Thomas' Work Space

1. View screens (best viewed side by side, but note that left and right screen are not synchronized):
   1. for full slide show (note the included short links for convenient further reading), left screen
   2. for Sanako interface and full audio track, right screen.
2. Table of contents:
   1. Overview of a Sanako Oral Exam
   2. Examples of Exam teachers’ exam question recordings
   3. Example of a Sanako Exam
   4. Loop induction
   1. creating an exam question recording
   2. by taking a Sanako exam as a student
   5. Step-by-Step of administering a Sanako oral exam
   6. Grading Sanako oral exam student files
      1. Sanako voice insert for
         1. facilitating recording oral assignments for student without hard-coded pauses
         2. commenting on student responses during grading
   7. Sanako authoring tool for providing visual on top of aural cues to students
3. 

1. Link:
2. Example of KWIC view result:
3. Based on Europarl, Wikicorpus (2006!), MultiUN. From their metadata page:

   Metadata for Corpus del Español Actual
   Corpus name	Corpus del Español Actual
   CQPweb’s short handles for this corpus	cea / CEA
   Total number of corpus texts	73,010
   Total words in all corpus texts	539,367,886
   Word types in the corpus	1,680,309
   Type:token ratio	0 types per token
   Text metadata and word-level annotation
   The database stores the following information for each text in the corpus:	There is no text-level metadata for this corpus.
   The primary classification of texts is based on:	A primary classification scheme for texts has not been set.
   Words in this corpus are annotated with:	Lemma (Lemma)
   	Part-Of-Speech (POS)
   	WStart (WStart)
   The primary tagging scheme is:	Part-Of-Speech
   Further information about this corpus is available on the web at:	http://sfn.uab.es:9080/SFN/tools/cea/english

4. To use, “consult the IMS’s brief description of the regular-expression syntax used by the CQP and their list of sample queries. If you wish to define your query in terms of grammatical and inflectional categories, you can use the part-of-speech tags listed on the CEA’s Corpus Tags page.”
5. Also provides frequency data (based on word forms or lemmas, and others  – up to a 1000):
6. Examples of a frequency query result (click for full-size image. Note that a lemmatized list was requested here which links all inflected forms back to the lemma, and vice versa, upon clicking the lemma, displays a KWIC view containing all forms subsumed under that lemma, see picture above):

1. All other things equal (given a limited amount of time), teachers can provide more and better corrective feedback on student oral proficiency recordings if, during their grading, they could easily insert their own oral comments into the students’ recordings (delivered as MP3 files to teachers’ desktops after Sanako oral exams).
2. Both the Sanako Tutor and Student Player have a voice insert mode that is much easier and quicker to use than (albeit not free as) editing the student audio in Audacity (which we still recommend for bare-bone viewing/listening because of Audacity’s capability of loading and displaying multiple tracks simultaneously).
3. Fortunately, Sanako tutor/student player are available on the teacher/student station PCs in the LRC (the latter’s insert function is available when the PC connected to the running Sanako Tutor on the teacher station).
4. How easy and fast is it to use this? As you can see in this demo screencast on how to use Sanako voice insert to add spoken comments into your students’ Sanako oral exams, voice insert only requires:
1.  a click on the voice insert button in the center, whenever a user wants to speak during listening,
2. and, from the top left menu, a “file”/ “save as” at the end.
5. In a next step – not only during the grading process –, how easy is it to distribute student recordings made with Sanako to students? That is TBA:a different story.

1. Support for more languages is planned (Chinese, Japanese):
2. 
3. The interesting approach based on parallel corpora provides a wealth of empirical data, albeit a bit raw  and of varying quality, e.g.:
4. 

An inititative of an expert from the UK LLAS,  Yazik Open has the potential to become a welcome addition to our SLA research search options, especially if you do not want to run into a pay wall after finding an interesting abstract.

The currently sole contributor seems to be admin – same problem I had when I started a language learning resource links database in 1998, when will this change?

The keyword list looks somewhat rudimentary – when I worked with LLAS on a language learning resource metadata schema, complexity led to a grinding halt.

So the need to bring some of the advances in technologically fostered collaboration and information exchange to domain-specific fields like SLA certainly remains to be felt here.

The Foreign Service Institute language learning materials  – consisting of scanned documents and digitized audio of multiple courses per language – were still a heavily-advertised resource when I visited the Defense Language Institute in Monterey in 2006.

It is nice to see these resources be made available for free. It is also nice to see the progress that has been made not only in technological adaptation of textbook learning materials since these materials were made available (post WW II?).

This, however, comes at a cost. If you shun it, and do not take a course that works which requires (and entitles you to the use of) a textbook, here are easily accessibleviewable learning materials for a large set of languages, including many LCTL: Amharic, Arabic, Bulgarian, Cambodian, Cantonese, Chinese, Chinyanja, Czech, Finnish, French, Fula, German, Greek, Hausa, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Igbo, Italian, Japanese, Kirundi, Kituba, Korean, Lao, Lingala, Luganda, Moré, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbo-Croatian, Shona, Sinhala, Spanish, Swahili, Swedish, Tagalog, Thai, Turkish, Twi, Vietnamese, Yoruba.

The Forums , however seem to indicate that not too many still use these options. The transformation into a (technologically superficially) more modern format here is limited to very few languages and courses (and crashed my web browser).

1. Eva Word Lookup – not listed under the extensions, but run against Wordnet, the lexical database for English – enables you to study your English words in depth. This lookup gives you information organized by the following aspects of your word, linked from  an overview of each word type your search term can belong  to:
1. the coordinate terms (sisters)
2. the derived forms
3. the synonyms/hypernyms (ordered by estimated frequency)
4. the hyponyms (troponyms for verbs)
5. the holonyms, for nouns
6. the meronyms, for nouns
7. sample sentences, for verbs
2. Below is what results look like for example search term “design”: