Yoruba | Thomas' Work Space

Foreign Language Character Input on Windows 7 in the LRC

2012/08/16 plagwitz 1 comment

The LRC, now on Windows 7, is testing Carly J. Born’s U.S. International Extended 2.0 Keyboard, an improvement on the previously used US International Keyboard (still recommended for personal use, as it comes standard with all but ancient versions of Windows) for typing accented characters in Western languages, Pinyin-tone-marks for Mandarin (replacing the also useful, but more evolved Pinyinput), and other SLA tone- and length-marks e.g. for Latin.
Not limited to specific application, you can use anywhere in Windows the following shortcut’s – taken from the original developer documentation (with some minor modifications).
We hope you find the benefit for SLA far outweighs the need to getting used to typing a space between the 2 red characters and a vowel, in order to produce their regular form, without creating a foreign language character.

acute accent, pinyin 2nd tone	apostrophe (= ‘), vowel	(e.g. á é í ó ú)
grave accent, pinyin 4th tone	grave (= `), vowel	(e.g. à è ì ò ù)
c cedilla	comma apostrophe, c	(e.g. ç)
macron accent, pinyin 1st tone	hyphen, vowel	(e.g. ā ē ī ō ū )
vowel with umlaut	double-quote (= “), vowel	(e.g. ä ë ï ö ü ÿ)
vowel with circumflex	shift+6 (= ^), vowel	(e.g. â ê î ô û)
pinyin 3rd tone	Shift+5, vowel	(e.g. ǎ ě ǐǒǔ)
ü with pinyin tones	Accent, double-quote	(e.g. ǖǘǚǜ)
letter with tilde	tilde (= ~), letter	(e.g. õ ñ ã)
letter with dot below	shift+period, letter	(e.g. ạ ẹ Ẹ ị ọ ụ)
letter with double acute	shift+; , o or u	(e.g. ő, ű, Ő, Ű)
«	ctrl + alt + [
»	ctrl + alt + ]
€	ctrl + alt + 5
ß	ctrl + alt + s/right-ALT + s
ø	ctrl + alt + l	[won’t work in word, onenote, but works in excel]
¿	ctrl + alt + /
¡	ctrl + alt + 1	[To type ¡, disable the command called ApplyHeading1 in the Format category, in word or onenote, but not needed in excel]
œ	Right alt + k

Categories: documentation, French, German, Italian, Latin, Mandarin, Operating-system, Polish, Portuguese, Presenter-Computer, Spanish, Student-Computers, Swahili, Yoruba Tags: extended, FAQs, foreign-language-character-input, keyboard, pinyin, us-international

Making audio cues for model imitation/question-response oral exams with Sanako Study 1200

2012/06/28 plagwitz Leave a comment

We can easily record and post-process audio files in the LRC for use with the Sanako Study 1200 oral exam activities.

This can work not only for outcome exams (course- or chapter-wise), but also or formative assessment:

Think converting your textbook-based “drills” into Sanako, like repetitively recapitulating the newly acquired vocabulary item “donut” with different cues:

Example: “What can you do with [student can enter her favorite new vocabulary item for the current class] on [teacher can ask for one social web service after the other that her students likely are familiar with]?”. In response, student has to practice vocabularry item by forming sentences that fit the vocabulary item that fit like in the whiteboard example.

We can add to these recordings the features explained in the slide below.

I’d be happy to play you examples from this slide – and more – in the LRC (not to be published here so that the exam files can be reused).

How the LRC supports Second Language Acquisition (all 4 skills) and testing using computers, and provides requisite documentation and training

2012/06/28 plagwitz Leave a comment

Table of contents for 2 screencasts of a presentation, left screen slides/no audio, right screen/speaker audio – best viewed side-by-side.

Time in LRC-report-speaker	Time in LRC-report-slides	Topic	Subtopic
	0:00	Overview of LRC activities
0:00	0:40	SLA reading
0:02	1:10	SLA writing
1:00			high-stakes quiz screencast: http://goo.gl/AaGrK
3:40			Movie caption exercise generation using NLP
5:45	2:35	SLA listening	Text-to-speech Deskbot
7:15	4:00		example of time-stretched audio
10:00	10:10	SLA speaking	Moodle Kaltura for webcam recordings homework assignments
12:30			Sanako oral exams
	15:00		Example of oral exam material
16:40	15:45	Classroom management systems
27:15			Outlook: LRC as proficiency assessment/testing center, outreach/service to high schools
	16:40		Example of oral proficiency exam
28:30			Needed additions: video streaming to students, video recordings from students
30:10		Question period
30:10			LRC media repositories
33:30		Infrastructure work:	Year1:Ghost+imaging
33:35			Year2:LRC calendars (room reservation, equipment circulation, staff timetabling)
34:25			Outlook: things that need to be fixed in LRC calendars
39:25
39:45	19:45	LRC Blog
39:45			Querying tags and categories
45:00			tags, categories, RSS feeds displayed in internet explorer tag display,
55:20			Using tags/categories searches of the LRC blog in training teachers and students
57:25		Q:TOEFL, AP exams and other oral proficiency assessment –
58:45		Webcape placement exams and other written exam in the LRC
59:30		Q:Concurrent exam scheduling	Sanako has no scheduling system to allow a limited number of users to take an exam simultaneously (but it prevents users beyond the licensing seats to use the Sanako, including for exams), Scheduling plug-ins seem to be available for Moodle.
61:40			Outlook: Need more licenses for the Sanako to match the UNCC class size

Spring 2012 Faculty Workshop II: Oral Proficiency testing with Audacity/Sanako

2012/04/30 plagwitz Leave a comment

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.
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
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

Protected: Sanako Study 1200 Final oral exam for advanced Business Spanish: A Job interview

2012/04/19 plagwitz Enter your password to view comments.

Protected: Spring 2012 Faculty Workshop I: How to ease your end-of-term oral assessment burden with the help of the LRC Moodle Kaltura and Sanako Study 1200 oral assessments

2012/04/06 plagwitz Enter your password to view comments.

Independent study with free language learning materials from the FSI?

2012/03/22 plagwitz Leave a comment

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).

Categories: Absolute-Beginner, Arabic, Beginner, e-languages, French, German, Greek (modern), Hindi, Italian, Japanese, Korean, learning-materials, Listening, Polish, Portuguese, Reading, Russian, service-is-evaluating-learning-tools, Spanish, Swahili, Yoruba Tags: fsi

I2speak.com: Web-based IPA Keyboard

2012/02/23 plagwitz Leave a comment

The Sciweavers Team announces http://www.i2speak.com: “an online Smart IPA Keyboard that lets you quickly type IPA phonetics without the need to memorize any symbol code. For every Roman character you type, a popup menu displays a group of phonetic symbols that share the same sound or shape beneath typed character. Use arrow keys to select the proper symbol then hit the Enter button. I2Speak also supports the following features:

1. The Sampa English Keyboard lets you type English phonetics using Roman characters according to SAMPA (Speech Assessment Methods Phonetic Alphabet) rules.

2. The IPA English Keyboard provides you with a full English phonetics keyboard. Press the symbol of interest using a suitable input device.

3. You can type directly on your physical keyboard or on the virtual on-screen keyboard using a suitable input device such as mouse or touch screen device.

4. You can change the keyboard symbols by selecting another layout from the list box located above the virtual keyboard.

5. For every keyboard layout, more symbols can be displayed by pressing the CAPS Lock.

6. When you hover the mouse over an English phonetic button, a slick tooltip will show some example English words.

7. You can save typed phonetics as an MS-Word file by clicking the Save button, copy them to clipboard using the Copy button, or post them to Twitter, Facebook, etc. by clicking the desired button.”