Post #7 Feb 25, 2010 Concordances Lextutor.ca

Writing with an online concordance has its advantages in terms of ready resources for students to rely on. It can be a time-saving device, and once 'hooked' on the system and the real-time answers to vocabulary or grammar questions, I can see how students would not mind writing in this manner. BUT the online sessions should be timed periodically throughout a semester for both the students' and instructors' sakes. Having the actual documents posted on one site for the instructor eliminates the awkwardness of e-mailing documents, which I cannot tolerate myself, when faced with exorbitant amounts of students. The drawback is the learning curve for familiarizing oneself with the technology.

Luxtutor is amazingly academic, however, which is its strength. It's a maze of resources, best used for the advanced, or EAP writers. Just becoming familiar and even expert at navigating the concordance would be useful in the students' future academic writing. I'm smitten with this feature: concordance of both written and spoken language! The bonus for me, also a French instructor, is that Luxtutor has both English and French concordances. BINGO!

Journal #6 Podcast: Everyday Living in the USA! Schedule a Medical Appointment

WELCOME to EVERYDAY LIVING IN THE USA! Come, listen and learn with us!

Scheduling a Medical Appointment *** ESL / ESP Advanced Beginner or Low Intermediate Activity

Click on each of the words below for a link to Encarta Dictionary and the definition. To navigate back to this blog from the vocabulary site, click on the return arrow key of your server. Click on the above link to listen first to the vocabulary list below, and then to the podcast episode. Enjoy!

schedule an appointment
a checkup
medical
dental
health insurance
co-pay (copayment)

Pre-listening Activity 1. Test your vocabulary practice activity...Choose the correct definition for each word. (The answers are at the end of the activity.)

clinic

1. a medical center 2. an institution where children and teenagers are taught

dental

1. relating or belonging to the teeth 2. a building where goods are manufactured

schedule an appointment

1. a published work of literature 2. arrange to meet somebody

checkup

1. feeling or showing pleasure 2. to carry out detailed examination

medical

1. treatment given by doctors 2. used in education or by teachers

health insurance

1. financial protection for customers 2. medical expenses covered by employer

[ 1 1 2 2 1 2 ]

Now listen to the podcast by clicking on "Schedule a Medical Appointment" above.

Post-Listening Activity 2. Follow-up activity for comprehension…

After you’ve listened to this episode, take a look at the following comments. You will notice that the order of the following sentences are jumbled. Please put them back in order, according to the sequence of events in the episode you heard. The answer key is at the end of this activity, but try not to look until you’ve attempted to put the sentences in the correct order! Hint: You might want to review the meaning of your new vocabulary words.

A. The clinic appointment scheduler tells Mr. Kuma that they have a Japanese doctor on staff.
B. The clinic appointment scheduler asks Mr. Kuma to wait while she connects him to the medical department where he can schedule his appointment.
C. The clinic receptionist asks Mr. Kuma to state the purpose of his call.
D. The clinic appointment scheduler would like to know if Mr. Kuma has health insurance coverage.
E. The clinic scheduler tells Mr. Kuma when there is an opening in their calendar to schedule a checkup visit.
F. The clinic scheduler reminds Mr. Kuma to bring his UIC ID and his co-pay to his physical checkup.

[ C B E D F A ]

Post-Listening Activity 3. Group discussion questions. Spend a couple minutes brainstorming with your group and be ready to share your results.

1. There are many kinds of clinics, depending on their purpose. Name the kinds and purpose of a visit there.
Remember that some clinics are located inside hospitals. (Ex. Dental: when you have to get your teeth cleaned, or have a toothe ache.)

2. Imagine that you need to make a phone call to a hospital. What information will you prepare before you call? (Ex. your name, address, phone number, etc.)

3. Think about the hospitals in your own country. How are they different from those in the United States or other countries? Introduce the hospital system and admitting procedures in your own country to your group members, and discover the differences among other countries' systems.

Thank you for joining us and come back again soon!


Note to instructors. This episode is the first in a series for ESP medical/dental visits, which take place in both the doctor’s or dentist’s office as well as in the hospital. This first episode prepares the ESL/ESP student for questions that might be asked when scheduling their medical appointments. It will also allow the student to experience the turn taking and politeness features used in English that they can expect from the scheduler, and that they will be expected to use in return.

Instructors may find this dialogue at Literacy Net Only minor back stepping has been added, and a few details such as dates have been changed. The exercises are original and are in keeping with the typical communicative pre-listening, listening and post-listening process. The students will recognize this progression towards ACQUISITION of USEFUL VOCABULARY and FOCUS on FUNCTIONAL LANGUAGE. For example, the follow-up comprehension exercise does not simply translate the statements from the dialogue. The statements are made such that the student will have to identify the function, not merely recognize the dialogue features. All of the stated vocabulary words are repeated in the jumbled statements, so that they first view the list, hear the audible list, may look up the meaning via the link provided to Encarta Dictionary, are given a chance to repeat the words, can catch the words in the actual hearing of the episode phase, then view the words embedded in the comprehension exercise based on our understanding that repetition aids in SLA.

ORAL post-listening activity. Follow-up questions in class might include: How does this experience compare with medical appointment scheduling in your country? What other types of information might you need to give or ask? After students complete the listening portion activity individually or in pairs, they can form groups and role play a similar scene for one another. This time they can go directly to an office to make the appointment. Perhaps one of the students might role-play taking his NNS grandmother to the office to navigate the scheduling of the appointment on her behalf? They could be asked to do the same for a dental visit, brainstorming as a whole group what additional words might be used for the dental office.

WRITING follow-up. To continue the follow-up above, the newly created dialogue can be written by the pairs or individually. An alternative writing assignment might be to write a journal entry about this event such as: Today I scheduled my first doctor appointment in the USA. … I was really nervous at first, but since I knew the questions that would be asked in advance, I managed quite well. OR, I bombed. I was so embarrassed. Oh well, better luck next time I have to schedule an appointment.

For a more personal or creative assignment, students may also write a narrative about a humorous or frightening medical mishap in their past. Instructors might ask them to describe a medical visit gone sour, or a humorous visit, some incident that has some connection to a medical visit. They can combine their new vocabulary and the functional use of the questions and answers, turn-taking and politeness features, combined with a review and practice of the past tenses in this assignment. Soon they'll be ready to play act Molière's 'Le Malade imaginaire' with flair! Here's to life in the USA. Thanks for stopping by.

Journal #5 Voicethread, Week 5

Voicethread has a global perspective in that it is available internationally. In terms of learning strategies for listening on line per Chapelle and Jamieson, it would adhere to their suggestions of need for motivation, modeling by other students, and a consistency or familiarity with the site. The fact that L2 can click on icons representing other students not only preserves the anonymity of the responders, but it makes it fun and kind of mysterious. These are engaging factors. Being able to 'point' to the items being discussed -as if on a white board- makes the visual component outstanding, easy to follow, and will certainly ease the anxiety factor that listening often causes. It might or might not be helpful to hear the other accents/grammar inaccuracies from the accuracy perspective, but it certainly would aid in improving fluency. That should be the aim of Voicethread.

Blog 4 February 4, 2010

feed//www.rfi.fr/radiofr/podcast/
For this blog I am giving the teacher's perspective of a popular podcast. Radio France network produces a news show daily at a slightly slower speed than normal French speech. This is indeed at minimum an intermediate (think 2nd or 3rd year college French) program. There is no written script, so the students who use this on a daily or weekly basis will have to listen numerous times. The repetition is a good thing to improve listening skills. It could be listened to in class, allowing the teacher to stop at any point to discuss the terminology or ideas. It would work quite well as content for reaction journals.

http://radiolingua.com/2010/01/lesson-73-coffee-break-french/
Let's switch to the student's perspective of this podcast. Students will love the idea of following a story, and learning how to converse, repeating after the instructor in a conversational manner. It is user friendly for English L1 students, who can follow episodes of this Scottish production at their own pace. The story line is conversational, and the explanations in Scottish English are excellent. The caveat is that the student will hear both English and French, which can be confusing. This is best for beginners to intermediates. It would be a good way for false beginners to review. This has a cost of 12BP/year.

WEEK 3, vocab-related CALL sites

ULTRALINGUA.com
I accessed the Food.inc website and looked up an article on Haiti, placing the URL in the Ultralingua.com site dictionary. This was the result when I double-clicked on Haitian
"Haitian n.
A native or inhabitant of Haiti.
Haitian adj.
Of or relating to or characteristic of the republic of Haiti or its people: “Haitian shantytowns.”
phrases
Haitian centime n.
100 centimes equal 1 gourde.
Haitian Creole n.
A creole language spoken by most Haitians; based on French and various African languages.
Haitian monetary unit n.
The monetary unit in Haiti."

I find this option the best of all that were discussed in the FIVE articles for this week's activities. This enables the reader (and since when did reading STOP being a JOYFUL activity????? Ref. Gruba) to remain on the actual reading text site without flipping back and forth between sites. In short, it looks like a thorough definition and explanation are provided, in a very non-invasive manner. It will be possible for the students to have a fluid reading approach. These definitions in English can be used to formulate the mini-concordance by assigned groups, or by class in the event there is a small class size. Students can negotiate for the most important words to include in their concordance or corpus. After the teacher edits the list by eliminating the passive or low frequency terms to assist the students in paying attention to the most high frequency and utilized vocabulary, a test can be given to assess their acquisition of the terms. It would be interesting to do an initial quiz immediately after the reading and before the students begin to put together a concordance, then again immediately after they have assessed and assembled the mini-concordance, and then finally after they have studied their self-selected mini-concordance to see if there is a marked increase in the internalization of the information.

WORDCHAMP.com
Placing the same URL address in this READ site yielded less definition and explanation. Further, in order to put the words in a list for later use as flash cards, etc., one is required to be part of a class which the instructor can apparently set up for free. However, the students must pay $12.50. This is not a bad idea if the instructor wants the students to create a wordlist, or if they want to have their students chat online with penpals. This last option would be an interesting one to pursue, as long as the total expenses of the class permitted it.
This site provides the technology for students to create their mini-corpus or mini-concordances online, and the same process can be applied as for Ultralingua.

Blog 2 CALL January 19, 2010

Dear TESOL bloggers,

I found three great sites that contain short stories that can be used in K-8 classes.
http://www.indianchild.com/short_stories.htm This contains SHORT INSPIRING STORIES. The site is user-friendly and not slick, simply functional: scan list, select story and click, print text, read with kids and do your follow-up activities.

The second site is slicker, contemporary, is better indexed, but is basically a good resource for texts:
http://www.eastoftheweb.com/short-stories/childrenindex.html SHORT STORIES

These can be used as a text for cultural or ethical conversation courses, the point de départ for a writing or dialogue/role-play activity. I would suggest studying a genre such as the fable, then having the kids write individually or as a group to create their own fable. The fables could be copied and assembled into a book that would be distributed to the parents and kept for posterity. Students (people!) love to get published!!!! Great for parent teacher conferences or for the first parents' night of the scholastic year. The stories would make great displays, either all together in a display window in the hallway, or featured one story a week on a special board. The student would read their story either in the library (read "New York bookstore') or in the classroom for their peers.
So now you have reading, vocabulary building, discourse, literary genre, art of writing and editing, peer editing, group project, publishing, reading out loud, celebrating creativity!! IT'S WIN WIN WIN.

Blog 1 CALL January 14, 2010 Previous CALL experience

Dear TESOL bloggers,

It is January 12, 2010, the beginning of my last semester in the MA program in Applied Linguistics/TESOL at University of Illinois at Chicago. I will chronicle my journey into CALL-land for TESOL, bringing to the blog screen questions, concerns, debates and 'Aha! moments' as they occur. I not only appreciate, but I expect you, the readers, to contribute your own constructive comments, ideas and suggestions. All for one and one for all!

I have extensive experience with Blackboard Discussion Board, Voice Board, Grade Center, posting items and web links, as faculty in university courses. I've dabbled in Dreamweaver, Jing and Hot Potatoes. Clearly, I have a long way to go!

My primary concern in CALL class is to KISS *keep it simple schweetheart* so that CALL projects are user-friendly and allow for minimal interference when students are accessing the site and doing the project.

One of my main questions is how to set up EFFECTIVE group projects. What have you, my readers, experienced in terms of successful, or UNsuccessful group projects, or even solo CALL projects?

Looking forward to learning the software and sharing my observations and questions with you!