Sunday, April 19, 2009

IATEFL conference vids free online

A number of sessions and interviews from the recent IATEFL conference in Cardiff have been put online and made available for everyone, no membership or payment necessary. I'm not sure how they've chosen the links from that main menu, but if you click on each of the days at the top, you find a mixture of new presentations and presentations from the main video page.

One that caught my attention was by Jeff Stranks, whose presentation makes the point that texts given to learners as a source of information are great, but ultimately students are in our classrooms to learn English, not other stuff, so we need to also bring attention to the language in the texts: the vocabulary, the collocations, the grammar, the punctuation, and the style. Stranks presents a number of simple ways of doing this. Unfortunately, he's plagued by the perenial issue of a malfunctioning PowerPoint, but both his slides and his handout are linked to below the video. This is indeed a good idea. Students should be revisiting texts that they're familiar with and focusing on the language.

Another talk that gets it wrong is "What kind of vocabulary do advanced students need to learn?" by Stuart Redman. Granted, he's looking at advanced learners, but bringing students' attention to expressions like having second thoughts or being of two minds, as he suggests in his talk and does in his textbook, is a waste of time. The expression two minds occurs at a rate of about once per two million words. Second thoughts is more common, especially in fiction, but even there it occurs only at a rate of 5.7 times per million words. The top 2,000 words of English occur above a rate of 30 times per million words, and it would take many thousand more words to fill the gap between 30/mw and 5.7/mw. In other words, as I've said before, there's more important stuff to be teaching them.

22 comments:

johnkuti said...

Is there a distinction between expressions and words to made here?

Learning a phrase like "second thoughts" is more defensible if you consider that the advanced student actually knows the two words already, and you are merely saving them from producing the clumsy "doubts about a decision made earlier"

Nick said...

You can check out the subjunctive mood answer here: http://sciolistgrammar.blogspot.com

Brett said...

Frequency isn't the only important issue, though my post did seem to suggest that. Learning burden is also important, and something like "second thoughts" may have a low learning burden, but it may also be the kind of thing that students can simply figure out on their own because they DO know both of the words.

Nick said...

Are you a teacher and what do you teach? I'm guessing English or maybe English as a second language?

Brett said...

Yes, I teach English for academic purposes to pre-college students, and I also teach per-service teachers about English grammar and how to teach it.

Nick said...

Well I'm an English major student, but I haven't graduated from college yet. I have one more year remaining. I'm sorry to be so irascible and so stubborn, but it's how I was taught. You can call it what you like; I just write in that blog about it as a tool for my classes.

Nick said...

Where do you teach? Canada?

Brett said...

Yes, I teach in Toronto.

Where are you an English student? Most "English" students I've met are "Literature" students who haven't been taught so much as the difference between a verb and an adjective. You seem rather more knowledgeable than them.

Nick said...

I go to Kent State in Ohio. I am an English major who is interested in semiotics more so, especially semantics. A lot of this I taught myself, but I've taken classes on it, too; it's just that when I took the classes, I already knew it.

Nick said...

What's the importance of knowing the rate at which words like this are collocated such as "two minds" or "second thoughts"? They're idiomatic expressions; nothing more and nothing less.

Brett said...

I'm afraid I don't understand the question or what it's referring to.

Nick said...

Here is what you said:

Another talk that gets it wrong is "What kind of vocabulary do advanced students need to learn?" by Stuart Redman. Granted, he's looking at advanced learners, but bringing students' attention to expressions like having second thoughts or being of two minds, as he suggests in his talk and does in his textbook, is a waste of time. The expression two minds occurs at a rate of about once per two million words. Second thoughts is more common, especially in fiction, but even there it occurs only at a rate of 5.7 times per million words. The top 2,000 words of English occur above a rate of 30 times per million words, and it would take many thousand more words to fill the gap between 30/mw and 5.7/mw. In other words, as I've said before, there's more important stuff to be teaching them.

What is the importance of knowing the rate at which words like "two minds" collocate? Aren't they just expressions? That's my question.

Brett said...

Language teachers can't teach everything, so they have to make choices about what to teach. If you teach a rare expression, it means you're missing an opportunity to teach a more common expression. By looking at frequency data, teachers can make more principled choices and use class time more effectively. Does that answer the question?

Nick said...

Oh okay.

Nick said...

I have a question: How does one tell whether a question is asked frequently? How do they gather and collate this information? It seems to me that it would take a very long time and be very arduous. Do you have any clues?

Brett said...

Certainly in the past it was very difficult, but with progress in computer memory and the availability of texts in electronic formats, it is becoming easier. If it's an invariant expression that you're looking at, such as "how are you," it's quite easy. Simply go to the COCA and search for it. It will tell you how often it occurs per million words. As the expression gets more spread out with more variable slots, such as "what does ~ mean" or "not only ~, but also ~", it takes a little more digging.

Nick said...

That COCA thing is amazing. I really like it. I'm going to have to try it more often. It's incredible that they can do that.

Nick said...

Your forum stele says, "Second thoughts on English and how she's taught". I have a question that has always boggled my mind. I know in French, one can take an inanimate object and treat it as though it were alive, such as "la maison" is feminine" so the pronoun would be "elle", which is "she", but in English, how is the word English a "she" and not an "it" in that sense? Just some fodder to chew on.

Nick said...

Do you have any good ideas about what I can talk about on my blog? You seem to come up with some great ones.

Nick said...

What is podcasting? John kuti talks about it.

Brett said...

Podcasting

Brett said...

@ Nick "Do you have any good ideas about what I can talk about on my blog?"

Sure, how much you willing to pay me for them? :-)