Academic Keywords

Since one of my lovely graduate diploma students confessed to being a crossword addict, I thought I'd play with some software called Hot Potatoes to create a crossword made up of words and definitions from page 179 of The Study Skills Handbook : Third Edition by Stella Cottrell.

You can try the crossword out here or on Moodle under the heading "self-study materials". Let me know what you think...

Another week, another set of reading links

A hectic week means that it's Wednesday night and I've only just leafed through last weekend's papers. Here are some links to articles you might find interesting, courtesy of the Guardian, Observer, and New York Times.

Handcuffed, a midwife is led into court. Her crime? Championing home births.

Japan goes from Dynamic to Disheartened

Lara Stone and Georgia Jagger make gap teeth the new face of fashion

Mama Grizzlies lead the Republican hunt for America's angry voters

No country for poor people?

Polls show a nation split as French protest spreads

More suggested reading

I've picked a few stories from the Guardian and New Scientist which might be of interest. From The Guardian:

The big story in economics this week relates to the spending cuts currently being introduced by the Chancellor, George Osborne. You can read about his programme here, and some hostile reaction to it here. Across the Channel in France there are reports of Panic-buying at Petrol Pumps, and much further afield in Mexico, a 20-year-old student has been given a surprisingly high-status job.

Meanwhile, in the New Scientist, this story about company logos and neuroscience might be interesting. There are also stories about how technology can aid research, and how nature can hamper technology designed to save it.

Recording and Learning Vocabulary

Some important considerations when recording and learning new vocabulary:

1. Is it useful? Consider field and register - the Academic Word List Highlighter may help you here.

2. What does it mean? A good dictionary will help you. Try Cambridge's free online dictionaries. There's no problem with using translation to understand basic meaning, but you will still need to consider all the other points here.

3. How can you remember it? This article by Scott Thornbury may be useful.

4. What type of word is it? (adjective, verb, noun, adverb - context and a dictionary will help. If it's a noun, is it countable or uncountable, singular of plural?).

5. How can you use it? Look at the context in which you found it, think about collocation (search The Oxford Collocations Dictionary for help) , and the patterns that it may be used in. Cambridge's free online dictionaries list possible patterns of use under each definition.

6. Does it belong to a FAMILY of words? Finding the word "unilaterally", for example, can open your eyes to "lateral" and "unilateral".

7. Is there anything IRREGULAR about this word / phrase? What do you need to remember about it? Is it a noun with an irregular plural form (e.g. children, people), is it an intransitive verb (if you don't know what "intransitive" mean, check the glossary of the Internet Grammar of English).

8. Can you pronounce it? Again, a good dictionary will give you a phonemic transcription of a word's pronunciation, and online dictionary sites like Cambridge's have sound clips of how to pronounce each word (with British and American variations provided).

Graduate Diploma : Suggested Reading Resources

The Economist and Financial Times 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:

• The Dark Side of Light - on obesity
• A Growing Appetite - on the ambitions of a food company in China
• From Hoarding to Hiring - on how countries can generate employment
• Google's Robocars - on a plan to develop computer-driven vehicles

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.

Compared vs Comparing

In class today we discussed the possible differences between COMPARED and COMPARING, and we came up with the following distinction:

ACTIVE
- Comparing China with the UK, Cheng and YeHui drew up a long list of differences.
- Comparing the shoes in his huge collection, Alexandre spent two hours deciding what to wear.
- Tengiz walked through campus happily singing Kazakh folk songs.

PASSIVE
- Compared to London, Colchester is small.
- Compared to Mark, Sultan is intelligent, charming, and handsome.
- Compared to his childhood ambition of becoming a cosmonaut, Azer’s goal of being elected president of Azerbaijan seems quite reasonable.
- Compared to Hitler, my father was not strict.
- Tengiz walked through campus, followed by an angry crowd of students.

If you fancy trying Google Fight by yourself, you can follow this link. Alternatively, for more serious language exploration, have a look at this website devoted to the Academic Word List.

New Graduate Diploma Group

Today was the first EAP reading & writing session with Graduate Diploma Economics and History students (except without the History student). The following 9 sentences summarise what we found out about each other. Are they all logical?

1. According to Azer, Tengiz is the best at maths in this room because he spent more time as an undergraduate studying maths.

2. Azer claims that he speaks the most languages in this room: four.

3. Chen believes that the strongest ‘man’ in this room might be Mark, because he is the tallest and heaviest person present.

4. After reading each student’s writing from week one, Mark concluded that Azer is the most ambitious individual on the Graduate Diploma course. He came to this conclusion because Azer’s childhood dream was to become a cosmonaut.

5. After interviewing each member of the group, Juelma concluded that the most romantic is Chen, because he likes listening to romantic songs every day, and often watches romantic films.

6. Juelma also claims that the best cook in the room is Azer because he likes cooking every day.

7. Tengiz claims that the most adventurous person in the group is Chen, because he has visited more countries than his classmates / peers.

8. According to Tengiz, the most creative person in the group is Azer. Tengiz came to this conclusion because Azer likes to experiment when cooking.

9. Mark believes that Juelma is the fittest person in the group, because she has never smoked a cigarette.

We also discussed some pattern grammar and collocations issues, including the possible differences between a strong man and a strong woman. Opinions on this are welcome...

Sound familiar?

A little exercise in exploring ideas about intellectual property...is this stealing?

The Chiffons in 1963:



George Harrison in 1970:



Read about the subsequent legal battle here.

There's been no legal dispute, however, been T-Rex, seen here in 1971:

...and "derivative" Oasis, who released this in 1994:

Is there enough of a similarity between this song, written in 1932:

and this 1983 hit:

to justify this?

The Michigan Corpus of Upper-level Student Papers (MICUSP)

A very interesting project involving Upper-Level (A scoring) undergraduate student papers at the University of Michigan has produced this corpus of texts, which looks like to be a very nice teaching & learning resource indeed...

Pattern Grammar

I often find myself using the term PATTERN GRAMMAR when trying to diagnose problems with students' writing, but I wonder if they always understand what I mean by this...I certainly don't think that many other teachers are likely to use the term with them. As far as I can remember, I think that I first heard the term used during a talk by Dave Willis, who wrote a book called Rules, Patters and Words : Grammar and Lexis in English Language Teaching. There's actually a sequence of slides from one of Dave's talks available online here, but I'll try to give my own perspective on things...

My students tend to already know hundreds of patterns without ever having stopped to think about them. When someone learns English, they'll probably realise quite early on that when they use the verb LIKE, they're going to use a noun of some kind straight afterwards (e.g. I like sleeping, I don't like this blog). They'll find the same can apply when they use WOULD LIKE (I'd like a banana sandwich), but when they start talking about plans or aspirations, they need to employ a more complex pattern of words. After all, "I would like a train driver when I'm older" doesn't reflect the ambition "I would like to be a train driver when I'm older". So this is pattern grammar...when you use a particular word, you'll need to know what pattern of prepositions and word forms follows it. The verb GIVE, for instance, can be followed by"me all your money!" and "all your money to me!" but not "for me all your money".

Quite understandably, when a student writes in English, there are going to be some patterns that they need but have not yet learned, and there may be some patterns that they've seen before, but which get forgotten or confused because of the influence of the student's first language. It used to frustrate me that students would produce patterns that they had clearly never seen before in English (and give ME more work to do in correcting their work), but I eventually came to realise that incorrect patterns may be the result of guesswork (perhaps applying a pattern they know for a similar word) or translation. I recently learned, for instance, that in Arabic, the pattern used with CONSIDER is CONSIDER + SOMEONE + AS + SOMETHING, which explains why so many of my Arabic-speaking students insert an unnecessary "as" into expressions with CONSIDER.

So how can we avoid problems with pattern grammar? I would recommend three approaches:

1. Be patient and realistic. Nobody is going to learn the pattern for every English word overnight. Any learner of English will encounter new patterns throughout their life. I know people who are extremely proficient in speaking and writing in English but who still make occasional slips with patterns.

2. Learn patterns when you learn vocabulary items. Any time you learn a new word, check the pattern that follows it. If you write new vocabulary down, write it in the pattern in which you first encountered it. Likewise, if you notice an unfamiliar or surprising pattern while reading, make a note of it and learn it. Do you really know a word until you know how to use it?

3. Use a good dictionary. The Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary online is free and with every definition gives examples of the pattern in which a word may be used. When writing an essay, give yourself sufficient time to check patterns that you are unsure of before submitting your work. If feedback from a teacher indicates problems within particular expressions, identify the key word, look it up in a dictionary, and check the patterns which the word may be used within. A student of mine recently produced the expression "they seek for better opportunities". A quick look at the verb SEEK in the dictionary throws up the examples "seeking jobs", "seeking asylum", and "legal advice should be sought". No "for" anywhere...the pattern is simply SEEK + OBJECT. Easy!

Essex Business School Southend Group

I've uploaded two files that I promised you in the last 24 hours. Clicking here will give you the powerpoint file from Monday's project class, while clicking here will give you the ppt from today's ESP class - complete with audio recordings (you just have to click on the sound icon). Let me know if you have any problems downloading or opening these.

Trustworthiness

According to the Daily Mail, this is the most trustworthy face in Britain. I think it looks like Frank Lampard, and I wouldn't trust him as far as I can throw him...I probably couldn't even lift him up though. The picture comes from this article, but please don't start reading this nasty little newspaper. I found a similar story in this Boston-based publication, and if you want to try an experiment to see how trustworthy your face is, you can have some fun on this TV station's page.

If you are interested in reading more about Nigel Harwood's research into use of "I" in academic texts, you can do so by following this link.

AWL Links

Some AWL links for you to explore:

The AWL Highlighter and Gap-maker

Averil Coxhead's page

Academic Vocabulary Exercises

Collocations Resources

I mentioned some collocations resources in class today and just wanted to copy and paste from previous posts to provide appropriate links...

The Corpus Concordance Sampler can be used to see examples of any word or phrase in native spoken or written English. Type in a word or phrase (you need to put a + sign between each word, eg most+of) to see a sample of uses taken from the Collins Cobuild Corpus (more detailed instructions and explanations can be found here). Look carefully at the results and look for patterns. What words come before and after your target phrase? Do you notice anything that the examples have in common? By analysing the examples you can draw up a list of patterns and learn how to use your target language accurately - like a native in fact! By analysing the differences between two similar words, you might be able to discover important differences in meaning (for example, the difference between ASSURE and ENSURE). What you find through this process can show you more than any dictionary entry, and the fact that you have to spend time observing language and thinking about it means that you should remember it for longer. That's the theory anyway.

Here are some more online resources for you to explore. Let me know if you have any questions about how to use / access any of the sites, and tell me also if you have any particular requests regarding online resources.

Dictionaries
cambridge dictionaries online
longman online dictionary
macmillan online dictionary
oxford dictionary (and the less legal oxford collocations dictionary)

Corpora and Concordancers
collins concordance and collocations sampler
mark davies' british national corpus search
a huge but fairly anonymous concordancing site

GVD Catch-up

With all sorts of testing, marking, and moderating going on, I neglected this blog for the final two weeks of Pre-sessional GVD classes. I'm therefore trying to stuff lots of materials and links into this one post.

So what did we do? Well, most recently, we reviewed complex sentences and vocabulary strategies using two Saudi-themed stories from The Economist - Clash of the Saudi Titans (handout here) and Mecca versus Las Vegas (handout here). Notes made in class, including student-written versions of the latter text are available here.

Following complex sentences, we had a one-lesson review of linkers. There is a handout available here, although most of the content was specific to the students in attendance...

Another overview lesson took place in the penultimate week of period 2 when we looked at the simple (honestly) combinations of tense and aspect occuring in English verb phrases. After considering tense and aspect through the examples featured in this grid, we looked at this article from the Asian EFL Journal and analysed how and why certain combinations were used within it. There's a powerpoint file here which reviews tense and aspect together with voice (passive or active), which is another factor we considered in our analysis of the Asian EFL Journal text.

In the middle of all this there was a test and a poorly-attended trip to the library, but I think that covers the gist of two weeks' worth of classes...let me know if you have any questions.

The Rosetta Stone

I'm not sure if my recent lack of posting to this blog has been because I'm too busy or too lazy, but apologies to anyone who suffered withdrawal symptoms (highly unlikely, I know).

Yesterday in my Listening & Speaking class we listening to this short BBC Radio 4 programme on The Rosetta Stone. A tapescript is available here alongside some further background information, and you can access all the recordings and related texts from the series A History of the World in 100 Objects so far by clicking here.

If you are interested in seeing these objects for yourself, you can do so at the British Museum in London.

Diamond Geezer

Here's a link to a video of Jared Diamond lecturing on why societies collapse from a lovely website called TED. There's a wide range of talks and lectures on this site, many of which are quite short (some are under 6 minutes) - useful either if you're busy or if you want to do some really intensive listening practice (one of my students recently told me that he memorised the tapescript on markets and morality; I think such an exercise is far easier with a shorter recording...not that I'm advocating this approach).

An impressive and useful feature of the TED website is the way that interactive tapescripts are linked to recordings. You can see the tapescript to the right of each video, and clicking on a word will take you to that point in the video...not only that, you can call the tapescript up as subtitles...in English or - if you're desperate for help - in a choice of alternative languages. With listening resources this good available for free, I don't think any students need English teachers any longer...

Who's the bad guy?

Some ethical questions to discuss today. Professor Michael Sandel referred the following issues in his lecture on markets and morality. What are your opinions on these matters:

- Is it wrong to drop litter if you are happy to pay the fine for doing so?

- Is it wrong to offer your children financial incentives for success at school?

- Is it wrong for the US government to introduce a $50,000 fee for people who wish to immigrate to the USA?

- Would it be wrong for the UK to pay Ireland to accept refugees that the UK did not want to take?

- Do you think health care, prisons, and schools should be run as businesses with the aim of making profits?

...and which of these people is the worst? Can you put them in order from worst to...err...least bad? (the best of a bad bunch?)

Alex sees an elderly neighbour drop a £20 note in the street. He knows that she does not have a lot of money. He picks up the £20 and keeps it for himself.

Beth was burgled, but she had home contents insurance and claimed for all the things that were stolen from her house. She also claimed for a digital camera and iPod, even though she never owned these.

Clive is the CEO of a car manufacturer. It is discovered that a very dangerous fault is affecting a very small number of the cars his company produce. The cost of paying compensation for deaths and injuries resulting from the fault is much lower than the cost of recalling all cars which might be faulty. Clive decides not to recall any vehicles.

Diane is a marketing executive for a major European producer of dairy products. She instigates an advertising campaign to tell young African mothers that breast-feeding is unhealthy, so that they become more likely to buy her company’s milk.

Edward is an accountant and realises that his wife, who works for the same company that he does, is claiming false expenses. He says nothing

When you're smiling...

The article we looked at from the New Scientist is available in full here (including a link to the research it reports on). If you would like to test your ability to distinhuish genuine from fake smiles, you can do so via this link to the BBC Science & Nature site.

And just in case anybody cares, I've posted the key to last Friday's grammar exercise here.

Thursday LisP materials

Some links for today's class:

• The Reith Lectures via the BBC gives you a wide variety of lectures to listen to, dating back to 1948.
• Professor Michael Sandel's lecture on Markets and Morals, which is what we started to listen to in class
• Transcript and further reading on Professor Sandel's lecture, including a relevant podcast if you find this subject interesting
• A Wordle cloud for the lecture's introduction, which shows you the most commonly used words in Sue Lawley's introductory speech
• The AWL highlighter, to help identify "useful" new vocabulary
• Cambridge Dictionaries Online is my preferred online dictionary for checking new vocabulary
• iTunes, for downloading and managing podcasts, as well as the new iTunes U section with university-produced audio and video