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...

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.

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???

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...

Exemplification : A Hot Potatoes Quiz

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

Noun phrase construction

Another email exchange to share:

STUDENT QUESTION

this sentence:

Due to the increasingly (adj) globalised (v) business (n) environment (n)....

Why? do you understand my question?

If I want to express the same meaning, I will write like this:

Due to the increasingly global business-environment...

MY RESPONSE

Actually your version is OK. The hyphen between business and environment isn't necessary, but the difference between GLOBAL and GLOBALISED is just that the latter (GLOBALISED) suggests that forces have MADE the world global.

Your analysis of the phrase from the text isn't quite right though:

Due to the increasingly (adv) globalised (adj) business (adj) environment (n)....

We could argue about whether business is an adjective or noun here and it doesn't really matter either way, but GLOBALISED is definitely not a verb. A lot of adjectives in English are formed from the active or passive form of a verb. To me, this is quite useful because it helps you understand their meaning (i.e. whether they are active or passive). Examples include bored, boring, interested, interesting, satisfied, satisfying, and I'm sure you could add hundreds more to my list!

A question about commas

I just thought I'd share this recent email exchange:

Student question

I have a question about "if" and commas.

What is the differet between this two sentences.

1 I would get married, if I were you.

2 I would get married if I were you.

My response:

The comma does make a slight difference. A comma tells a reader to pause, and it separates out parts of a sentence.

Sentence number 1 encourages the reader to stress IF. Stressing IF makes what follows seem less likely, or in this case, emphasises the fact that "I am not you".

There are other occasions when commas will make a much bigger difference to meaning. Can you see a difference between these two sentences:

1. I like student who email me questions about grammar.

2. I like students, who email me questions about grammar.

Sufficient evidence?

Last week I asked my class the following question about this chart (taken from The Economist's Daily Chart online feature) :

Do you think these statements are TRUE or FALSE? Do you have enough evidence to verify each statement?

1. DVDs are cheap in China because they are all illegally copied.

2. The average Polish employee has to work longer than the average Indian employee in order to be able to afford a DVD.

3. DVDs are cheaper in Germany than in India.

4. The best films are made in France.

5. The currency used in Australia is dollars.

6. People in Japan like to watch DVDs.

7. The average US worker can earn enough money in 200 minutes to buy 4 DVDs.

Together we agreed that 2 and 7 are true, 3 is false, and we do not have sufficient evidence to comment on the other 4 statements. The students then wrote statements about other charts. Please comment on whether their statements are true, false, or impossible to comment on without further information.

Big Mac Index

1) In Norway a Big Mac costs 7.02 dollars.

2) The Swiss Franc is overvalued against the US dollar by 75%.

3) In Britain a Big Mac is 9p more expensive than in the USA

4) In Japan the cost of a Big Mac is the same.

5) Chinese currency is least expensive in the chart.

6) USA citizens eat more burgers than the rest of the world .

US Border Control

1. The cost per apprehension of illegal immigrants was steady between 1992 and 2000.

2. The total cost per apprehension of illegal immigrants from 1997 to 200 was as high as in 2008.

3. There was a decline in the cost per apprehension of illegal immigrants for the two years following 2003.

4. The average cost per apprehension of illegal immigrants has been increasing since 1992.

Read-e for the masses

1. The line graph shows the sale of e-books in 2008 and forecasts growth from 2009 to 2011.

2. The sale of e-books will grow substantially from 2008 (1 million) to 2009 (5 million).

3. Between 2009 and 2010, e-book sales will experience an incredible increase from 5 to 12 million, followed by modest growth (to 15 million) in 2011.

Foreign Students in America

1. Do you think the percentage of British people who go to study in America is lower because they have English as their first language as well?

2. The percentage of Spanish students studying in America is higher than the percentage of Indian students.

3. Studying in America is cheaper than in the UK.

4. The country that sends the most students to study in America is China.

5. The American people prefer to receive Italian students than Japanese students.

6. People from Japan do not like to study in America.