Beyond the sentence...

Here's a selection of links and other bits and pieces related to IA902 Session 9.

Flax (Flexible Language Acquisition) is a very interesting website from New Zealand which aims to "automate the production and delivery of practice exercises for overseas students who are learning English". Meanwhile, Tom Cobb's Vocabulary Profiler is a potentially useful tool which can be found on his Compleat Lexcial Tutor website.

In terms of texts we looked at in class, you might be interested in reading more about Derek Bentley or in watching the film "Let Him Have It", which is based on his case.  The events of the Battle of Balaclava and Lord Raglan's miscommunication are also well documented online. For those with more literary tastes, there's "This Be The Verse" by Philip Larkin, The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner, or a huge number online limericks. 

If you're tired of reading for now, you could always just watch any of the videos below, one of which involves the mysterious case of the Pineapple Princess:

Guy Cook - Discourse

Representing the Sentence

We looked at various pictorial representations of sentences in this week's session, so I thought I'd share some links for those of you who might want to do some exploring. Images of cuisenaire rods came from a teacher's blog, Pilgrims English Language Centre, and a commercial website. The image of colour-coded sentence parts came from a podcast for disability professionals, and the diagram that I still don't quite understand came from the blog of an American bookworm.

If you'd like to make beautiful syntax trees, phpSyntax Tree is incredibly easy to use, and I made these two images using a free piece of software called TreeForm:

Rules, Patterns and Words by Dave Willis

Pattern Grammar

Extracts from Pattern Grammar by Susan Hunston and Gill Francis courtesy of Google Books:



Read a review of the book published in Computational Linguistics here, or click here for an article by Susan Hunston entitled "Frame, phrase or function : a comparison of frame semantics and local grammars"

Clauses and sentences

This may seem like an odd starting-point for a discussion of clauses and sentences, but all will become clear eventually.  These videos accompany the Preparatory Task I have circulated for IA902 Session Seven:

Noun Phrases : Typical difficulties for learners

Here's a question for you in relation to this week's topic of nouns and noun phrases. Which of the following difficulties are most relevant to the context that you teach in? How serious are the difficulties and how can you help learners to overcome them?

1. Choosing the wrong word endings when attempting to form nouns from adjectives (e.g. *angriness, *youngtime).
2. Not using capital letters appropriately ( e.g. *I speak French).
3. Using countable nouns when the context is uncountable (e.g. *an information, *a good weather, * the news are good).
4. Using plural nouns as though they are singular (e.g. *The people is kind).
5. Making regular plural forms of irregular nouns (e.g. *a lot of womans, *three childrens).
6. Using plural forms of modifying nouns (e.g. * some pencils sharpeners, *a 16 years old girl).
7. Subject-verb agreement with modified nouns (e.g. * Successful users of the language is able to….).

(adapted from Parrot, 2010 pp. 18-20)

What is a word?

I've never tried embedding an element from Google Books in a blog post before, so this is just an experiment, but anyone tackling question 1 for their assignment will recognise some text on page 4!

What is a modal verb?

To give the quotation in my previous post some context, Michael Lewis presents it in a book which otherwise sets out to show that we *can* simplify descriptions of English grammar in a useful way (i.e. it's not as complicated or difficult as some like to claim).

A question that Michael Lewis asks is whether or not HAVE TO is a modal verb. I suppose this means we need a definition for modal verbs.  If MUST is a modal verb, what makes it a modal verb?  How can we recognise it as a modal verb?

There seems to be a general consensus that the following verbs are all modals: can, could, may, might, must, shall, should, will, would. Ron Cowan, for example, refers to these 9 as "pure modals".

In what way(s) might HAVE TO be different to the verbs in this list?

Modal Verbs

There is no doubt that the overall  picture of the modals is extremely “messy” and untidy and that the most the linguist can do is to impose some order, point some regularities, correspondences, parallelisms…This subject is not one that lends itself to any simple explanation.

(Palmer, 1979.cited in Lewis, 1986, p.99)

Is this true of your experience, either as a teacher or as a learner (or both)?  Can you give examples of any difficulties you have experienced?

PronSci

I've been following a discussion of ideas on Pronunciation Science (!) on the IATFEL Pronunciation Special Interest Group mailing list, and wondered if it's something you'd like to look at and discuss.  The gallery is very interesting, although I have a colour vision defect, so I'm not sure if I can really see what the authors want me to see!  On the pronsig mailing list, I was quite surprised to see a comment from a participant arguing that " if the teacher is not a native-speaker of the language, it is probably better that the students don't hear her speak it"claiming.  The same writer, however, also believes that using "Pronunciation Science", anyone can "teach" perfect pronunciation of English.  She's one of the brains behind Pronunciation Science...

Any thoughts?

Session Four Overspill

Below are video extracts from presentations by two Michaels - McCarthy and Hoey - both of whom have an interest in what we can learn from corpora.  Both talks here touch upon what corpora tell us about the "behaviour" of particular words and particular contexts.





This British-Council-sponsored IATEFL website features documents and videos from the past five IATEFL conferences, and may be a good site for exploration when your eyes get tired of reading.

Session Four: Links for the Lab

It will be a good idea to keep this web page open and visible throughout the lab session.  The powerpoint presentation is full of screen caps from websites, some of which you will be encouraged to explore.  A list of links in the order in which they will appear is below:

1. Oxford Dictionaries Online
2. Google Fight
3. Leeds University Collection of Searchable Corpora
4. Wordsmith Tools
5. Wordle
6. Dr Johnson's Dictionary
7. AWL Highlighter
8. Oxford Collocations Dictionary (google it!)
9. Compleat Lexical Tutor
10. Collocate Cloud
11. Touchstone : from Corpus to Coursebook
12. Cobb, T. 1997 "Is there any measurable learning from hands-on concordancing?" System 25 / 3

If I've missed anything, let me know and I will add extra links later.

Neologisms, Dictionaries, and Etymology

If you'd like to explore any of the neologisms we discussed at the beginning of session three, this article on the Oxford Dictionaries Online blog provides a brief overview and some handy links to online dictionary definitions.  Elsewhere on the web, the term celanthropy is discussed on the Economist website, and the Washington Post encourages its readers to coin creatively in its annual neologism competition.

If "a game of cat and mouse" sparked an interest in everything catish*, the ODO entry for cat is worth looking at. Interestingly enough (or not, perhaps) etymological details are provided below definitions and related phrases. Do you think this kind of information is useful for students?  The archives of the ELT Journal contain two articles from the 1980s on the value of etymology to the language learner - click here for "Etymological information : can it help our students?" and here for "Using Etymology in the Classroom". For an online dictionary of etymology, click here.

Do you think that etymological information is useful for language learners?  Please don't be shy: post your thoughts as a comment below.

* Thanks to Kriang for coining this term. I wonder, though, if "cattish" would be better than "catish".  What do you think?

Morphology

I set "Types of Morphemes" - the third chapter of Morphology by Katamba and Stonham - as preparatory reading for our week 4 IA902 session, but perhaps we need a few definitions before you start reading.  For those of you who would like to participate as blog authors, can you write a post explaining how you would define the terms MORPHOLOGY and MORPHEME?  You can either define these terms in your own words, or present definitions that you like from other authors, but if you take the latter option, please make it clear where your definition originates.

Teaching pronunciation

We discussed several resource books for teaching pronunciation in yesterday's session, particularly Mark Hancock's Pronunciation Games and Ann Baker's Ship or Sheep.  There's also an apparently unrelated website named Ship or Sheep (not sure if it was possible for Ann Baker to copyright the expression "ship or sheep"), and I referred to some clunky but potentially interesting exercises on the Centre for Independent Language Learning website.  Further suggestions will come in future sessions, but I am also very keen to read about your experiences of teaching (or being taught) English pronunciation.  Do you have any tasks or exercises that have worked particularly well for you?  Has reading and discussing the topic sparked off any ideas that you'd like to share?  I'd be very happy to read your thoughts either as comments on this post, or as individual blog posts of your own.

From voice-setting phonology to mondegreens

Scott Thornbury's suggested task of getting students to converse in their mother tongue but with "English accents" (in "Having a good jaw: voice-setting phonology") put me in mind of a couple of topics that seem to be discussed with much enthusiasm online. One is the notion of "fake English", which has spawned hundreds of Youtube videos of people trying to sound English without necessarily being able to speak any of the language.  My personal favourite amongst these is this Italian song:



The second topic is more closely-related to music. A "mondegreen" is a misinterpretation of a lyric in a song (the term originates from the mishearing of the phrase "laid him on the green" as "Lady Mondegreen") and there are websites and online discussion threads devoted to listing such misunderstandings.  This clip from a Bulgarian TV show in which a contestant misinterprets the whole of a Mariah Carey song (actually it's by Harry Nielsen but that's a different matter) has received over 4 million hits on Youtube.



But, to return to articles published in the Journal of ELT, there's an interesting angle on this for language teachers in the form of Geoff Smith's 2003 article "Music and mondegreens: extracting meaning from noise". The author discusses the classroom task of transcribing song lyrics and attributes his students' 'mondegreens' to "an inadequate awareness of the full range of English phonological distinctions".

A short survey on terminology

I'd be grateful if you could each click on the link below and complete my simple 10-question survey on terminology.  I used Survey Monkey for this task, and hopefully we'll get the chance to discuss both the results and the shortcomings of the survey itself in a session soon.

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/J5597LT

P is for...

There are two relevant posts on Scott Thornbury's A-Z of ELT Blog - P is for Prescription and P is for Phonemic Chart.

IPA Tools from the University of Victoria

Two resources from the University of Victoria in Canada.  First, a simple graphical keypad to create IPA transcriptions, and then a similar tool employing a more visual layout.  I first came across these pages via the Phonemic Script Typewriter webpage:

The Sounds of Spoken English

Interactive Phonemic Chart

The Etymology of Morphology by Marc Quinn

Tate Collection | The Etymology of Morphology by Marc Quinn:

Morpheme maze

IPizz, Podaholics, Podestrians

IPizz, Podaholics, Podestrians: "IPizz, Podaholics, Podestrians"

English Module 2.4: Concordance programs

English Module 2.4: Concordance programs:

'via Blog this'

Unicode Phonetic transcription : a link

A UCL page on Unicode Phonetic transcription: specifically, how to put phonetic symbols in a Word document.

Diphthongs : "The Rain in Spain Stays Mainly in the Plain" from My Fair Lady

Find more details of the film from imdb.com, or explore the George Bernard Shaw play on which it was based (Pygmalion) via Bartleby.

Peter Roach on Prosody

Click here to access the rest of this lecture via Youtube.

BBC Pronunciation Tips

A video about the Pronunciation Tips pages of the BBC Learning English website: