The Lesson of TED_ED

 URL of TED_ED LESSON:

http://ed.ted.com/on/B5xTKCek

The Review of EverWrite

Nusrat Jahan

ID: 2014-1-92-022

MA in ELT

Review of EverWrite

EverWrite is one of the remarkable English learning especially writing skill based software. It is a CD-ROM accompany to ‘Evergreen’ (7^th edition) that consist of six different practice and test contents.  The factors or contents are e. g. editing exercises, identify rhetorical paragraphs, working with transitions, organizing your thoughts, recognizing your thesis statements and practicing grammar. There are two types of tasks in this software e. g. practice and test where practices helps students to practice more and enhance their writing skill and tests emphasizes on the feedback and evaluation.

In the editing exercise part, first of all, there are sixteen sub-parts that starts with adjectives and adverbs and ends with writing paragraph. This is the initial stage of essay writing. Here, all the practices and tests are related to writing accurately and appropriately. Second, identify rhetorical paragraphs is interrelated to identify the essay or paragraph type because there are various types of paragraphs e. g. definition, classification, cause and effect, analytical etc. And the third part includes the transitional aspects of writing that how transitional expressions help learners to write efficiently. And the other two parts includes the organizing the thoughts and reorganizing the thesis statement as well. And the final part is about grammar learning practices and tests that also includes the tense, verb, punctuation etc. grammar related tasks.

Now I would like to discuss about the EverWrite software according to some factors like learner motivation and interest, user friendliness, interaction and some other minor aspects.

According to Howard Gardner’s (1983) multiple intelligence the various types of apparatus helps students to perceive more in terms of language learning. Here, the software EverWrite has the writing tests and practices but in a different way that related to technology. And a student himself/herself can learn through it without any interference. That is why students of tertiary level in our country will be interested and motivated to use this software. Moreover, it is a CD-ROM type software that has no link with internet. So, the students of rural areas and without internet service can use this software. It is also another issue that can motivate students. There are a lot of practices and tests are included in this software that enhances the writing skill of students integrated with reading skill also. And it also gives the scores to the students that will also motivate students to explore it and learn more as well.

The learner autonomy theory of Henri Holec (1981) is related to self directed software like EverWrite because in this software, learners have the own responsibility to learn the aspects which they think important for them. The practices will also help learners to write the essays with appropriate use of cohesion and coherence.

In terms of user friendliness, EverWrite is a very easy to access software where a learner needs to write his user name and starts to explore the practices and tests. The each and every practice sessions are put separately and the areas are also stated separately and it is helpful for the learners to choose his/her weak part and practice those. In addition, the instructions of the tests and practices and the eye soothing background color of the software home page is also another user friendliness aspect for the learners.

In the case of interaction, this software is not interaction based software. It is based on learner autonomy and here learners are responsible for their learning. But teacher can provide some writing task e.g. writing essay or paragraph after exploring the software. And this software is not free software like some other software, it is quite costly and students need to buy it from the Evergreen website. And there is no time limitation for the practices and tests in this software that is another weakness. However, this software follows the notional-functional approach to manage the tests and practices which is interrelated to communication language teaching which is an important factor.

Above all the discussions, we can say that this is excellent software for language learning especially for writing skill. It can be suitable for the rural and urban context with adult and younger students. And teachers can use it for the students to teach grammar to follow notional-functional instruction of language teaching.

Reference:

Website:

 http://edutechwiki.unige.ch/en/Learner_autonomy, Date: 17 November 2015, Time: 3.00 PM

http://infed.org/mobi/howard-gardner-multiple-intelligences-and-education/, date: 17 November 2015, time: 3.30 PM

The Review of Virtual Writing Tutor

The Virtual Writing Tutor is one kind of writing correction website founded by Nicholas Walker who is  an ESL teacher at Ahuntsic College in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. And  it was launched  on April 5th, 2012.  The goals of this website are given below:

                      a. to increase the quantity of corrective feedback available to the students
                      b. To improve its quality
                      c. To improve its timeliness
                      d. To increase its frequency
                      e. To enhance ESL writing pedagogy

 In the Virtual Writing Tutor website, there are three types of correction tools e.g. grammar checker, spelling checker and punctuation mark checker. In terms of grammar checking procedure a person can write on the text box and click on the 'check grammar' option. Then the website automatically check the grammar and give feedback about both grammar and punctuation. And spelling checker gives the feedback of correct and wrong spelling and give suggestions and recommendations of correct spelling. Here, the spelling checker is working in the case of wrong spellings but the grammar checker is much more contradictory with the goal statements because it is not working appropriately. I wrote three wrongly ordered sentences but the feedback was not appropriate at all. In my second sentence, there were some major mistakes but the Virtual Writing Tutor website gave feedback that there were not grammar errors in that sentence.

In the case of advantages of using the Virtual Writing Tutor website that this site might help the learners and language users to check or correct the spelling mistakes and punctuation errors in some extent. Moreover, in grammar checking feedback it gives an option to report or submit about any wrong feedback such as they use an option '(Not an error? Report it)'. But in terms of grammar checking it should not be used for the students because it may be harm their learning and leads them to the inappropriate path. In this review, I put some examples that easily proves that this site is not appropriate website to use in the classroom or anywhere to check the grammar mistakes and punctuation mistakes and other staff.

The Screenshots

Grammar Checking Examples from Virtual Writing Tutor: 

Example 1:

Text: i got to dhaka austrilia canada and amarica

Statistics :
Word count : 8
Sentence count : 1
Average Words/Sentence : 8

1. You wrote: i got to dhaka austrilia canada and amari...
   
   Feedback: This sentence does not start with an uppercase letter   (Not an error? Report it.)
   
   
2. You wrote: i got to dhaka austrilia canada and amari...
   
   Feedback: This should be written in uppercase: 'I'.   (Not an error? Report it.)
   
   Link: Capitalization error
   
3. You wrote: i got to dhaka austrilia canada and amarica
   
   Feedback: Names of countries should be capitalized. This should be written with an uppercase letter: 'Canada'.   (Not an error? Report it.)

 Example 2:

Text:  Rubi cold Shoma to attented the tommorow class about song. But shoma refuse it because she felt coldness in hot weather.

Statistics :
Word count : 21
Sentence count : 2
Average Words/Sentence : 11

No errors detected.

 Example 3:

Text: I loved the football and cricket but i hatred the resling game. I got to the stadium to saw the play but it was crowdy yet. I got back to the home

Statistics :
Word count : 32
Sentence count : 2
Average Words/Sentence : 16

1. You wrote: I loved the football and cricket but i hatred the resling game. I got to the...
   
   Feedback: 22 You have a problem with your verb consistency. You use a past form, "loved," but you follow it with a with a Present Simple verb, 'cricket'. Consider revising your first verb: 'I loved the football and cricketed but '   (Not an error? Report it.)
   
   
2. You wrote: I loved the football and cricket but i hatred the resling game. I got to the st......
   Feedback: This should be written in uppercase: 'I'.   (Not an error? Report it.)
   
   Link: Capitalization error
   
3. You wrote: ... to saw the play but it was crowdy yet. I got back to the home
   
   Feedback: Three successive sentences begin with the same word. Reword the sentence or use a thesaurus to find a synonym.   (Not an error? Report it.)

Spelling Checking Example: 

Example 1:  i got to dhaka austrilia canada and amarica.

Example 2: Rubi cold Shoma to attented the tommorow class about song. But shoma refuse it because she felt coldness in hot weather.

Example 3: I loved the football and cricket but i hatred the resling game. I got to the stadium to saw the play but it was crowdy yet. I got back to the home

Jack Isgar: Sleep My Child

Jack Isgar: Sleep My Child: Sleep my child, dream of a world refined by wisdom.   Sleep and dream, dream. I wish you all the love and joy that can be wished up...

The Practice on Designing Materials for Teaching and Learning AWL

I have chosen 5 words from AWL (Coxhead, 2000) and provided vocabulary teaching instructions for EFL teachers. Here, I follow the Presentation, Practice and Produce (PPP) method and teacher can use those instructions for Bangladeshi rural undergraduate students. In the presentation part, teacher can give the pictures and show the videos to the students to guess the context and words and then introduce words and give definitions as well. And then students will do the practices and produce some sentences and text to use those words. Presentation: The five words from AWL ( Coxhead, 2000)  1. Contradict  To disagree with someone and something
2. Contribute This video is one kind of contribution for the society.
3. Cooperate  To work or act together toward a common end or purpose
4. Create Bring something into existence    5. Currency  The money that a country uses : a specific kind of money

Practice: Do the exercises and do not forget to enjoy and explore ( the questions are adopted and adapted from some websites). Contradict, Contribute, Create, Cooperate, Currency 1. She wasn't about to --------------- the cold executioner when he was in this mood. 2. Rafique smiled at Karim's exuberance but didn't ------------ him. 3. Contribute means to:  a. forsake b.convey c.detach d. bring 4. She was a white horse who wore ribbons in her hair, and felt as though she didn't have to--------to the cause. 5.  In unequal societies, rich people ---------- less with their poor neighbors if they know they're wealthier, according to a game-based study published today in Nature. 6. Which one is cooperation? Picture:1 Picture 2:   7. Who would have guessed that Samsung would ----- a more elegant interface than Apple? 8.  Bakers ------- cakes and biscuits.  9. Which picture indicates currency? Picture: 1 Picture: 2 10. Which of the following is an example of currency? a. a bank b. a coin  c. a bolt of lightning  d. a painting  Produce: 1. Go to the following websites  www.lextutor.ca/ www.vocabulary.com http://www.englishvocabularyexercises.com/AWL/index.htm http://www.thedailystar.net/ http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/ and find the definitions and practices and use those sites for your better understanding of the words. Write some sentences to use those words. 2. Write a short essay about your experiences of  using those sites. Write your personal opinion that those sites are really helpful for you or not. If not what are the challenges you faced?

Review of Vocabulary Learning Websites

After reading the chapter 1 i.e. Vocabulary from the book of Chapelle & Jamieson's (2008) Tips for Teaching with CALL , I have found 13 website links. In the chapter, before the website instructions, there are two paragraphs e. g. 'what research says' and 'what the teacher can do' which explains the opinions of researchers and the initiatives of teacher that how teacher can instruct student's vocabulary learning. And I have accessed all the sites and had a lot of experiences and instructions as well as I enjoyed my testing and having scores. Sometimes the practices were easy and sometimes difficult to match the words with the appropriate pictures or synonyms. Moreover, selecting appropriate websites and practices for the intermediate Bangla medium students is one kind of challenge in our country because the different institutions and settings has different types of teaching and learning instructions. All Bangla medium intermediate student's competency are not almost same. The rural and urban students have different level of competency and the madrasha students are weak in English ( Rahman & Kafi, 2013). Now, I would like to discuss about three websites that teacher can use for the Bangla medium intermediate students.

 

First of all, http://www.lextutor.ca/ is a very resourceful website for vocabulary learning as well as for other language related learning. The author of the site is Tom Cobb who started it in 2004 and it is a free browsing site. The products of this sites are concordancer, vocabulary profiler, exercise maker, interactive exercises, and much more. There are three separate criteria for the learners, researchers and teachers. The dictionary, grammar checker and lot of practice tests are included in this site. That is why learners have many scopes to learn a lot of things at a time. They do not need to access those separately. In addition, using this site can save learners and teachers time. In terms of searching examples, there are many examples in this site. However, this site is interrelated with many factors and looks like a mess and students may be frighten to watch it for the first time and lost their interest. And teacher need to introduce it with the help of  video and  audio supports. There are some audio and video demo of this site. In terms of pedagogical instructions, there are two types of vocabulary test for the learners e.g. frequency based tests like recognition and productive and word associates test. The tests are included some filling the gap and word matching activities which are helpful for the learners but there are no picture based practice test for the intermediate learners in this website. Also there is no audio or video based practice tests. So, instead of some weaknesses our teachers can use this site for our intermediate Bangla medium students to teach English vocabulary.

 

Second, www.vocabulary.com is another dynamic website I have found where different types of tests are included e.g. using pictures, filling gaps, matching synonyms, questions and answers etc. This site is also very much easy to access and students may like it very much. The words and the practice tests are related to academic study. Here, students can easily use it and the tests are like game. Students can use it individually, with the friends and connect with facebook account. So, there are many scopes for interaction and engagement. Though the site is a very smart site for learning vocabulary but it has no audio or video related tests and the dictionary gives detail information only when learners makes any mistakes to answer the questions. And at last I can say that this site is really very much fascinating and it would be useful for Bangladeshi intermediate learners.

 

 

Finally, http://www.wordsmart.com/wsc_d/statistics.html is another great website for vocabulary learning. This site is based on two skills e.g. reading and listening. Here, peer comparison and challenging statistics is an interesting aspect and this is a completely gaming website. It has a rewarding option like earn dollar and connect with facebook account and also measurement of progress rate. The site looks very attractive and some emotional smileys and very easy to use. So, it covers a lot of engagements and interactions as well. This game provides performance chart where three stages are used e.g. below average, average and high performance. The game is not that much easy because some questions, gaps or synonyms are quite difficult. But this site can be helpful for our intermediate learners who already used the first two mentioned sites.

And I would like to mention some other websites which are also helpful and I think appropriate for the intermediate learners like http://iteslj.org/cw/3/ck-dolch01.html where crossword puzzles are given and it is also interesting vocabulary game. Another site http://www.rosettastone.com/learn-english is also interesting and where students can learn grammar as well but this site is not free for all. In addition, http://www.vocaboly.com/vocabulary-test/ is also applicable for intermediate learners where SAT, GMAT, GRE, TOEFL and VOA vocabularies are given. Basically there are many learning websites are available in the internet and to choose the appropriate practice tests are significant for the teachers and learners.

Reference:

Chapelle, C. A., & Jamieson, J. (2008). Tips for Teaching with CALL: Practical           Approaches to Computer-Assisted Language Learning. USA: Pearson Education, Inc. 

https://www.scribd.com/doc/28681752/English-Language-Teaching-and-Learning-in-Bangladesh

A review of www.freerice.com

www.freerice.com is one of the websites supported by United Nations World Food Program which aimed to spread knowledge through some gaming activities. In October 2007, John Breen founded this site and donated to UN World Food Program where learners can use this site free and enrich their vocabulary, grammar and other knowledge. In this website, there are 8 different subjects that are covering some general fields of basic learning. The subjects are humanities, English, math, chemistry, language learning, geography, science and test preparation.  This site is not only based on English language but also three other languages e. g. French, Italian and Spanish. Now I would like to discuss about some aspects of using www.freerice.com and how this site can help Bangladeshi student's English vocabulary and grammar learning.

According to Howard Gardner, an American psychologist  (1983), intelligence is not a constant thing or it has no unitary character and he refers multiple intelligence as 'frames of mind'  where intrapersonal  is a special kind of feature that help learners to discriminate complex inner feelings and deficiencies and to improve own knowledge. And Vygotsky's (1896-1934) zone of proximal development is also describes the differences between current and potential knowledge and encourages individual learning. In addition, learner autonomy is another factor in foreign language learning that supports learners own learning activities. Here, the mentioned theories indicates some individual learning activities where www.freerice.com can be one of the best examples of individual vocabulary and grammar learning website. 

 

In this website, both grammar and vocabulary are included in learning English where for each correct answer learners can donate 10 grains of rice to the United Nations World Food Program. So, there are three major advantages of this site e. g. first of all they can enhance their vocabulary and grammar, they can donate for the hunger needy peoples which is a noble work and it helps them to formulate their ideas in a better way and manipulates those ideas authentically. The games are very much practical and learners are enthusiastic about the gaming activities and practical works which can help their day-to-day life. And also this language practices improve students job interview and exam scores as well. So, if students get the appropriate directions, they could be motivated to play in this site and update themselves with the global challenging world.

In the context of our country most of the students are not getting the proper instructions of learning vocabulary. Our teachers are still following grammar translation method instead of CLT based textbooks in primary, secondary and in some extent of tertiary level. Moreover, communicative language teaching (CLT) approach is not that much successful and our teachers are not trained that they do not know how to apply CLT and how to teach vocabulary effectively. And the educational setting of urban and rural areas are different where internet is not available in the rural areas as well as the urban local kindergarten schools also. That is why learning websites like www.freerice.com is not applicable for rural students. It is applicable for higher secondary urban students and English medium students of our country. 

Above all the discussions we may close with some hope and possibilities that are given below. In order to apply the site for the students of our country, teachers need to be very proficient about the usage of those sites and internet based teaching instructions. And teacher's training colleges need to include information technology based training in their session. And also the educational institutes need to allow that types of teaching and learning instructions for their students. And informally teachers can introduce students with that kind of individual learning sites and make them aware about the importance of the learning games sites so that they will be more productive and practical which will enhance themselves as well as our country.

My Writing Stuff

 

Today I am going to explain one of my weaknesses of writing . First of all I would like to discuss about some of my problems of academic writing. Usually when my teacher gives some writing task or assignment which is not that much familiar to me it takes me some more time to think about it and to gather the information. At the same time I can write when my brain and mind permits me to write otherwise I cannot. Sometimes I know I should write my essay but I cannot and when I really start to write it takes very short time. That is why when teacher provides any writing assignment, my friends do it earlier and I do it in the last moment of submission. 

And the another problem is that I always feel dissatisfied with my writing. Even when some people appreciate my work I silently find many problems. Moreover, I always search the perfection in my writing and if I realize that I am failing to do that it sometimes makes me pessimistic. The another aspect is my perception or understanding about the topic of my writing. I think writing without proper understanding is a bad thing and when I do that it also hampers my time and I cannot do my assignment a few days earlier. 

So please suggest me that how I can solve my problems.

Life is the drop of water on the leaf The pinch of salt on the stake And the hungry bite to a rotten bread.........

Life is the drop of water on the leaf
The pinch of salt on the stake
And the hungry bite to a rotten bread.........

Welcome Note