My bad

This is the post for my presentation that I've prepared for the exam! The idiom my bad!

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More PowerPoint presentations from Bülent Yüksel

Chapter 10: Enchancing with video

Here my video about today's topic. Have fun! :)

Vocabulary, ha?!

Vocabulary, ha?!
Is it important?
It is probably as important as the other parts of a language. In the learning process, one cannot escape from any of them. One cannot spend his whole life to checkout grammar, or vocabulary. So, people should have a knowledge of vocabulary. However, when it comes to the rules of this knowledge, it can be sometimes confusing because people do not have the same interests with the others. On the contrary, one may just want to know the words that he is going to use in his business life. So why do he need to learn, the words related to pop culture? Then, why do we need to use articles in English/artikers in German in a context? If we are speaking with a close friend, she would just understand what we are talking about. Anyway, there are several possible questions while someone is learning vocabulary. However, it is claimed in the presentation that people who are learning English need to know the common words which are 2,709 words at total. The common words mentioned in the presentation are the %95 percent of the words that occurs in every each of the texts. And here is the link of this presentation, if you want to check it out!

Colour of Words: Part 1: why common words

One another theory about vocabulary learning related to the presentation is that why don't people learn it naturally if they are the common words. Well, when we are dealing with teaching a language, we are focusing on something specific at a time, which is usually grammar because English is a language that has strict grammar rules. Therefore, there will be only a little information about vocabulary learning, and how they will study vocabulary. I know that there is sometimes none. Teachers are not usually familiar with the techniques, or they may not even know the basics. So, they just follow the instructions that others prepared. It is the problem of humankind, they don't really like doing researches. However, I believe that in learning a language, the most important thing is to internalize. In this sense, I do remember that I have two words that I confuse all the time until my girlfriend give an example like 'you appeal to me.' The words that I confuse were 'appeal' and 'appear' by the way. So, I had the connection between the word, and the sentence; thus, I'm never going to confuse them again. The other possible problem with the vocabulary is people are going to memorize it by studying them over and over instead of trying to learn them instead of learning them.
2,709 words... Okay, so what? People have feelings that they even cannot understand, and they are trying to express. Therefore, it may not be enough. For the learning part, it is alright to use 2,709 words but when it comes to such superior thoughts than just simple actions, it can be difficult and it may not stay in %95.

Take all my loves, my love, yea, take them all:

What hast thou then more than thou hadst before?

No love, my love, that thou mayst true love call;

All mine was thine before thou hadst this more.

Then, if for my love thou my love receivest,

I cannot blame thee for my love thou usest;

But yet be blamed if thou this self deceivest

By wilful taste of what thyself refusest.

I do forgive thy robb'ry, gentle theif,

Although thou steal thee all my poverty;

And yet love knows it is a greater grief

To bear love's wrong than hate's known injury.

Lascivious grace, in whom all ill well shows,

Kill me with spites; yet we must not be foes.

For example, the statistics of the common words that are meant to be the be %95 decreases in Shakespeare's Sonnet #40 to the percentage is 74,6.
Contrary to the common belief, I think that non-native speakers can have better results in tests because they learn it systemically, rule by rule.

Choosing a text proper text for the students can be a difficult task. However, I believe it depends mostly on timing. For example, if I have 3 hours of classes with per-intermediate students, I would choose the second text; thus, when they are done with the text, they would have learned more information. However, for one of class, it would be nothing but torturing. Another important thing to know when to select a text for the students is directly related with student's interests. Thus, they can be motivated easily to study the text in front of them. However, there is always a risk while doing it because they can already know the topics and they wouldn't care maybe. Also, it seems that the shorter the words become the easier in English. People are lazy and this can be the reason for it. Since they are lazy, it is possible to avoid longer words to pronounce or write.

Wordle vs Lextutor
Wordle is cool, it produces nice images from the texts. It probably uses an algorithm that allows more frequent words to be written in higher fonts. However, Lextutor is more advanced since it can give more statistical values and can give examples as well. The only problem with Lextutor is the non-user friendly interface. It can be hard to use it for the first time and maybe even for the second and third time.

Possible Strategies
Teachers can use vocabulary profiling systems to find out the rarity of the words so that they can prepare a text by find the rarest words and listing them as the unknown vocabulary and give the meaning of them to the students. So that, they can read the text and find out the meanings of the common words that they do not already know and ignore the ones that are rare.

To be honest, I am a narcissist person and I don't want to share my tools with my students. I would pet them, and feed them with lots of exercises, materials but my tools? Oh, no way! :D
And this my example to cloze test, http://www.lextutor.ca/cloze/vp/users/A_review_of_Veronika_decides_to_die[2].html
And this is the key words of the text according to Lextutor,

(1) 320.13 suicide
(2) 152.60 teenage
(3) 98.08 mental
(4) 62.53 institute
(5) 61.46 youth
(6) 52.31 repeat
(7) 50.44 wake
(8) 27.28 death
(9) 25.07 process

CTE Course Discussion 1

 CTE Course Discussion 1

DISCUSSION POINTS:

• How easy do you think it would be to follow the data-driven learning principles in a face-to-face (f2f) classroom? What problems would you anticipate?
• Would data-driven learning work best with individual students, or group work?
• To what extent might computers and the internet enhance data-driven learning?

  On the top, there are some discussion points related to this entry. I think the difficulty rate depends on the individuals in the classroom because one cannot be the same with the others. One possible problem with data-driven learning can be getting out of the purpose since the curiosity might take the students' minds too far away from the goals that teacher expects. 
Again, it depends on the individuals because one might like to discover alone as opposite to ones that might like to discover by completing one another' ideas. For example, I don't usually like to work with a group, they have often came back after me to some points. So how can I possibly discover and learn something better within such a group.
Well, as the last point it is very possible that curiosity comes with a price and the price is in this condition, the false knowledge that comes with the Internet. However, it is nearly impossible to avoid using Internet since the sources such as encyclopedias are not handy to use. Through the Internet, one can easily find out the information that is needed and the information will trigger the student by prompting their curiosity. 

Also, there are some tools related to the discussion above. One of them is Worldle.net which helps to create an image of the texts by putting the most used words in an order as the most used one comes up the biggest.

 Another tool is  smmry.com which helps people to summarize a text easily with an algorithm. So that, people can find out what the text is really about; however, it might not be good as a summary made by a real person.

"TASK BASED LEARNING Task-based language learning is an approach which was developed in the 1980s by the Indian language teaching specialist N.S. Prabhu. TBL is based on the idea that the acquisition of language and linguistic competence as well as language and language learning awareness can best be realised through tasks which encourage the learner not to focus explicitly on the structure and the rules of the new language. AIM OF DATA DRIVEN LEARNING The principal aim of all teaching activities must be the creation of a learning environment in which learners are asked to carry out authentic tasks. Providing the appropriate data, organized into suitable units of information and supported by relevant processes must be the foremost task of educational design of any kind of language learning and teaching resource in order to contribute to the success of any learning situation. The traditional transmission model of learning must be replaced by models which emphasise information processing and knowledge construction as acts of learning most suited to the acquisition of the kind of skills needed for the knowledge society. In addition to the undeniable need to achieve instructional goals, the development of cognitive and strategic abilities suitable for the knowledge society is defined as one of the principle aims of a learning process based on knowledge construction and discovery learning."

 The text above is just an example of smmry.com

A vocabulary profile that is created by Wordle can be used in classroom environment of language teaching to teach students most common words so that students can learn the priority of the words and they can try to learn them since they are important for the language.

There is also another website can be used as a tool as Wordle which is Concordle. Moreover, at some point Concordle is more helpful in learning because once you click on the word, it will give you the sentences that includes the word. For example, you click on the word 'materials' and you will see examples like

that the advent of technology enhanced learning

materials

requires a re -thinking of the methodological

So if you have a text and want to see which words are more common or find out the things called as chunks.

Here we have some more examples of Smmry and Wordle:

"Why would you want to learn the frequent words of English? For the simple reason that English, like any language, has the habit of recycling a relatively small number of words over and over again, and if you know these words then your reading power can be enhanced dramatically for a relatively modest learning investment.

Different words Percent of word tokens in average text 86,741 100 % 43,831 99.0 6,000 89.9 5,000 88.6 4,000 86.7 3,000 84 2,000 79.7 1,000 72.0 10 23.7 Table 1 How small a number are these 'main words' that are recycled over and over in English? Suppose your goal is to read academic English texts with good comprehension, and to use reading as a way to expand your vocabulary still further.

Just 1000 word families account for more than 70% of the words or ink, and 2000 account for about 80%. So you need to find out what these 2000 word families are and be sure you know them.

You could learn another 3000 words and increase the amount of black ink coverage in an average text by only about 8%. The graph below, which is just the table above turned on its head, dramatizes the drop-off in coverage after 2000 words.

The learner reaches the 90% mark only at 5000 words, or after another 3000 new words have been learned.

The good news is the 2000 list and the AWL together, a combined list of 2570 words, can bring the coverage of an academic text up to approximately 90%. In other words, if you know the first 2000 plus 570 AWL words, then you know about 90% of the words you will meet in any academic text."

 

The examples are related with the website Lextutor.ca which is kind of a dictionary of frequency. By using lextutor, one can find the most common words in Lextutor easily. Finally, I have prepared a quiz about Lextutor which you can access on socrative by entering the code: SOC-2358693

 

Is email really dead?

There is a decline in everyday use of emails since nov. 2006. according to the chart.

Make Love, Not Warcraft

Hey, checkout this statistics and see the difference among the regions. Nobody else shall die anymore.