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. 

Persian Curriculum Design (Advanced)

Startalk Program in Washington DC

June 4, 2012 — June 15, 2012 ~ Residential Program 

In the course of two intensive weeks, this program will help instructors in facing the challenges of the twenty-first century in teaching Persian. This professional development program will include sessions on standards-based curriculum planning, multi-media technology, learner-centered classroom strategies, and second language acquisition theories, as well as familiarity with assessment tools. Applications are accepted from novice and experienced instructors of Persian. Familiarity with Standards-based language teaching preferred. A limited number of stipends ($500)  will be available to applicants, and accommodation available for out of town participants.

DEADLINE: April 30, 2012

To apply, please fill out the application here, and email your CV to  persian@gwu.edu. Please forward any inquiries to persian@gwu.edu, or call for inquiries: Professor Pardis Minuchehr at  (202) 994-7948.    

1. This exam file has been authored with the Sanako Study 1200 TBA:authoring tool. It is displayed from  the Sanako tutor application:
   1. images on a projection screen connected to the teacher computer,
   2. aural portion through the tutor-controlled Sanako student player and headsets. 
2. To protect the integrity and allow for reuse of the exam, only the initial instruction, example and collection of the results of an exam with visual cues are shown in this screencast.

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):

“The Penn Center for Foreign Language Teaching and Learning with Technology (PLC) will host the second STARTALK Excellence in Leadership Summer Institute at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. For each of the languages (Chinese, Dari, Hindi, Swahili, Turkish and Urdu), the Summer Institute invites no more than five participants for each language group. These participants must hold positions as principals, supervisors of world language and/or language program directors who wish to implement curricular changes, employ pedagogically-sound applications of technology and gain leadership know-how in an effort to strengthen, expand and solidify their respective programs. These leaders will become STARTALK multiplicators who in turn will promote and implement programmatic and curricular changes. The program of the Summer Institute is designed for Leader-Teachers to:
 
•      gain leadership know-how
•      strengthen existing programs
•      expand and solidify programs
•      discuss current pedagogical trends in language education
•      promote and implement curricular changes
•      endorse lasting efficacy of robust learning outcomes
•      practice pedagogically-sound applications of technology
•      engage in succinct field building opportunities
 
Applications are due May 1, 2012.  To apply and for information about travel and accommodations, please visit our website at:
 
http://www.plc.sas.upenn.edu/elsi2012/Application.html”

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.