Vocabulary-related links

Five links to online resources related to vocabulary development are below.  We have looked at all of these together in class:

- The Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary
- The Oxford Collocations Dictionary
- The Academic Word List Highlighter
- Google Fight
- Wordle

Graduate Diploma Week One : Suggested Sources for Reading Diaries

The Economist, Financial Times, and New Scientist websites are good sources of texts for students to use for reading diaries. Articles you might find interesting from the Economist website right now are:

• Hot spots and blind spots : The mounting human costs of Japan's nuclear disaster.
• Not just rubies and polyester shirts : an article about the Indian economy
• Now is the time - an article about "women and the Arab awakening"

And from New Scientist (which isn't just for scientists):

• Drowning a sea of misinformation - about problems that museums face
• Cops on trail of crimes that haven't happened - about some computer software designed to identify places where crimes might be committed

You could also visit the BBC, Guardian, Independent, or Telegraph websites for current news stories.  The Guardian, for example, has a story about how rents in Britain have become unaffordable for many families and a bizarre tale of a man who somehow managed to use a shark as a surfboard.

Reading lists from the university module directory are also a good indicator of the types of texts students need to deal with in their postgraduate studies.  For more general news from the University,Essex Quarterly is an interesting publication with short articles, primarily about research conducted at the university.

Error correction : choosing the active or passive voice

The problems in the following examples relate to your choice of either the passive or active voice for your verb phrases.  Can you identify the problems and suggest corrections as comments below?

1. The Olympic Games with its long history has always been attracted by people as an entertaining and social event

2. 44,000 women diagnosed with breast cancer annually in the UK

3. Protein foods are advised to be included in your breakfast since it provides sustained energy and takes longer to digest

4. Skipping breakfast become an issue to be widely discussed

5. missions are always taken place in the most difficult situations.  

6. it is not justified for the government to provide more funding for dementia

Error correction : referencing

Can you see any problems with the following examples from your writing?  Look for examples of ACCORDING TO in an article you are reading for your project and tell me (via comments below) what you think is wrong with these examples.  How would you correct them?

1. According to (Essex Quarterly, 2011) over 44,000 women diagnosed with breast cancer annually in the UK, while 12,500 women die every year from the disease.

2. According to the research published in Essex Quarterly, the study was conducted on more than 4,000 children by looking at key factors contributing to their general health included weight and physical activity.

3.According to “fighting the demon of dementia”, the author states that 820,000 people in the UK suffer from dementia and the number will increase to one million in 2025 and two billion in 2050.

New Month, New Season...same old mistakes?

In class we looked at noun phrases and collocations.  In terms of collocations, we decided identified some good, bad, and funny expressions, but with some correction we arrived at the following beautiful examples:

- provide Halal chicken monthly

- repair a badly broken camera

- desperately need unconditional love

- ask a terrible question

- smell fresh flowers

- found an international organisation

- decorate a Christmas tree

- boycott drive-through McDonalds

- punish a (not particularly) smart thief

We also attempted to correct some collocation errors from your writing.  Can you suggest any better alternatives than the following?  Write your suggestions as comments underneath:

1. Go through a challenge
2. Opinionated questions
3. Manage harder
4. Wrong habitual eating styles
5. Very necessary
6. Before I received my first child
7. Less quality alternative
8. Make more research

From the sewers of Paris to polished complex sentences

 

TASK ONE:

Nineteen rings and three sets of earrings were dug up from a drain.

The drain was at a house.

The house is in a suburb.

The suburb is called Seine-Saint-Denis.

The suburb is a working-class area.

One of the pairs of earrings has a value of £14m.

All of this information comes from the police.

CREATE A COMPLEX SENTENCE (aim for 31 words)

TASK TWO:

Nine people were charged over the robbery.

The house belonged to a person.

The person was one of the robbers.

CREATE A COMPLEX SENTENCE (aim for 13 words)

TASK THREE:

The Harry Winston boutique is on a street

The street is off the Champs-Elysées Avenue

The Champs-Elysees Avenue is dotted with fashion houses.

The Champs-Elysees Avenue is dotted with cafes.

CREATE A COMPLEX SENTENCE (aim for 20 words)

Post your answers as comments below and I will get back to you...

Complex sentence exploration : relative clauses

All of the following sentences were given to me as examples of relative clauses.  Leave a comment if you think any of them DO NOT contain a relative clause:

1. The importance of information technology (IT), especially of the World Wide Web, in tourism has increased tremendously over the past years.
2. The former wanted the convention amended to oblige states to submit nomination lists containing candidates from both sexes.
3. Each Convention Party nominates three candidates, whom it considers satisfy the criteria for office laid down by Article 21 of the Convention.
4. What is new is the accelerating speed with which it occurs and the growing outreach of its implications.
5. The information from the contracting parties disclosed that only three had legislation requiring egalitarian representation of both sexes in their highest courts.
6. Each Convention Party nominates three candidates, whom it considers satisfy the criteria for office laid down by Article 21 of the Convention.
7. They are only true about the teachers I have interviewed and the high school classes I have observed.

Complex sentence exploration : miscellaneous

Students found some interesting complex sentences in their reading.  Some were difficult to categorise, and some were just plain difficult.  Read the 5 examples below, and leave a comment telling me a) what types of complex structure you find in each sentence, and b) if you think any of these sentences are particularly difficult to understand.

1. Nowhere in the convention is it stipulated that one candidate belonging to the sex which is under-represented in the court must feature in the list.
2. Several protestors, former Conservative voters, declared themselves as having been “pushed to the left” by their experiences.
3. Others mentioned the issue of live exports as only one of the reasons why they felt they had to be there.
4. Foreign language educationalists and cultural linguists believe that foreign language learning cannot occur properly unless the socio-cultural aspect of the foreign language is learnt simultaneously because the mere acquisition of linguistic competence is not enough.
5. This study also hypothesizes that raising high school EFL teachers’ awareness of the autonomous and ideological concepts of communicative competence is likely to help them see their teaching activities lean towards the autonomous model of communicative competence.

Complex sentence exploration : wh- noun clauses

I'm finding it hard to forget Hakan's "it's a mystery; why?", but in class we produced some good examples of wh- noun clauses like "It's a mystery why nobody likes English food" and "Everybody knows who won the women's world cup this year".  Look at the following examples students found in their reading texts, and leave a comment if you think any are NOT good examples of wh- noun clauses:

1. Most of the problems organizations face today when designing and implementing online strategies stem from trying to fit everything into existing structures and models.
2. The assembly decides to investigate at national and European level what obstacles currently exist to the nomination of women candidates, what measures could be taken to encourage female applicants, and to consider setting targets for achieving greater gender equality in the composition of the court.
3. Empirical data on how these camps affect…
4. The primary issue for the Grand Chamber was whether the questions posed were within its Advisory Opinion jurisdiction
5. The participants were male and non-native speakers of English, two of whom had a BA degree and one had an MA degree in TEFL.

Complex sentence exploration : To

In class, we looked at sentences like "I came here to study" and "Shatha came to the UK to perfect her English" as examples of infinitive clauses.  "To study" and "to perfect her English" explain the purpose of the main clause of the sentence.  My students found lots of examples in their reading, but not all of them are quite the same.  Have a look at the following examples I was sent:

1. Organizations continue to broadcast information instead of letting the consumer interact with the Web site content.
2. Online advertising offers the opportunity to precisely target an audience to deliver advertisements that are customized to the user’s particular interest and taste.
3. Nominees to the full-time court are asked to submit standardized CVs and be interviewed by members of a sub-committee of the parliamentary assembly.
4. A key element of the resolution was the Parliamentary Assembly’s desire to increase the proportion of female judges on the court.
5. The protestors should join us in attempting to persuade other European publics and governments to abandon these cruel practices.

I think that sentence 2 is a very different example to all the others.  Can you see why?  Please post your suggestions below as comments.

Complex sentence exploration : a challenge

Canan found this sentence in the article she read for her presessional project:


In 2004, the Grand Chamber held that a request for an Advisory Opinion concerning the status of the complaints system set up by members of the Commonwealth of Independent States, following the collapse of the former USSR, to which some parties to the ECHR belong, fell outside the Court's jurisdiction.

I count 50 words in there.  Can you find a longer, more complex sentence than this?  Please copy and paste it as a comment...

Error correction

Can you correct any of the following sentences?  Leave a comment with your suggestions!

1. I attempted to figure out what is the average amount of money in our pockets.  Therefore, I must ask all my classmates about how much they have in their wallet.
2. The answer of these questions lead to determine who is the laziest person
3. Students in the class have nearly the same answer
4. The biggest amount of sleep was 8 hours daily according to MeeMee’s answers
5. Someone who is most intelligent in this classroom
6. Souod and Ayman was a top in their school or university
7. He answered my question politically 
8. I tried to find out who is the best cooker in this room
9. He think women is the best in cooking

A Logic Quiz

This arm-chair logic test is not too taxing, but my brain exploded after reading the first question on this logic test from Hypography (looks too much like maths to me).

Welcome New Presessional Students

Hello and welcome to all the new presessional students at the IA. Please feel free to browse my blog and let me know if you have any comments or questions.  It would be great if one or two of you started your own blogs...send me a link you decide to do so.

Have a look at one some of the continuing presessional students have produced in the past five weeks, and join in!

CALL Session 5

BLOG FEEDBACK : WORDS, PATTERNS AND COLLOCATIONS

A good dictionary, a collocations dictionary, and perhaps even a thesaurus may help you to find better alternatives to these 9 expressions:

1. ATM Skimming has made me lost thousands of pounds

2. It was borrowed by somebody to studied it

3. share these students their academic achievement.

4. I lost the the hope to find the book

5. my mentors Mark and Sandra

6. my colleagues in Lab class

7. a lunch party in my tower's flat

8. face with a serious problem

9. press your password

BLOG FEEDBACK SENTENCE CORRECTION

Check our comments on your blogs for suggestions on how to correct these sentences.  You can also refer to an online resource like The Internet Grammar of English, produced by University College London.

1. Finally, after might be 15 minute I was ready to live with my book, and thinking how simple it was.

2.ATM skimming is a kind of credit card fraud by using hi-technology.

3. To sum up, These steps are what we should aware of it when we use the ATM machine, and It seems like that we might not be able to avoid this problem, and it has been a serious problem in our society because some people are still using advanced technology illegally.

4. When I went there I saw strange lift at there.After which I went to third floor and I searched but Idid not fund it.

5. Being specialist in phonlogy and i need to do researches in this regard i chose book about acoustic sounds to have look about it .

6. It was not the first time that I go to the library where I went to the Library with my friend who study at university 

7. So I asked Mark about it where went us again to the shelf and looked for it 

8.Because of our different nationality, so it was the first international party

9. Most of all food were prepared by Arisa (thank you Arisa!). 

10. I prepared some Thai Food to share and the rest dished were cooked in the kitchen by a Super Chef from Japan (Naoko) and a Head Chef from Thailand (Great).

Further error correction tasks:  You can complete an MS Word-based correction task (download the task and the instructions), or find and correct the mistakes below.  There will be a huge reward for the first person to post (as a comment or on their own blogs) or email perfect versions of everything you find:

When you've had enough of error correction, we can move on to email etiquette!

Try this online quiz with a partner.

Speaking Class Task Text

As a mini group project, PS Class 1 were set the task of adding grammar to the following text:


I sympathize most with boy, because I can imagine do same things he do if I be his situation.  other words, if I have girlfriend who sleep with another man  £500, I find it impossible forgive her.  I feel sorry her, though.  She do what she do for right reasons, but I think if she truly love her boyfriend, she know how much her action upset him.  I no can make up my mind about friend.  If my friends know something important my relationships then I want them tell me.  However, if friend keep quiet, boy and girl no split up and they still be happy now.  Also, if I be friend, I no think I be able to tell boy what really happen.  I consider boatman and rich man be quite similar because they both take advantage girl’s situation.  I no can sympathize rich man because I never ask woman sleep me in exchange money.  boatman no seem so bad because “he only do his job” and if he take girl other island for free, then everyone else expect same treatment and his business collapse.  However, he no show any compassion and only see her situation in financial terms, so I no can respect him.

CALL Session 4

Since I wrote my last blog post (read it here now if you haven't already done so), several students have produced last-minute homework, and now most of the presessional blogs are looking good.  Not everyone has written about their library experiences yet, but Sultan and Turki have both done so in an interesting narrative style, and Great has hidden a sentence about the library within a very informative (and worrying) post about fraud at cash machines. 


In today's CALL session, the plan is as follows:


1. Complete the online quiz to test your knowledge of how to use the Albert Sloman library.


2. Explore the university's myskills pages and write a blog post about your experience.  You should answer the following four questions:


- Which skill did you choose to focus on and why?  
- What tasks did you complete?  
- What did you learn from the tasks?  
- Would you recommend the task to your classmates?


3. Read each other's blogs about myskills and ask questions or make comments about anything you find particularly interesting.


4. Error correction tasks.  You can complete an MS Word-based correction task (download the task and the instructions), or find and correct the mistakes below.  There will be a huge reward for the first person to post (as a comment or on their own blogs) or email perfect versions of everything you find:

BLOG FEEDBACK : WORDS, PATTERNS AND COLLOCATIONS

A good dictionary, a collocations dictionary, and perhaps even a thesaurus may help you to find better alternatives to these 9 expressions:

1. ATM Skimming has made me lost thousands of pounds

2. It was borrowed by somebody to studied it

3. share these students their academic achievement.

4. I lost the the hope to find the book

5. my mentors Mark and Sandra

6. my colleagues in Lab class

7. a lunch party in my tower's flat

8. face with a serious problem

9. press your password

BLOG FEEDBACK SENTENCE CORRECTION

Check our comments on your blogs for suggestions on how to correct these sentences.  You can also refer to an online resource like The Internet Grammar of English, produced by University College London.

1. Finally, after might be 15 minute I was ready to live with my book, and thinking how simple it was.

2.ATM skimming is a kind of credit card fraud by using hi-technology.

3. To sum up, These steps are what we should aware of it when we use the ATM machine, and It seems like that we might not be able to avoid this problem, and it has been a serious problem in our society because some people are still using advanced technology illegally.

4. When I went there I saw strange lift at there.After which I went to third floor and I searched but Idid not fund it.

5. Being specialist in phonlogy and i need to do researches in this regard i chose book about acoustic sounds to have look about it .

6. It was not the first time that I go to the library where I went to the Library with my friend who study at university 

7. So I asked Mark about it where went us again to the shelf and looked for it 

8.Because of our different nationality, so it was the first international party

9. Most of all food were prepared by Arisa (thank you Arisa!). 

10. I prepared some Thai Food to share and the rest dished were cooked in the kitchen by a Super Chef from Japan (Naoko) and a Head Chef from Thailand (Great).

Presessional Week 4

I thought that men were supposed to be more interested in technology than women, but the moment, the pre-sessional blogosphere is being dominated by female students.  Tamami was the first student to write about last week's experience in the library and she wins my blog-of-the-week award because she's also written a very good summary of an article that she read (several students haven't even written ONE yet).


Still on the subject of female-authored blogs, Arisa's blog is now full of an interesting mixture of writing and images.  If you're interested, compare Arisa's version of her birthday party with Miri's.  Can you find any differences?


Of the male students, only Ahmad and Ghalib have updated their blogs in the past week.  You can read their latest posts here and here respectively.


There's another quiz for you this week, but you need to complete it with a partner.  The aim of the quiz is to review your knowledge of the university library system, and if you look hard enough, you can find most of the answers on the University website.  Click here for the quiz, and try to be the first team of students to score 100%

mySkills

Blog Feedback Quiz

While reading your blogs, I've been collecting examples of language that could be improved (through attention to grammar and vocabulary or just punctuation and spelling), and I've used these examples (from YOUR writing) to create a quiz.  Click on the image to go to the quiz...it's multiple-choice and I hope that the instructions are clear.  Make sure that you read the feedback given after you answer each question.  I've provided links to online resources to explore various language issues further. If you have any problems, just ask.

Presessional Blog Project

A week has passed since we invited presessional students to set up their own blogs.  The aim is to use these blogs as a starting point for online self-study, and we hope that it will encourage a useful process of extended reading and frequent writing.  In seven days, it is clear that some students have spent more time developing their blogs than others, but we can at least see that MOST students have completed their homework (finding a text to read and posting a summary of it online). 


Tamami was the first to post a summary, and her writing is very good (click here if you'd like to read it).  Note that she starts with a sentence to show what she read and she provides a link so that we can read it if we want to.  Turki also begins his summary well, by referring clearly to the writer and title of the text that he read.  Ahmad, Ghalib, and Mohammad all chose very interesting texts to read, but they need to adapt their writing to make it clear that their posts are summaries.


Sandra and I are leaving comments on blogs to encourage students to make improvements to their writing.  It's easy to edit anything you post on your blog, so you can go back and change or rewrite sections that you'd like to improve.  Let me know if you need any help doing this.  If you do make changes, you'll see the benefits as your writing improves.  Sultan has been working hard to make improvements to his summary, and already we can see progress with his writing.


We're not just interested in the way that you improve one summary, however.  Personally, I'm keen on seeing you develop the PROCESS of writing, and my comments reflect this.  Don't stop at one summary.  Find something else to read, and then produce a new post to summarise the main point of what you read, where you found it, and what you find interesting or surprising about it.  Keep your posts short, but concentrate on the quality of what you have written.  Last week, some of you wrote your first posts very quickly, but didn't pay any attention to spelling, punctuation, or small mistakes.  Miri and Turki, however, devoted time and energy to making their writing as clear as possible.  Look at their posts from last week, and you'll see how effective writing can be when the writer has taken care over it.


It's not compulsory, but there are things that you can do to make your blogs attractive and lively.  It didn't take Great long to find out how to embed videos from Youtube in his Blog.  You can add videos to your own blogs and ask readers to comment on them (I'm sure you can find a better song that Great did though!)  Saqer deserves an award for the number of links that he's added to his sidebar, although they might look even better if they were all in one place.


Finally, I'd like to nominate Arisa's blog as my "blog of the week".  I'm very impressed that she has managed to include a pun in her blog's name, and she's done a good job with both the content and design of her online space.  The picture above is a screencap of Arisa's blog.  Click on it to see the page itself.


I hope that you'll continue to develop and post to your blogs.  The more that you read and write, the better your reading and writing will become.  Any reading and writing that you do now is going to help you in the future...happy blogging!

Economist Editorial on AV

I read this editorial on the Economist Website and then copied and pasted the text into the Academic Wordlist Highlighter.   The Highlighter identified the following items from my article as belonging to the Academic Word List:

alternative, clarity, concentrated, constitutional, constitutional, contributed, disproportionately, economist, eliminated, estimates, fundamental, ideological, indicated, issue, items, labour, majority, minority, norm, plus, previous, proportion, proportional, redistributed, redistribution, regional, secure, secures, seek, selected, series, topics, undertaken, unique, version

How many of these words do you know? I was surprised to find so many, although I can see that some words may not really BELONG in this list.  For example, in the context of the Economist article, LABOUR refers to a political party, not to work.  I've added some dictionary definitions as links to words that I think might be useful to learn.

When I felt that I understood the article, I wrote this:

MY SUMMARY

This Thursday, the 5^th of May, the UK is holding a referendum in which the public will be asked to vote on whether or not to change the voting system.  In an editorial published on the 28^th of April 2011, The Economist argues that the alternative voting system on offer (AV) is unsuitable and undesirable.

According to The Economist, the current voting system, known as “First Past The Post” (FPTP) is  simple and clear but not particularly fair.  The Economist supports this claim by pointing to the fact that the Liberal Democrats received almost 25% of all votes in the 2010 General Election, but under FPTP, won less than 10% of the seats in parliament.

Despite seeing flaws in FPTP, however, The Economist believes that AV will not deliver the changes that are needed.  Although the success of the AV in Australia is outlined, The Economist claims that benefits of the system are exaggerated and that it is not nearly as fair as a third system, proportional representation.  

168 words!  Any comments???

Setting up your own blog

Click here for instructions on how to set up your own blog, and here to view an example of a self-study blog.

It's a little fast, but the following Youtube clip takes you through all the steps involved in setting up a blog on Blogger.  Use the pause button whenever you need to!

Physics of the riderless bike

from http://www.sciencefriday.com

Example learning blog

As a starting point for a blog project with this year's Pre-sessional students, I've prepared the following blog as an example of an online learning journal. It's up to students to make of it what they wish, though...

And more IATEFL Videos

More IATEFL Vidoes

IATEFL Videos

Materials for practice timed-writing exercise : meat-eating

Link to Time Magazine Article

OF WHICH?

I received the following question from a student, which I'll respond to below:

 

I quoted the following sentences from Guardian, though, I could not understand what the expression "of which" means here

 

"There's the predictable slew of buzz-building reports overnight, the most unlikely of which comes from the usually infallible" and on other occasion " Apple will also add a few surprises, the most dramatic of which would be retinal display.

 

And this from comments " the only value of which is the capacity to store all my music"

 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/pda/2011/mar/02/ipad2-apple-steve-jobs

 

MY RESPONSE: Good question.  Let's answer it in two stages:

 

Firstly, the purpose of WHICH in these examples is to join together two sentences. So:

 

I found an interesting article. I would like to ask you a question about the interesting article.

 

becomes

 

I found an interesting article WHICH I would like to ask you a question about.

 

So far so simple, but, here's the second stage of my answer.  What if one of the sentences we want to join has a preposition?

 

I saw a horrible clip on Youtube.  In the clip, an owl gets injured at a football match.

My grandfather had six brothers.  Five of my grandfather's brothers fought in the  Second World War.

 

become

 

I saw a horrible clip on Youtube in which an owl gets injured at a football match.

My grandfather had six brothers, five of whom fought in the  Second World War.

 

Note that the preposition is attached to WHICH in the relative clause.  When we attach a preposition to WHO, it becomes WHOM

 

So, in your examples:

 

"There's the predictable slew of buzz-building reports overnight, the most unlikely of which comes from the usually infallible" and on other occasion " Apple will also add a few surprises, the most dramatic of which would be retinal display.

 

= There's the predictable slew of buzz-building reports overnight. The most unlikely of the reports comes from the usually infallible…(I suspect that what comes next is the source of the report)

and: Apple will also add a few surprises. The most dramatic of the surprises would be retinal display.

 

Your second example tells me why you found it difficult to understand.  You have clipped out the important part of the sentence that WHICH refers to:

 

And this from comments " the only value of which is the capacity to store all my music"

 

I had a look by myself and found this:

 

I'd much prefer a 128GB iPhone. Then I could finally retire the iPod Classic, the only value of which is the capacity to store all my music.

= I could finally retire the iPod Classic.  The only value of the iPod Classic is the capacity to store all my music.

 

Does that make sense?

 

 

Jared Diamond : Why Societies Collapse

How and Why videos

Why is the Sky blue? (US)



Why is the Sky blue? (UK)



How do the tides work?

Exemplification : A Hot Potatoes Quiz

Click here for an ugly-looking Hot Potatoes Quiz I made as a form of feedback on student writing.