On foot and on average

Here is the report we wrote together in this morning's GVD class. I'm looking forward to a Bank Holiday weekend spent reading reports on your own mini-surveys:

A survey was conducted into pre-sessional student journeys to the university. Respondents were asked about the means and duration of travel. The results show that the majority of students commute by bus, while forty percent walk every day. Although methods of transport vary, the journey time of most students is very similar – between 10 and 25 minutes.

There is some debate about the two exceptions to this general rule. Contrary to the claim of one respondent, Al Hosan (2010) argues that it is impossible for anyone to reach room 3.413 within three minutes. Al Khudiry (2010) is similarly sceptical about the estimate of one participant that it takes him 30 minutes to walk from University Quays to the campus.

(If you're curious about the image of Lisa Simpson, it's the first image that comes up when you google "sceptical")l

Pre or Post?

Yesterday we looked at the question of whether some "prepositions" would be better referred to as "postposition". You can find the Powerpoint presentation here, and if you're interested in Louis Vuitton (I'm not even going to check my spelling of that) or elderly people playing Wii fit, you can read the relevant stories in full via the following links:

- Researchers look into how Nintendo Wii Fit can help elderly fallers

- the BBC's version of the Wii fit story

- Welcome to the House of Vuitton

We also found out that people from Jeddah are more intelligent than everyone else in the world put together (proof, if you need it, is inavailable in the form of this series of games of noughts and crosses) and that nobody knows why the Riyal is called the Riyal, or indeed why it briefly became very valuable in March (according to the Universal Currency Convertor wesbite)

Prepositions and pattern grammar

This morning, we looked at these conversations as exemplifications of the use of IN, ON, and AT:
1. A telephone conversation.
- Where are you?
- I'm AT the station. I've just arrived. I'll be home in half an hour.

2. Between friends.
- What does your sister do?
- She works for British Airways. She handles customer complaints.
- Right…so where is she based?
- She works IN the airport.

3. A confession.
- Julie, there's something I have to tell you about your father.
- What is it mother?
- Well you know I told you that he worked on an oil rig, and that was why you didn't see him very often…
- Yes…
- Well, I lied…
- No!
- Yes. The truth is…your father is IN prison. He's a murderer!

4. The next day…
- Hello
- Hello!
- Where's Julie?
- Oh, she's not in…she's AT the prison. Visiting her father.

5. Directions
- Where's the pub?
- It's ON the corner of Marylebone Road and Baker Street.

6. Arranging furniture
- Where do you want your TV?
- Over there - IN the corner.

7. Socialising
- Where shall we meet tonight?
- Well, let's meet AT Leicester Square and then move on to Covent Garden for something to eat.

8. Some more socialising
- Are you coming to the cinema tomorrow night.
- Yeah….which cinema?
- The Odeon, Leicester Square.
- OK. I'll be there.
- Cool. See you IN Leicester Square at 8.

For the full ppt file from today's class, click here. You can also download a key to our pattern grammar task here, although it IS included in the ppt.

Textbook and other reading materials

The texts we have used in this week's GVD class are all available in full at The Economist website via the following links:

- Maddison counting
- The Best Books about Language
- Business software: Office Politics


Meanwhile, can you look at this extract from the textbook Passages and give me your opinions on it. Would you like to use this kind of material in class?

Monday Morning Matters

In class this morning we tried to create complex sentences, and for some reason started with the topic of Khaled buying a farm. The following three variations were eventually arrived at:

• - Khaled bought 3 acres of land to build a new house.
• - Khaled bought an £800,000 farmhouse with 3 acres of land.
• - Khaled bought a house costing / which cost / £800,000 on 3 acres of farmland.

You can suggest answers for the rest of this exercise here on the GVD Group 2 Wiki

On the way to completing these sentences, we looked at following issues:

When used as a countable noun, "land" means "country". Apparently, Britain is the land of hope and glory (click here for the song that proves it and then read the comments underneath the video that reflect the sad reality), The USA is the land of opportunity, and Saudi Arabia is the land of many things that couldn't be specified in class.

We use the pattern QUANTITY + OF + NOUN, to create the following expressions:

- 2 packets of cigarettes 500g of flour
- 2 litres of milk
- 3 acres of land

BUY FOR and BUY WITH are both possible, but with different meanings:

- I bought a necklace for my mother.
- I bought a necklace for £10.

- I bought a computer with my sister.
- I bought a computer with my credit card. / I paid for it by credit card.
- I put it on my credit card / I bought it / paid for it on credit.
- I bought a computer with Windows 7

We then shared all sorts of personal information through complex sentences, and Mohammad became very romantic. After spending some time discussing and correcting the sentences that didn't quite express what we wanted them to, we had the following:

I came to England to study at one of the best English universities, but I ended up in Essex instead.

I will stay in England until the 5th of December 2011.
I will stay in England until I have completed my studies / until finishing my studies.
I’m never happy until I meet you. / until 4pm on Fridays.

If I can’t sleep at night I will watch TV.
When I can’t sleep at night, I (might) sometimes watch TV.
If I were you / I would watch TV.
If I can’t sleep at night, I read any book which makes me fall asleep.

I like Colchester more than George Bush does. (does = like Colchester)
I like Colchester more than Southend, but I hate Southend.
(inf. that isn’t saying much)
The only “thing” I like less than Colchester is George Bush.
I like Colchester more than I like George Bush.

I like Colchester more than I dislike it.

It’s a mystery why Nick Clegg agreed to co-operate with / join David Cameron in governing the UK. (an aside to this was the use of SHARE, and we found that you can "Share power with David Cameron", "Share the cost with a friend" and "Share your toys with your sister! ")

Being much younger than my sisters, I had a difficult childhood.
I lived in Leeds from 1993 to 1996 and, being a student, I did not make any friends with the locals.
Being British, I have to pay lots of tax.
Being Libyan, Fadia has to correct her teachers’ spelling and put up with questions like “what do you do in Saudi Arabia”.

Being a student, I have to study hard.
Being an international student, I will do my best.
I will do the best (that) I can.
I will do everything to the best of my abilities.

1.Being a student, I am fed up with having to live with lazy and noisy British undergraduates. (participle clause)
2.I am fed up with being a student. (noun phrase / object) - this is no different to saying, for example, I am fed up with Colchester / Mark / my house.

Being a student, I can take advantage of my student card.

Want to know more about these advantages? Click here...

Reading materials

This week we have looked at extracts three texts, each related in some way to at least one of the subjects GVD Group 2 students will be studying in October. If you would like to read these texts in full, they are available from the following links:

- A Good African tale

- Sustaining computer-mediated communication in university courses

- How English erased its roots to become the global tongue of the 21st century

Happy reading...

Compound Adjectives and Noun Phrases

I suspect that this might only be of interest to one person, but here's a pdf of the ppt slides we looked at today in relation to compound adjective formation. This is also a nice opportunity to copy and paste what we've produced at the beginning of our last two GVD classes.

On Wednesday, GVD group 2 students described themselves as:

• Hard-working students
• Genius students
• Pre-sessional students
• Excellent students
• Lazy students

and tnen:

• a mixture of lazy and hard-working students
• a group of students
• a student group

A sign (I think) of progess, is that this morning we were able to produce this borderline-ridiculous and potentially untrue statement:

This is a wonderful group of extremely beautiful, young, reasonably child-like, successful, intelligent, hard-working Arabic-speaking students who come to university late almost every morning.

We also learnt that Mohammed is a trainee Olympic weight-lifter, but that's another story.

Political Graphology or an Invasion of Privacy?

This morning I mentioned these photographs and notes from the Guardian's website. If like me you've ever felt ashamed at your own handwriting, you might feel better after seeing Nick Clegg's.

Lobby, A Lobby, or The Lobby?

Just a quick post to give you a link to the Economist article on Smoking in Indonesia. Let me know if you find anything surprising about the writer's use of articles. If you're interested, you can also read about the English teacher who got into trouble in Sudan for blasphemy.

GVD Group 2 Self-Study Project

I have set up this wiki so that you can continue to do self-study grammar and vocabulary development in your own subjects and at your own pace. The aim is that we can collaborate on this project and I can give you advice and corrections without taking up any extra time in class. We can of course still look at some of the issues that arise in class. Just let me know what your concerns are, and try to participate as actively as you can.

You'll need to register with pbworks in order to contribute to the wiki, but it's pretty easy to do. Please let me know if you have any questions about how to use the wiki.

If you're wondering what exactly a wiki is, this video from youtube puts it in plain English:



You can access my wiki here.

Collocations

In class this morning we did a little exercise to generate collocations, which we could then analyse and correct. In each case we started with nouns and then tried to add verbs and adjectives. Firstly we came up with the adjectives MAJOR, BASIC, IMPORTANT, CRUCIAL, VITAL, ESSENTIAL, and INFLUENTIAL to collocate with the noun FACTOR (MAJOR, CRUCIAL, and VITAL are all listed in the Oxford Collocations Dictionary). ADDRESS was suggested as verb, but more common collocations are CONSIDER and TAKE INTO ACCOUNT. We came up with some great verbs to collocate with PROBLEM - HAVE, SOLVE, ENCOUNTER, DEAL WITH, and even STUMBLE UPON, but our adjectives (striking, difficult, and sensitive) weren't so good...upon further consideration we decided that SERIOUS was more appropriate. Then Abdullah started talking about FORTY WINKS so we had to move on...

Some nice collocations we produced at speed were:

- CARRY OUT GROUND-BREAKING RESEARCH

- PROTECT AND ENDANGERED ENVIRONMENT

- AN EASY TARGET

- COMMISSION RESEARCH

...but we didn't like these:

- have a public experiment

- study a prolonged study

- invent precise assessment

Do you have any better suggestions?

Universal Grammar Exercise

On Friday morning we did some grammar exercises using this Guardian article on the University of Essex which we had also looked at on Thursday. First I distributed a "de-grammared" version of the text for everyone to amend:

Essex be 1960s university, but it remain small than many its contemporaries, with just over 9,000 students (6,840 undergraduates). They have plenty space roam around university's three campuses – Colchester, Loughton and Southend – with 200 acres of landscaped grounds oldest and largest campus outskirts Colchester. student union invest more than £3m campus past five years and recent open nightclub, follow £1.25m redevelop. £25m Southend campus open spring 2008. £250m capital invest plan involve 30 different projects be current under way. Highlights include £25m student centre Colchester campus and new student accommodate, and studio and perform facilities East 15 act school base Southend campus. Essex boast consistent strong academic perform and rank nine UK quality its research 2008 research assess exercise.

As a class, we then produced the following "re-grammared" version of the text. The two colourful sentences are illustrations of sentence structure, and the horrible greeny-brown coloured words are what we got wrong:

Essex is a 1960s university, but it has remained smaller than many of its contemporaries, with just over 9,000 students (6,840 undergraduates). They have plenty of space to roam around IN the university's three campuses – Colchester, Loughton and Southend – with 200 acres of landscaped grounds in the oldest and largest campus (situated) in the outskirts of Colchester. The student union has invested more than £3m on THE campus over the past five years and recently opened a nightclub, following a £1.25m redevelopment. The £25m Southend campus WAS opened in spring 2008. A £250m capital investment plan involving 30 different projects is currently under way. Highlights include A £25m student centre FOR THE Colchester campus and new student accommodation, and studio and performance facilities at (FOR THE) East 15 acting school based at THE Southend campus. Essex boasts (a) consistently strong academic performance and was ranked ninth in the UK for the quality of its research in THE 2008 research assessment exercise.

In our discussions, we also looked at some particular language points.

1. Patterns with "for"

Khaled was praised for his excellent knowledge of English grammar.

Mohammad received an award for bravery.

2. Followed by vs following

Maha came to class at 10.55, following a coffee break. (1st coffee break, 2nd Maha came to class)

Tjhey opened a nightclub following development.

Maha came to class at 10.55, followed by Muhammed. (1st Maha came to class, 2nd Muhammed did)

They opened a nightclub followed by development.

3. Lists, commas, and the use of and

We can buy many different flavours of crisps. Popular flavours include ready salted, beef,roast chicken,prawn cocktail, salt and vinegar, and cheese and onion

4. Different meanings of BASED

LOCATION

The British government is based in Westminster in London.

INSPIRATION

Baz Luhrman’s 1997 film Romeo and Juliet is based on Shakespeare’s play of the same name.