Archive
Posts Tagged ‘news’
Scraping RSS of online actualités for language learning materials production
2013/03/24
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- The capability of RSS-news feed integration of foreign language news may be standard now in most LMS, but was not in 2002 (not even having an LMS was standard, I had to build my own while it took the university a few more years to adopt Blackboard as I had recommended in 2000):
- But RSS-feed display is skin-deep and, even in extensive-reading pedagogies, not sufficient for integration into teaching and learning which requires more post-processing.
- At a recent Digital Humanities Unconference, I was asked how I had “scraped” (RSS-scraping was chosen since it easier than screen scraping, for RSS is devoid of most markup, as long as it validates) into a SQL-server database. Here are some code-snippets to get you
- from the web
- into the database:
- The scraped plain text in the database can form the foundation for post-processing for SLA-purposes, see e.g. glossing for reading comprehension facilitation or question generation with the trpQuizConverter for
- from the web
Categories: Reading, service-is-learning-materials-creation, service-is-programming
2003, c#, news, rss, SQL, vs.net
How to use archive.org’s US-English news collection as a language learning corpus with QUIK-like speaking samples
2012/09/25
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- Much of TV news nowadays seems to amount to not much more than a constant stream of sound bites – however, exactly this brevity,
- the large archive and simple search interface:
- the research/browsing capabilities visible on the left here, including the varied sources – of which Arabic and French and other European TV likely provide a somewhat different perspectives on Edward Snowden –
- and the caption-like transcription, make it all the more accessible for intermediate learners of English.
- video clips of only 30 seconds length is hardly enough for instruction, however, you can have students work with corpus-QUIK-like spoken samples, and have them string a news history together if you design webquest-like research assignments – with the major added benefits, that this corpus is spoken and trains listening.
- For more background info on archive.org’s transcribed TV news, consult this NYTimes article.
Categories: Corpus-linguistics, e-languages, English, learning-materials, Listening, websites
archive.org, news, spoken, tv