Tori Amos《Winter》Live

Enjoy!

Reflection on Computer Assisted Language Learning

“Computer Assisted Language Learning” is perhaps the course that fascinates me the most this semester because first of all, I have always been the kind of person who is addicted to computer (and Internet of course), so it was such a delight to learn all about CALL. Second, what has been taught in the class is so cool and up to date to me that I develop a lot of interest in them. Third, the learning experience in the class is so different than the others: I have my class in the computer lab; I post my homework to my blog instead of hand in hand-written homework; I learn things such as corpus and My ET that can be very helpful to English learners but have not been taught in any other classes during my entire school years. In the following paragraphs, I would like to mention some of the things we learned in the class: corpus, Google Syntax, and screen capture software.

It was my first time ever to learn about corpus, and I am so glad that I learned it because a course I took at NTNU this semester, semantics, requires a lot of use of corpus. The teacher asked us to use corpus to find the nouns that appear with unit nouns, such as a drop of water or a chunk of money. We were also being asked to find collocations, and again, I was glad that I have learned what is collocation and have introduced to better Collocation Retrieval Systems in CALL class than the one I learned in semantics class.

Moreover, corpus is helpful in self-learning for it shows whether or not certain words can be used in certain ways. For example, when I was writing a journal in English for self-training, I can always go to a corpus database to check if my usage of the words are correct even if there is not an English writing teacher who I can call for help. In other words, corpus serves not only a tool but also a tutor that is able to judge and correct. Since I will enter the workplace after graduation, there will not be any English teacher that I can ask for help like in school years any more. Therefore, I can foresee corpus being my new English teacher in the future, and best of all, I would never feel ashamed to ask him questions that can be deemed too easy or stupid.

Google Syntax is also a nice tool I find useful in CALL class. As a student, I rely on Goole search engine for searching information for homework and presentation a lot. However, though I use it very often, I have never known that with a few words and symbols typed with the key word that I am looking for would lead to more precise search results and therefore, saves both time and effort. Furthermore, other functions that we learned in the class such as “I'm Feeling Lucy(好手氣)” and “Google.com in English” are useful, either. After learning about Google Syntax and other functions, I became more aware about the Google guides and various buttons on the Google page that I did not try to click before because I think there must be many more time-saving functions that I would want to learn about.

In addition, the screen capture software is quite a nice software in which the file is small but provides enough functions for us to do the screen capturing, picture editing, and even recording the movements on the screen. I have always wondered how does the author of computer reference book capture and put the step-by-step screen pictures in his book, now I finally know how he does it. Screen capture software can be applied into many other purposes, such as preparing material for teaching or presentation. The presentation Sophia and I did on the topic of “The OWL at Purdue” uses much screen capture software functions and I found my presentation being more easy for the audiences to understand with the pictures captured from the website instead of just explaining to the audiences with only a few key words on the slides. In some cases, picture speaks louder than words.

In conclusion, I have learned so many useful, interesting and up to date means of computer-related English teaching tool that I would like to use them in my own learning in the future. Last, I would like to thank Dr. Lai for her instruction of telling us to value the work of perfecting our every presentation, the good attitude toward learning, and for that she really cares about our future and shares her experiences with us.

Notes of ESL Podcast 440 & Reflection on ESL Pod.Com

ESL Podcast

Episode No.: #440

Topic: Being a Self-Made Man/Woman
Link:http://www.eslpod.com/website/show_podcast.php?issue_id=6319808

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Episode Scripts & Explanations of the Key Words Taken Down


Edgar: What a crock!
★crock: (informal expression) something is a false or a lie that you shouldn’t believe it.

Ann: What is it?

Edgar: I'm reading an article about successful business people who were self-made men and women. I don't believe a word of it.
★self-made: means you became successful or rich because you work hard, not because you receive help from other people.

Ann: What don't you believe?

Edgar: These people didn't pull themselves up by their bootstraps. They were all born with silver spoons in their mouths.
★pull themselves up by their bootstraps: to become successful because of your own efforts or your own work, especially if you started as a very poor person or an unsuccessful person to get out of this difficult life situation and become rich or successful without the help of anyone else.
★born with silver spoons in their mouths: Edgar was talking about the people in the article that he’s reading who said they are self-made. But Edgar said, “No, they were born with silver spoons in their mouths.” This is an expression to be born with a silver spoon in your mouth means that you were born into a rich family because only rich family could afford a spoon made of silver. Dr. McQuillan said he was not quite sure why it has to be a spoon other than other things. He said perhaps it is because we feed little babies with small spoons and put spoons in their mouths. So to be born with a silver spoon in your mouth means that you were born a very rich person. You come from a rich family. And therefore you weren’t pulling yourself up by your bootstraps if you became successful. (中文: 銜著金湯匙出生。)

Ann: Not all successful people were born into money and privilege.
★born into money and privilege: to be born into money means that you were born into a rich family. Privilege: privilege is something that is special for only a small number of people, for very few people. Very few people can have this. It is often used simply to mean advantage. He has a lot of privileges= He has a lot of advantages coming from a rich family.

Edgar: That's true, but it gets me riled up when people who grew up at the country club claim to have had humble beginnings.
★rile up: to be angry, upset, annoyed.
★country club: here refers to a place where members can participate in sports and social activities. Usually this is a very exclusive club that costs a lot of money to become a member. Country clubs often have golf courses, and require a lot of money if you want to become a member and use the club. In general, when someone says or refers to the country club, they are referring to people who are very rich, people who are living in a very rich manner or a rich way.
★humble beginnings: means that you grew up in a family that did not have a lot of money. Humble here means poor. Beginnings means when your were a child. So to have humble beginnings means that you had a childhood where you lived with a family that was poor or grew up with a family that did not have a lot of money.

Ann: Just because some people were born with a leg up doesn't mean they didn't work hard to get where they are.
★a leg up: here means an advantage, ahead start. Something helps you to do something faster or better. For example, f you are trying to learn French. And you already know Spanish and Italian, you have a leg up on other people who do not know those two Romance languages because Spanish, Italian and French have many similarities, they are similar languages. So to know one language means that you have a leg up on learning the other languages.

Edgar: Where would that hard work have gotten them if they didn't have backers with deep pockets, or if they didn't know people in high places? I know plenty of hard-working people who aren't hobnobbing with the rich and famous.
★backer: a supporter, usually someone who gives you money. For example if I am going to start a new company, I would ask some backers. I would get people who would invest or give me money to help me start my new company.
★deep pockets: means to be very rich, to have a lot of money. A pocket is what we call that part of your pants that you can put money into or keys and so forth. Usually you have two pockets in front and two pockets in back.
★people in high places: means people who are powerful, rich or successful and have a lot of influence. If someone says to you “I know people in high places,” they mean, “I know people who are very important, who have many influence, and therefore could help me.”
★hobnobbing: means to spend time talking with people who have a lot of money or influence. We might also say nowadays to network. Network sounds better than hobnobbing. Hobnobbing has the idea that you are trying to become successful by talking to other people and getting them to help you. To network sounds like you are looking for opportunities to become successful. So hobnobbing is probably considered a little more negatively. Networking is a term we use now in the business world to refer to making contacts, getting to know people who may help us in the future.

Ann: That's true enough. Who needs the rich and famous? I'll take my hard-working man over any of them any day.

Edgar: That's why I married you- a woman with beauty and brains!

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Reflection

In my opinion, ESL Podcast has both strong points and drawbacks. First and the most obvious strength is that it is free to listen and download the episodes from the website. Second, it constantly adds new episodes. Third, the downloads are in mp3 file which makes it compatible in almost any audio players. In addition, all the episodes are categorized according to their contents that make it easy for the users to find the exact kinds of episodes they are interested in.
Despite the strengths, there are also a few drawbacks. One is that the speed of the episodes can be a little bit slow for more advanced listeners, especially the part in which Dr. McQuillan explains the vocabulary. The other drawback, in my opinion, is that Dr. McQuillan spends too much time on explaining the same thing. Take the term "humble beginnings" in this episode for example, he explains it as (1)"meaning that you grew up in a family that did not have a lot of money" and (2)"to have humble beginnings means that you had a childhood where you lived with a family that was poor or grew up with a family that did not have a lot of money." Actually he only has to say either one and the listener would totally understand the meaning.

Overall, I think ESL Podcast is a very good website. I will continue to visit it afterwards.

The Cranberries《Ridiculous Thoughts》

"Ridiculous Thoughts" is one of my beloved song from The Cranberries.
The other one is "So Cold in Ireland." I would like to post the link of the song here, however, all the videos I found on the Internet are live versions with unsatisfactory quality. If you are interested in it, check out the nearby CD store and buy it. I guarantee it will worth the money. The Cranberries really had some good songs!



http://www.singingfool.com/Title.aspx?publishedid=965155

Laura Pausini《It's not Good-bye》

A beautiful song with catchy melody. Please enjoy!

Comments on 2009 AFL International Conference---Day 2, IB-201

I was the bell ringer for all the conference held in IB-201 on Friday. Here I would like to give my criticism to all speakers who gave presentations in the room first. Then I would give my brief summary to one of the presentation.

First thing I noticed was the outfit of the presenters. Although it was a formal event, only a few presenters dress properly. Many of them wore jackets instead of coats; many of the female presenters wore jeans; a presenter wore a pair of evening shoes without fitting around the heel. Second, about half of the presenters put too many words on their Power Point slides. They put almost put the whole script on their slides instead of only giving the necessary key words. Third, some presenters did not memorize the scripts but just bring them to the stage and read them to the audience. The result of doing this was they gave very little eye contact with the audience. Moreover, it showed their lack of confidence and preparation.

Speaking of preparation, I think fluency of the speech is also a sign to show how much a person prepares for his presentation. Unfortunately, I found many of speakers, mostly graduate students, paused or gave lots of meaningless utterance such as uh during the speech, which obstructed audiences’ concentration and understanding of the content.

Despite the drawbacks, still there are quite some impressive presentations, such as the “SynctoLearn: an Automatic Video and Script Synchronization Tools for ESL Learners” done by Dr. Hao-Jan Chen. Dr. Chen is an excellent speaker who not only delivered the content fluently and clearly, but also used eye contact and gestures to enhance the conveyance of his speech. For these reasons, his presentation left the most impression to me.

In his topic Dr. Chen introduced SynctoLearn, a system which provides the videos and its corresponding scripts in a way that looks quite alike the videokes you can find on the video screen of a Karaoke Box: the scripts are displayed along with changing color that indicates which word the people in the video is saying at the moment. Moreover, the system was designed to be accessible via the internet that makes it the perfect tool for distance learning. The system is an exciting new technology, however, Dr. Chen also pointed out the system is still under developing. It has some flaws such as the limited videos for learners to choose from due to the fact that all the videos and scripts has to be put togeter and proofreaded manually that consumes a lot of time. Furthermore, the process of editing and uploading somehow decreases the quality of the videos. In addition, the system is not open to anyone using the Internet because the server has certain load limit.

At the end of the presentation, Dr. Chen stated that his team is working on perfecting the system. Perhaps one day we will all be able to use it.

【Comments】CCRS

Comparing with dictionary, concordancers and colloaction retrieval system offers us more different words that go with the word we searched in a natural environment(In other words, they are not made to fulfill the purpose as the examples in dictionaries). NTNU Concordancer and Collocation Retrieval System even lists the frequency of the collocations so that we are able to learn the mostly used collocations and the ones that are not used often (which suggests us to avoide use such collocations ).

The weakness of CCRS is that the context that comes along with the search result is restricted, therefore makes it difficult to identify the meaning or the appropriate usage of the collocations.

I did not encounter any problem when using CCRS. However I wonder if the tool updates its databank continuously or else we shall not able to learn the new collocations from it.

Big vs. Large

The two words, big and large is similar in which both of them can be used in describe the size. The main difference is that large is particularly used in describing the amount. Such assertion can be made as we find phrases "a large amount of something," "a large number of something," and "a large quantity of something” appear a lot when we search "large" in corpus.

Alizée《À contre-courant》

Fresh voice, good song.

3/5 Feedback

This week's class and article are very useful.Not only did I learn some cool softwares, such as FastStone, but I also learned that fact that as a English major student, I This week's class and article are very useful.Not only did I learn some cool softwares, such as FastStone, but I also learned that fact that as a English major student, I knew too little about my friend, dictionary.


Before I read the article "你不可不知的字典知識," I did not know that there are so many different types of dictionaries, and people can look words or phrases up in different dictionaries according to the information they want to know.I even did not know that most paper dictionaries nowadays are accompanied with a CD-ROM, either.Looks like I have to have an update on the things that I use everyday ...@@


p.s. I have tried Yahoo Minipen at home. It was cute and helpful, however, quite annoying, for its windows pops up when my mouse cursor just happen to stay on a word for more than 2 seconds. Therefore, I uninstalled the software.

Lara Fabian《Tout》

Powerful and Impressive!


One fo the Best French singer, Lara Fabian, singing her well-known "Tout."


(you might need to turn up the volume a little bit )

Lenka《Trouble is a Friend》

1 Click For 3 mins & 37 secs Good Mood :-)

Hello! It's Andrea!

It's hard to introduce myself completely within 100 words cause I got so many interests...


(1)I am addicted to BL manga & novels.

(2)I read a lot. My favirote writer is 三毛(She's a genius!)and 沈石溪(He writes fascinating animal stories).

(3)I like to draw...I have learnt painting for 1 or 2 years...years ago

(4)I like watching ANTM, Project Runway, Desperate Housewives, Two and a Half man, anime, and Japanese TV programs:
Favirote Japanese TV show is London Hearts(男女糾察隊)
Favirote anime is always changing... Recently I fell in love with R.O.D. (Read or Die) It's a great cartoon talking about people with super powers such as having the ability to manipulate paper to his will... lots of special effects have been used.

(5)I am also found of singing, traveling, collecting various things including perfumes, glassbottles, stamps... and sewing(I even have a sewing machine of my own) and any kind of hands-on activities

My least favirote thing is washing dishes... I get furious everytime I'm told to wash dishes...perhaps I was the dishwasher in my past life:-(


Anyway, if you find that you share the same interests with me, welcome to leave a message in my blog, we can talk about it together some time^^