Lifelong learning of lexis

I was looking through the stories in a newsletter I receive from Designtaxi and noticed one of the headlines - not particularly because of the story, but because of one word in it:

Adult Website Crowdsources Ideas

It was the word 'crowdsource' that caught my eye.  I may have seen it before, but I certainly hadn't 'noticed' it before.  

tweakyourbiz.com

'Noticing words' is something that I have included in several talks that I've given.  I can even remember my first 'noticing' experience.  I was in the back of my parents' car.  I can't remember exactly what the conversation was about, but my mum said 'He must have been...'.  I recall asking myself: 'Is that 'must of' or 'must have'?'  The budding linguist was alert!

Back to 'crowdsource'.  I checked the exact meaning in the Cambridge Advanced Learners Dictionary and this is what I found:

crowdsource

verb [I or T] /ˈkraʊdˌsɔːs/   /-sɔːrs/

› to give tasks to a large group of people or to the general public, for example, by asking for help on the internet, rather than having tasks done within a company by employees:The company plans to crowdsource the translation of its new web app.

http://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/british/crowdsource?q=crowdsource

http://en.paperblog.com/content-creation-how-you-crowdsource-your-efforts-751657/

Crowdsource' is apparently a very new word, and is related to another word:  outsource

outsource

verb [I or T]     /ˈaʊt.sɔːs/   /-sɔːrs/

› If a company outsources, it pays to have part of its work done by anothercompany:Unions are fighting a plan by universities to outsource all non-academic services.Some companies outsource to cheaper locations to cut costs.outsourcing     /ˈaʊtˌsɔː.sɪŋ/   /-ˌsɑː-/ noun [U]›The management guaranteed that outsourcing wouldn't mean job losses.              

http://www.mamumediallc.com/storage/bigstock-Outsourcing-Word-Cloud-Concept-29451263.jpg?__SQUARESPACE_CACHEVERSION=1363786585051

Outsourcing and crowdsourcing  are two portmanteau words - words by joining together two words, sometimes with no letters being omitted when they're joined like these two.  In other instances, some letters are omitted, like brunch, Spanglish, sitcom.  

On the other blog I'm involved in, we wrote about portmanteau words in a post and created an exercise.  

I've just started a board in pinterest with illustrations of portmanteau words.  My aim is to add to this and my other teaching boards there.  Just need to have 30 hours in a day to do all the things I'd like to!!!!

Edudemic - looks promising

As so often happens when I click on a link in an email, I then start moving around the web, discovering great sites and resources.

Today being Monday, I got my regular linked in update email.

I clieked on the link and on the update page in Linked In, was attracted by the heading of an article:

The Current State Of Mobile Learning In Education

This topic is, of course, often in the news, but today it seemed particularly relevant.  I have just returned from a weekend riding with my husband on our Harley Davidson motorbike along the 'Ruta de Santiago'.  Also on the route were about 25 other people from all over Spain, France, Belgium, Italy and Finland.  

Having studied French at university, I was called on to interpret for the people from France and Belgium several times.  Over lunch on Friday, I was talking to Alain from Belgium and we got to talking about education.  He told me about a school in Belgium where as from this year, all students are required to come to school with an ipad.

I ended up on a great site called edudemic.com.

This is the wordcloud for the areas covered on Edudemic

TRENDING TOPICS

adobe android Apple apps classroom college design edtecheducation facebook featured google guest guideharvard How To infographic iPad iphone jobslearning magazine math microsoft Must-See Posts online online learning schoolsscience sharing Social Media students study teachers teachingtechnology textbooks tips tools Trends tweets twitter video Videosyoutube

Wordcloud, edudemic.com

As you can see by the sizes of the different words and categories, there are a lot of articles about 'How to'.  I often type these words into a search engine to find the answer for a recipe, a craft or a presentation.

I have found so many interesting-looking features on edudemic that I know I will be spending time today looking at some of them and have already bookmarked the site under 'Technology' on my computer.

Have a great week!

From one useful link to another ....

As so often happens, I clicked on the link in one of the emails I received last week and ended up discovering another useful site.

I received an email from the takeaphotoand blog about a new post on the blog:

Wave your flag

In this post, Sue Lyon Jones outlines a lesson plan to discuss patriotism and whether it is a positive or negative thing.  A slideshow with discussion questions and quotes is provided.  

Among the suggestions for follow-up activities for students to do at the end of the discussion is the idea of them creating a word cloud about patriotism.  Sue suggested a website that I was not familiar with, tagxedo) so I visited it and created the word cloud below by typing in the Teaching Together Blog address.  

At the end of Sue's post, there was a paragraph about Sue.

 Sue Lyon-Jones is a freelance ELT materials developer, ESOL tutor and teaching with ICT consultant based in the UK. She publishes and writes the content for the free English lessons and ELT resources site, ESOL Courses. Her current areas of interest include teaching with web based technologies, interactive materials development, educational games, mobile learning, and Dogme ELT.

I clicked on the link to ESOL Courses and was very impressed by the materials on the site.  Simple picture and word matches to work on lexical areas.  I liked the Listening activities that I took a quick look at: for example, butlering at Buckingham Palace or New York Tourist Attractions.

 

Check the website out for yourself and you're bound to find something to recommend or use.

Text analysis and UsingEnglish.com

I have just subscribed to another site.  I had used various worksheets before from UsingEnglish.com but hadn't really got round to looking round the site when I'd visited it previously.

Right now, I am working on several seminars that I have coming up - most of them are on Cambridge English: Advanced, so I'm enjoying preparing activities and tips to share on all five papers - Reading, Writing, Use of English, Listening and Speaking.

Back in November, I shared with you a tool for making Word Clouds by feeding in a text to Wordsift.

I have found another very useful tool for working on and analysing texts.

I fed the following text from a CAE Reading Paper  into the Text Content Analysis Tool on the UsingEnglish.com website.

THE THEORY OF EVERYTHING

Time was when physicists dreamed of a final theory of fundamental physics, a perfect set of equations that would describe every force and particle in nature. Today that dream is being overtaken by the suspicion that there is no such thing. Some even fear that all attempts at a deeper understanding of nature are dead ends. This will lend support to those who have long claimed that research into fundamental physics is a waste of time and money; that at best it provides answers to obscure questions which few people understand or care about. So do these reservations undermine pure physics as a scientific pursuit? Surely, it makes no difference if the truths that physicists seek turn out to be more complex and messy than they once hoped. It could even make the search more intriguing. There are as many profound questions out

there as there have ever been, and to answer them physicists need the kind of hard experimental evidence that can only come from pure research. Can we, therefore, justify spending the huge sums of money that such research demands? What it boils down to is whether we think the search for fundamental truths is important. This quest for knowledge is a defining human quality, but it’s hard to quantify how our lives have been ‘improved’ by it. There have been plenty of technological spin-offs from the space race and other experiments. But the spin-offs are not the point. In showing us how the universe works, fundamental physics could also tell us something profound about ourselves. And for that, a few billion dollars would be a small price to pay.

After clicking on the 'calculate' button, I was impressed by the information I obtained about the text, all in a matter of seconds.















I found out that:

• The Total Word Count for the above text is 273 words.  
• 165 words appear only once in the text.  
• There are 15 sentences.  
• The average number of words per sentence is 18.2. 
• 25 of the words in the text are classed as Hard - they are three or more syllables long.

Lexical density

The text is lexically dense.  (The lexical density is 60.44%)

This is calculated by taking the total number of words in the text, dividing it by the total number of words and multiplying that by 100.

The programme also made me a Word Cloud for the text and I could sort this either alphabetically or in order of frequency of use in the text.

I then tried out the same text in the Advanced Texts Analyser (you have to be registered with the site to be able to use this).

I could then obtain:

•  graphic information about the words in the text (For example:  there are 64 four letter words and 42 of these four letter words only appear once in the text).
• information like the fact that there are 7 2-word phrases that appear more than once in the text (e.g. fundamental physics, spin offs, have been)
• 94 of the words belong to the Common Words word list.

I will certainly be trying these tools out again soon and sharing them with teachers at the CAE Reading seminar!

Hope you will try it too!

Word Clouds

On many blogs, you will see Word Clouds like the one below on many of them.

How do they work?

In blogs, the biggest words tell us that there are more entries on the blog with those labels.

In texts, the biggest words are the words that appear most times in the text.

Look at this word cloud made from a Cambridge English: First gapped text:

age anna arrive boy breakfast child 

chop cook cooked cooking course deep didn’t 

doesn’t drink eager egg eight evening farmhouse food four fruit 

girl hand hitting idea just  keen  kitchen later learn 

like lower make onion oven possible punch reluctant sausage start 

student  teach teaching ten way worked young 

What do you think the text is about?

How can YOU make a word cloud like this one?

Go to this website and paste your text into the box.In seconds, you will have your word cloud!

Did you know?

The middle gaps in the gapped texts tasks in Cambridge English: First and Advanced and Proficiency Reading papers are the ones that most candidates have problems with.