English | Thomas' Work Space

Microsoft Contextual Translator

2011/11/14 plagwitz Leave a comment

Certainly an advance over the MS-Word thesaurus (unlike the MS-Word 2007 and up spell check, still not contextual). Does this work at least well enough to serve as a fruitful pedagogical exercise: “Which phrase does not belong in the group?”

Categories: Advanced, audience-is-students, audience-is-teachers, Beginner, e-languages, English, Intermediate, Speaking, websites, Writing Tags: links, thesaurus

MS Universal Language Input Tool offers correction and transliteration on any web page

2011/11/10 plagwitz Leave a comment

Using the UIME, you can “type any language with any keyboard on any web page, using only the Roman characters present on every keyboard.”

And you can install your favorite input language in your web browser, like so:

Categories: Absolute-Beginner, Advanced, Arabic, Beginner, e-languages, English, French, Greek (modern), Intermediate, Japanese, Mandarin, Russian, software, websites, Writing Tags: character-input, ms-uime

Chinese newspapers

2011/10/28 plagwitz Leave a comment

China Daily is the largest Chinese newspaper available in English. It has a variety of versions: here is the version for the US, for cross-cultural learning, while the English version for speakers of Chinese is valuable both for learners of Mandarin and English.
The government-run newspaper People’s Daily has an English version, also with language learner glossing.

Categories: Absolute-Beginner, Advanced, Beginner, English, Intermediate, Mandarin, Media, Near-Native, Reading, websites Tags: newspapers

MS-Bing Dictionary for Chinese learners of English–and vice versa?

2011/10/28 plagwitz Leave a comment

Link: http://dict.bing.com.cn/?ulang=EN-US&tlang=ZH-CN#%3Ahome, powered by Engkoo:
This looks like a pretty evolved learning tool: It has instant suggestions that include usage information and translations.
Rich results that include contextual, parallel web-as-corpus matches in text and text-to-speech (that, on spot-checking, seems barely noticeably computer-generated).

Categories: Absolute-Beginner, Advanced, Beginner, corpora, Dictionaries, English, Intermediate, Listening, Mandarin, Reading, Vocabulary, websites Tags: links, ms-bing.ms-eengkoo

Sample of how students use the foreign language TTS (text-to-speech) in the LRC

2011/10/21 plagwitz Leave a comment

Last week, I noticed this student in the LRC working on a speaking assignment in her SLA class. First, she wrote a draft of her presentation. She then had the Deskbot TTS wizard (in the lower right of her screen) read out the draft to her. She recorded her version, modeling after the Deskbot’s pronunciation. Then she had the Deskbot read out the draft again, to compare with her own recording.

Look for the little guy in the lower right corner of the screen with the cartoon bubble over his head.

I favor the use of the Deskbot TTS (a Windows XP technology) as an easily accessible speaking dictionary, including during face-to-face teaching, when students may otherwise be too shy to make an utterance because they are not sure about the pronunciation of a single word, or even ask the teacher to pronounce it for them. Prosodically, the deskbot TTS leaves many things to be desired. Let’s hope that Windows 7 will enable us to set up more advanced TTS support in the LRC.

Categories: Absolute-Beginner, audience-is-students, audience-is-teachers, Beginner, English, French, German, Intermediate, Italian, Japanese, Korean, learning-usage-samples, Mandarin, Portuguese, Russian, software, Spanish, Speaking, Videos Tags: deskbot, text-to-speech

Speaking/Listening Assessments and Oral Exams: A comparison what the LRC has to offer

2011/09/22 plagwitz Leave a comment

Moodle:
1. I proposed for installing one of the free audio recorder plug-ins into our Moodle, but we are not there yet.
2. However, we do have a new video recording assignment (which is based on Kaltura).
  1. Format: free form, according to your written instructions in the assignment. Students can review and repeat the recording as often as they wish.
  2. The video overhead is minimal since it is streamed, and video is better for authentic language assessments – unless you specifically prepare your students for phone interviews: then just have students step out of the viewing angle of the webcam).
  3. thanks to Moodle, the familiar interface and the underlying LMS support infrastructure, it is easy
    1. for the teacher
      1. to create and assign a video-assignment
      2. to grade it from the gradebook
    2. for the students to take it and submit it.
  4. LRC Support:
  1. Since our PCs have no built-in or added webcam (proposed), we can currently only use our 5 iMacs for Moodle video assignments. Since the MACs do not have headsets (but built-in microphones), the audio quality is not as good as on the PCs. Since 5 seats are not sufficient for class-size activities/exams, it is best to use this as a homework assignment
  2. I list all necessary steps for a video assignment
  3. Additional support is available through the campus Moodle support team.
Sanako
1. Sources
  1. Dual-track comparative recorder:
    1. the teacher can prepare an input track (or provide one live. Preparing is easy, and worth your while, since easily reusable. I can help you)).
    2. the students records on her own track
  2. Pair and group recording:
    1. Sanako makes it easy to pair or form groups of students and to record free-form conversations.
    2. These recordings can be either controlled remotely by the teacher or locally by the user
2. Control
  1. Remote-controlled recording under exam conditions,
    1. responding to a listening cue within a preset (or live) pause in the teacher track
      1. model&imitation: for phonetics and pronunciation exercises,
      2. question&response for a wide variety of activities as commonly used in SLA textbooks and classroom, including practicing grammar structures or vocabulary recently
      3. question&response&model response: the teacher can also include after the pause in the teacher track a model answer for the students to compare their own output to.
    2. automatically saved with student names to be accessed from the teacher office desktop
    3. easy comparative grading using Audacity (see below)
3. User-controlled recording is also possible, using the student recorder in manual operation mode
  1. which has more language learner features (bookmarks, voice graph, dual band recording), and a simpler interface than a full blown audio editor like Audacity (see below).
  2. The task how to save and sent the assignment to the teacher is here left to the user.
4. LRC support:
1. I can help you
  1. creating an audio recording with your content and speaking cues and pauses – using Audacity (see below)
  2. conducting the remote-controlled exam
2. Up to 20 seats can take an oral exam simultaneously, until we get more Sanako licenses. However, we found a way to split classes into 2 halves and have consecutive exams (we can play audio on the other students’ headsets to provide for exam conditions). The LRC main classroom is equipped with 30 seats for 2 consecutive exams with Sanako headsets.
Voicethread is a popular online recorder, especially for educational institutions that have no onsite support.
1. Visual and audio cues can be provided by the teacher.
2. Pairing of students has been attempted via sharing and responding/commenting to the partner’s submission. This is not a realistic conversation.
3. Recordings are stored in the cloud.
4. There is no integration with the SIS (accounts – getting students set up with accounts that can communicate back with the teacher is a challenge) and LMS (the Moodle integration is superficial).
5. Voicethread is not free. The ELTI, however, has a subscription. LCS does not.
6. LRC Support:
  1. We support Voicethread exercises with new and improved headsets.
  2. Help is available through the vendor.
Audacity:
1. for teachers and LRC staff and other language professionals:
  1. best free audio editor, also good for comparative grading. I routinely make my audio exam recordings with Audacity.
  2. LRC support: I have tips and tricks how you can use it in your teaching preparation and grading.
2. for language learners: not the recommended option, since Audacity has not a feature set geared towards language learning nor support for language assessment workflows:
  1. Language learners do no need an audio editor for speaking exercises, they need a recorder. If you are a language learner, it is not pedagogical to be able to technically edit and refine your audio recording. Rather rehearse, reflect on and repeat your audio recording, until you are happy with your language output.
  2. Audacity is too technical: It involves too many steps, options and settings for the students to record, save, export and name the audio and to get it to the teacher, and (if it is not uploaded into a Moodle assignment, which could then be a Kaltura assignment anyway, see above), too tedious for the teacher to manage and grade files.
  3. LRC Support:
    1. If your students are technically inclined, we do have Audacity installed in the LRC.
    2. Your students should not find it difficult to read the documentation. Here are my posts on Audacity.

Categories: Arabic, assessments, audience-is-teachers, e-languages, English, Farsi, French, German, Greek (modern), Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latin, Listening, Mandarin, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Speaking Tags: audacity, audio, oral-exams, sanako-study-1200, voicethread

How a Student takes a Moodle Video Assignment in the LRC

2011/09/22 plagwitz 2 comments

On one of the LRC iMacs, in the Safari web browser (open new window with COMMAND-key+n),
go to your Moodle course, (1) find the video Assignment, read the assignment instructions (what your teacher wants you to record). Then click underneath the (2) button: “Add video Assignment”, to open the (3) submission window:
Note that she will also have to allow the flash player to interact with her webcam first.
If you see no web cam video window, only a black frame, read in.
In the submission window, choose the tab “Webcam” (1), use the dropdown to select the camera hardware (2).
Check the headset microphone audio: The external headset microphone on the iMacs did not work., but now it does, provided you do this: control-click on Flash’s a video preview window (= the window where you see yourself like in a mirror) for the web camera, and click on “settings”.
- Click on the microphone icon :
- Make sure the USB PnP device is selected.
- You can bring up the settings dialogue, make sure the USB PnP device is chosen for audio and CRANK up the microphone input sensitivity! Then, by tabbing (don’t speak yet) on the headset microphone, test the volume levels with the built-in volume meter (should show lots of green bars when you tab). Unlike in the picture, do not choose “reduce echo ”.
Start (3) the video recording.
Afterwards, the student can review (4) her submission.
If you don’t like your first recording, (3) “record” over it and review again with (4) “Play”. If you do this and the video appears frozen, drag the timeline cursor forward to get the re-recorded video to play. If this does not seem to work, you are likely still able to submit your 2nd attempt, just not review it again.
Click through all the “Next”etc. buttons:
2. until you get to the feedback page for the student (caveat: in IE9, the video does not fit into the frame provided on the page).
3. Note, it warns you to be patient now:
LRC support:
1. Depending on your hardware (webcam), software and network support, you can record your language speaking video assignments on any device that has a webcam and a browser that supports flash – and even more devices, if you are willing to post process and upload the video clip.
2. If you run into problems or want to use a tested setup, we recommend using the LRC. Since our PCs have no built-in or added webcam (proposed), we can currently only use our 5 8 iMacs (see LRC Layout, see Classroom Calendar and iMacs Calendar for availability). Our (limited) tests worked better in Safari than Firefox.