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. 

Blogathon

There are so many opinions about social networks such as facebook, myspace. One of them is using social networks on workplaces or schools. Although most of the instructers think that technology is unnecessary for education in the future, I think it is essential. And if there are certain policies, it can improve the performances of students and communication between peers.

  

What is your thoughts about social networks related to education?

Do you think it should be applied to education system? 

To summarize by computer, or to summarize by human...that is the question

To start with wordle.net, it was a good website that finds keywords and sort them by using rate in the text and the biggest word is the most used one. I shall continue with smmry.com. At first, it is a summarizing system that help us read quickly such long texts and help us to have an idea about text. Moreover, we can decide how many sentence do we want in summary. I think it's useful. I shall write about topicmarks.com. It's similar to smmry.com, but it's a bit advanced and organizes the text better. Summarizing websites such as smmry.com and topicmarks.com, help the student very much but when we look into them in the perspective of an instructor which is not good at using technology, students may abuse by plaguarising. Finally, I think they are helpful and useful because it gives us much more time than summarizing by hand.

EDUCATION RELATED TO SOCIAL NETWORKS

 INTRODUCTION

         I will start writing with the reason why I selected this research question. I chose this topic because I am interested in social networking and I am going to be a English Teacher. Thus; I wanted to make a research about social networks. To me, they are the future of teaching and learning. In addition, I will try to find whether they are useful for both teachers and students or not. There is a gap in classic education system. In Turkey, we students are exposed to a competition which causes to the education with one side “Learning by heart to pass exams”. I believe that is not enough to educate qualified students and I disagree as a student of TEFL (Teaching English as a Foreign Language). In METU, we are taught to develop all skills related to profession. However, the education system in university is completely irrelevant to the education with high school education. In high school education, we are directed to learn by heart; however, in university, we are supposed to comment on questions. Use of social networks in education may fill the gap in the education system.  There are several issues to research in education related to social networks, which are: definition of social networks, role of social networks, decision to use social networks in education. I will continue with the definition what social networks are.

DEFINITION OF SOCIAL NETWORKS

Since technology has been developed so quickly in the recent years, people from all age groups are attracting the social networks as well. To define social networking, it includes many Internet-based tools that make people’s life easier in such issues listening, interacting, engaging and collaborating with each other. People use social networking to share recipes, photos, ideas and to keep friends updated on our lives. In many cases, we can use social networking tools from mobile devices, such as Smartphone or tablet pc, as easily as from a PC or Mac. Moreover, I will write about the social networks which are most popular in educational use. Some of them are Facebook, Twitter, Edmodo, Ning, BlogSpot.

ROLE OF SOCIAL NETWORKS

- Blogs are the sites which people set up to provide information and opinions about events, ideas or anything else they want to talk about. In addition, Blogs can include links to other related sites, photos, videos and sound besides text. The number of bloggers is growing rapidly: According to eMarketer’s calculation, there were almost 23 million U.S. bloggers and more than 94 million blog readers in 2007.

- Twitter is a micro-blogging site. Twitter members post text messages called “tweets” of 140 characters or less, using either a computer or a cell phone. Other Twitter users can “follow”” your posts; however, you can decide if you want to let them follow you or not with privacy setting. According to Compete.com (a Web-traffic analysis service), Twitter had over 42 million unique visits in March 2012.

- Facebook is a social networking site where you can set up a profile, join different communities, create group pages and connect with friends. More than 175 million people currently use Facebook and it’s growing rapidly.

- Edmodo  is a secure social learning network for both educators and students. There are group codes which are chosen by teachers and students join the group with those codes. Teacher can set a quiz or assignment or share information to the students.

- Ning , which I believe is the best for educational use, requires payment to use. However, there are three options 19.95/year, 239.90/year, 599.90/year with different options and member numbers. By using this site, one can set up his own social site. It is said in the features of the website: “Thanks to built-in integration with Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, it’s easy to maximize your reach and spread the word. Plus add great Ning extensions for irresistible social functionality – live video streaming (Upstream), photo stickers and effects (Aviary) and email marketing (Constant Contact).”

Now, I shall continue with the relationship between social networks and today’s education.

DECISION TO USE SOCIAL NETWORKS IN EDUCATION

           There are several schools where Social Networks use in education. For example, at New Milford High School in New Jersey, the school’s official Facebook page keeps its 1,100 fans updated on sports events and academic achievements. Moreover, Students who traveled to Europe this spring for a tour blogged their experiences, and received comments from all over the world. On the other hand, other students have used the video voice service Skype to talk to their peers in other states for school projects.

For Principal Eric C. Sheninger, the micro-blogging tool Twitter has become his prominent supporter for professional development as well as school promotion, for example, through Twitter contacts, he formed a partnership with a company which donated technology equipment and training to the school, and he linked up with CBS News, which brought national exposure to the high school’s programs. And he said that he was used to be the administrator that blocked every social-media site, and now he was the biggest champion. Also he said that he was just someone who was passionate about engaging students and growing professionally, and he was using these free tools to do it. However, there is a fact that most of the schools still block internet access to such sites. On the other hand, there are also some educators that realize students feel at home and this is unlikely to disappear. According to a study by the Washington-based, Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project released early this year found that 73 percent of Americans ages from 12 to 17 now use social-networking websites, up from 55 percent in 2006. One of these educators, Steve Hargadon who is the creator of the 42,000-member Classroom 2.0 network on Ning, says that “Social networking is not going to go away.” In addition, he says that social networks are so powerful in terms of learning.

CONCLUSION

            According to these studies, the factors that affect teachers’ attitudes towards social networks can be argued in a few major areas. The most significant factors are considered to be the use of students' interest, global education by connecting all over the world and developing yourself as an educator. Specifically, this study posed the research question: "What are teachers' attitudes to using social networking sites, such as Twitter and  Facebook, with students?"


References;

Davis, M. R. (2010). Social networking goes to school. June 14, 2010, 03(03), 16-18,20,22-23.

Kapuler, D. (2011). Top 20 social networks for education. August 8, 2011,

Wecker, M. (2011). “More and more universities will use social media”: U.S. news education web producer ryan lytle. MAY 3RD, 2011,