is limited for everyone. If chat is more fun and more engaging, you'll naturally spend more time doing it, at the expense of your formal English study. If you can use chat to inspire you, and keep you focused on integrating yourself into all kinds of English-speaking culture, it can still be good for you. You can pick up vocabulary, notice and adopt an easy fluidity in making sentences and expressing yourself, and in general become more comfortable with the nature of English sentences and the people who use them. But if you spend all of your time typing out abbreviated vulgarities, as some people have called chat, and as it is best described, in some places, then that will be all you will know, and that won't help you much in the world where you really want to succeed, and may even hurt you.
Those who have been there point out the advantages of using chat to learn a language. You can choose who you want to talk to, and choose those whom you learn the most from. You can have long, engaging conversations that teach you a lot and are not threatening to your immediate safety or well-being; you can talk to older, interesting, polite and/or articulate people if you wish; you can talk at your own rate, and you can choose what you want to talk about. Finally, you can talk at the times of your choice, which can be good if you have trouble going to your standard English classes whenever they are offered. The advantages are clear and tempting. The dangers are also important. Don't lose your goal, which is formal study using formal language. Learning something similar to this formal language will be deceptive; it will seem easy, as if you can use the same language in both places. But it's like false cognates in related languages: words can look alike, and have the same roots, but if they are used differently, you have to learn the different variations, and that can be more difficult than learning two completely different words from the start. You'll need more discipline, and you'll need to take careful notice of the differences between chat slang and formal English, so that you don't confuse the two, especially at the wrong moments.
In the end, if you keep your eye on what you want, and you put enough time into it, you'll get it. Learning and using chat won't block you or stop you from learning anything else. In fact, you'll become master of yet another language, a kind of written dialect, which may as well be considered another language. And, you'll be using it for what it's supposed to be used for, talking to others, sharing, learning about people around the world. This can't be bad; you very rarely find anyone, anywhere, who was ever sorry that they learned any language. Sorry that they spent too much time on the wrong one, maybe. Sorry that they learned and used a new one? Almost never.
Thomas Leverett on the concerns of internet chat and its effect on language learning
If you are learning a language and have an internet connection, a temptation is open to you: should you seek out chat situations, and learn to chat in your new language, typing LOL like everyone else and laughing as you do it? It is not an easy question. If you are young, you may be much more comfortable using chat, the keyboard-typed version, than learning with the more traditional methods of reading articles, stories, or reading exercises that appear in English textbooks. Chat at least gives you live people to talk to, young people who speak your new language, but be careful: they're using shortened versions of words, misspellings and abbreviated grammar; they're leaving out punctuation and capital letters; is this good for you?
Language learners who have tried it are cautious about the power of computer chatting and its cousin text-messaging, though they may have mastered both chatting and their new language simultaneously. They are not so sure that it was good for their reading or their writing in the formal language, though they'll be the first to say that they learned to type faster, they read more, and they were able to participate actively in a new language. The influence of time spent chatting is considerable, and should not be taken lightly. You may, in the end, know more chat slang than anything else, just due to time spent in heated discussion with people who have become your close friends. Will this actually hurt your ability to learn and master formal English? I believe that it probably won't. People learn several languages at once, successfully, and become bilingual or trilingual, relatively fluent in more than one. Chat slang is like another language: you may have to struggle to separate it from other things you are learning; it may get in the way of your conscious production of your new languages, or even your native language, but it won't prevent you from learning anything. Your fluency in your new language, English for example, will be determined by how much time and energy you put into English, and won't be set back too badly by the fact that you are learning other things as well.
There are several problems associated with chatting that you should be aware of, however. The most obvious reason that chat itself carries a kind of stigma, is that it is associated with pedophiles and people who stalk the young and innocent for their own purposes. This is in fact a problem in virtually all chat rooms worldwide, anywhere where access is open to anyone, or anyone who can pretend to be someone else. Though there are many kinds of chat, formal and informal, for various kinds of people, there are also many kinds of people taking advantage of the anonymity of the chat room, for their own purposes. Be careful; follow the advice of the wise, don't reveal too much of yourself, and don't spend time in places that have proven to be trouble.
Further, as you may be aware, chat and text-chat slang carry a kind of stigma themselves, as you turn around to try to communicate formally, in virtually every language. If people in the formal English world catch you spelling "you" as "u," for example, which can happen very easily, they will associate you with a generation of young people who are versatile with chat slang but have trouble with commas, periods, and proper spelling; teachers at native-speaker high schools and middle schools have been railing against this problem for some time, and may have lost patience with students who can't or don't distinguish between slang and the proper language. You may have to work twice as hard to separate the two yourself, since both are somewhat new to you; you are in effect learning two different languages, though they are kinds of dialects of the same language. Do you have the time and patience to learn two different languages at once? Do you have the time and patience to sort out two similar, yet different, sets of rules, spellings, and customs? You'll have to. Mixing them will be easy, but dangerous, especially putting chat slang into the formal world.
This leads to your final problem, which is simply your own use of time and brain power, which is limited for everyone. If chat is more fun and more engaging, you'll naturally spend more time doing it, at the expense of your formal English study. If you can use chat to inspire you, and keep you focused on integrating yourself into all kinds of English-speaking culture, it can still be good for you. You can pick up vocabulary, notice and adopt an easy fluidity in making sentences and expressing yourself, and in general become more comfortable with the nature of English sentences and the people who use them. But if you spend all of your time typing out abbreviated vulgarities, as some people have called chat, and as it is best described, in some places, then that will be all you will know, and that won't help you much in the world where you really want to succeed, and may even hurt you.
Those who have been there point out the advantages of using chat to learn a language. You can choose who you want to talk to, and choose those whom you learn the most from. You can have long, engaging conversations that teach you a lot and are not threatening to your immediate safety or well-being; you can talk to older, interesting, polite and/or articulate people if you wish; you can talk at your own rate, and you can choose what you want to talk about. Finally, you can talk at the times of your choice, which can be good if you have trouble going to your standard English classes whenever they are offered. The advantages are clear and tempting. The dangers are also important. Don't lose your goal, which is formal study using formal language. Learning something similar to this formal language will be deceptive; it will seem easy, as if you can use the same language in both places. But it's like false cognates in related languages: words can look alike, and have the same roots, but if they are used differently, you have to learn the different variations, and that can be more difficult than learning two completely different words from the start. You'll need more discipline, and you'll need to take careful notice of the differences between chat slang and formal English, so that you don't confuse the two, especially at the wrong moments.
In the end, if you keep your eye on what you want, and you put enough time into it, you'll get it. Learning and using chat won't block you or stop you from learning anything else. In fact, you'll become master of yet another language, a kind of written dialect, which may as well be considered another language. And, you'll be using it for what it's supposed to be used for, talking to others, sharing, learning about people around the world. This can't be bad; you very rarely find anyone, anywhere, who was ever sorry that they learned any language. Sorry that they spent too much time on the wrong one, maybe. Sorry that they learned and used a new one? Almost never.
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