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

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

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).

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.

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...

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).

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!

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

LisP

Some random vocabulary that arose in today's LisP class:

-I leant against the wall
-The tree has many branches
-I threw the stone into the sea and it created ripples
-there was an earthquake
-the earth shook

.

..and some corrections:

- a wooden (not wood) door
- make (not do) a mistake
- walk along (not through) a path
- he isn't (not doesn't or doesn't be) afraid of death
- she climbed / stepped / jumped over the tree (rather than just "she across the tree")
- escape from the bear (not "escape away")
- problems that she faces or problems that confront her (not "problems that face her")
- I'd like to analyse (not analysis)

Finally, do you know the difference between THROWING A STONE AT A BEAR and THROWING A STONE TO A BEAR?

GVD Language Review

This morning we went through some error correction activities to review a few language issues which arose in last week's writing task. We also discovered that the only way to reduce the power of people from Jeddah is to mix them with "outsiders"! You can find corrections of your mistakes corrected in this Word file, while the powerpoint file is available to download here.

We also discussed and discovered the following:

Separating subjects and verbs with commas is only possible if there are two commas to separate out extra information. So, I, Abduoo, love you is OK, but I, love you is not.

SO and SUCH are used in a longer pattern that some of us had previously realised. Hopefully these examples show you how:

Colchester is so boring that I would rather watch paint dry than go to the town centre. (so + adjective)

Colchester is such a boring place that I regret ever coming here. (such + noun phrase)

Muhammed is so intelligent that he can answer any question without even thinking.

My girlfriend is so beautiful that when she walks in the garden the flowers feel jealous.

In reported speech, we don't have to shift every verb back one tense. If we want / need to show that what we are reporting is still true, we use a tense / aspect combination that reflects this. For example:

She told me she loved me. (she told me in the past, she loved me in the past...and probably not now)
She told me she loves me. (she told me in the past but, as far as I'm concerned, she still loves me now)
She tells me she loves me. (she tells me often - every day perhaps - and yes, she loves me now)

Apostrophes are found after the s in plural nouns. So, I stayed at my sister’s house refers to only one sister, while my sisters’ house would suggest that I have more than one sister and that they both live in one house. Likewise we'll see a difference between the respondent's answers and the respondents’ answers, and even between Maha's homework and Mahas' homework. Maybe my final example is just getting silly, but I hope you get the point...

Finally, we touched briefly on the difference between that and which, and I'd like to save time by directing you towards a previous blog post in which I tried to answer this question. Let me know what you think...

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.

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?

They'll never take away our freedom to make references to Braveheart in class

Two files from today's class: the ppt file and related handout. Can you remember the missing words from these five statements? (answers are in the ppt)

1. In the film Braveheart (1995), the English are __________ as cruel, unscrupulous and cowardly.
2. __________The Bible, the first woman was made from one of the ribs of Adam, the first man.
3. The BBC web page, Bloom, __________organic agriculture as “a system of farming based on principles of human, animal and environmental health”.
4. In an article on the state of American politics __________ “What's gone wrong in Washington?”, published in The Economist on the 18th of February, Barack Obama __________ for present problems. The __________ __________ that “the basic system works” and that the current president has been incorrectly “let off the hook”.
5. The Declaration of Independence, signed in 1776, __________ that “all men are created equal”, although slavery was not abolished until 1865.

Resources for Business Studies Students

My student Muhammad and I found this very useful online resource for business studies vocabulary - The Finanical Times Lexicon. He's going to use it to make personalised glossaries for his notes, which I think will be useful We also looked at a pitch from Dragon's Den on Youtube. Plenty more are available, but this is a nice ten-minute example of what you find in the programme.

Colchester is almost as exciting as London...and other lies

The notes we made in today's class are available here, and you can fill the gaps in our language study handout by referring back to Monday's model compare & contrast essay. Easy.

Thawb Thursday

The powerpoint file from Thursday afternoon's Graduate Diploma class is here for you to download, along with this word file, featuring class notes and the boards from our game of AWL Collocations Noughts and Crosses (which sounds much more glamorous than it is...)

If you're interested in loanwords like "thawb", you can find lots of them here on (sorry) Wikipedia...but don't be too quick to trust everything you read there!

Collocations

If you're still not quite sure what a collocation is, try this very short and sweet quiz on the BBC Learning English website.

Neologisms and Collocations

We looked at punctuation, sentence structure, and lexical sets in this article from the Guardian, and you can download today's ppt here. Notes that we made at the start of the class about JUST and GET are available on a word file here. As promised, the collocations we looked at from the Guardian article are listed below:

• a group of US wordsmiths in Texas
• a collective sigh of disappointment
• declared the idea preposterous.
• the next generation of
• internet applications,
• be formally crowned
• a universal means of communication.
• be able to communicate so easily