Mozuku

This month I’d like to focus on some search tools that mostly specialize in vocabulary. I don’t feel really comfortable using the term “search engine” since most people associate that with the Google-powered tool that sits prominently somewhere on the page that opens when you launch your browser. But most people are now making use of multiple search tools—Google books, image or video search tools, etc.—on a daily basis and just as you would use certain search tools to search for images, the tools here can be used to help you investigate and better understand lexical items (words, phrases, or longer fixed expressions).

First and most impressive this month is Visuwords. Type in a word or phrase and get a visual “map” of the word’s meanings and associations. Hover your cursor over any term to get more explanation or definitions. This must be seen to be believed. You will be impressed: I promise.

Next is ERek, a search tool that brings up instances or examples from either the whole web or only .edu (academic) sites or only news sites. This can be very helpful in identifying collocations or just seeing how the lexical item is used. A great tool.

Amazon.com allows you to search inside many books. If you would like some good examples of a lexical item in use in a certain area (economics, TESOL, etc.) you just choose a book in that area and search in the book for your item. For example, I just chose the book Understanding Motivation and Emotion by Johnmarshall Reeve (Wiley) and did a search for the word “identity.” My search produced 30 examples from the book.

If you would like to know how two similar terms (start vs. begin, for example) compare  in usage volume (frequency) on the web, Googlefight can help you. Just input the two terms and the system returns the number of times they can be found on the web. This can also be used to check out cultural items (hambuger vs. hot dog, or Pokemon vs. Dragonball, for example).

And finally, there is a new search engine in development that may just be the way all search engines work in the future. It is called Wolfram Alpha. It tries to understand your questions and return data in a way that matches your needs. It is still in development, but vocabulary searches seem to work well. If you search for a term, you get definitions, origins, frequency information (written and spoken), pronunciation, and much more. Give it a try and taste the future.

Welcome to October. Though the column this month features Halloween as its topic, I’ll be introducing a variety of sites—something for academic searching, a place to be creative or let your learners get creative, and a tool that just might save you some time.

Halloween

On the train the other day I saw a poster for Disneyland with that unmistakable orange and black design. Disneyland has really embraced Halloween as one of its seasonal themes, just one of many signs that students in Japan are now familiar the festival and its imagery. The history of Halloween is more interesting than just pumpkin faces, however, and can be good content for an English lesson. Here are two sites that you can use as a resource, or even send your more advanced learners to.

CBBC (BBC News Learning Site) has a nice short summary of the festival and its history and images.

History.com’s Halloween page is a wealth of resources including videos, background information, pumpkin carving suggestions, and related stories.

A Free E-book Search Engine

It is remarkable how many books are now being released online for free these days under the Creative Commons license, usually in pdf form. I have recently downloaded Opening Up Education, edited by Toru Iiyoshi and Vijay Kumar, and A Designer’s Log: Case Studies in Instructional Design by Michael Power. And recently I came across a new search engine for e-books, which should make it even easier to find free books online. It’s called Free E-Book-s.

Get Creative

Looking for a nice writing project for your learners? Storybird gives you the tools to write storybooks (like children’s picture books) online. Artists post their work at the site and you can just browse for images to use, choose a few, and write a story. The results are simple (as in not so much written text) but are surprisingly sophisticated. The completed stories can be viewed online and in the near future you will be able to print out your stories too.

Save Some Time

The Scholastic Vocabulary Quiz Maker: Here is a vocabulary test making robot brought to you by Scholastic. Go to the page, input your vocabulary (just the vocabulary, not the definitions or examples) and let the system create a vocabulary test for you. The system provides the definitions for you. And you can select the grade level of difficulty to control the difficulty of the definitions. It’s all in English—sorry, no translations are allowed—but it makes a test that you can easily adapt (copy and paste and edit) for use with your own learners.

When I first came to Japan years ago I was impressed by the widespread use of maps. People drew maps for each other when giving directions, for example, and almost every advertisement seemed to feature a map of some sort. Times have changed, everyone has a cell phone and businesses now all have websites, but the use of maps has not. There still seems to be one on every site these days—only now it is usually an embedded interactive Google map.

Google Maps uses JavaScript and XML, or KML (Keyhole Markup Language), an XML-based language. Using this code, some web tools have appeared that allow users to add additional information onto embedded maps, things like pins for locations, extra information or images, and more. For English learners, these tools can allow them to easily produce and share authentic and meaningful geographical presentations. Instead of just writing about their hometowns, for example, learners can identify interesting and historical places and introduce them on a map. Pictures and links to websites can also be added. Any assignment with a geographical or historical theme can make use of these tools, I think. The final products can be viewed at the tool site or embedded into a blog or CMS. Some sites don’t require registration either.

At Click 2 Map (registration required), you can create a map and add a marker at each desired location. Each marker can contain text, photos, videos or any other HTML content.

Quikmaps (registration not required for some functions) allows you to do much the same but you can also doodle on your map with a marker pen function. I find this allows the maps to look more personalized.

UMapper (registration not required for basic service) has similar functions to the other two sites. You can also create or try taking geographical quizzes for fun.

In an introductory writing course I teach, the textbook asks students to make a scrapbook to introduce themselves. There is even space provided–in the form of topic titles and empty square boxes to write in located in the last few pages of the textbook. There are  interesting and exciting topics such as “My Favorite Holiday” and “What I Do to Stay Healthy” and “My Daily Activities.”  But the best part is the big blank title page, a full-sized blank page with nothing on it but the words, “My Autobiography, by ______________.” Students simply add their names and then apply their creative energy to filling up all that blankness by drawing pictures or pasting in pictures to illustrate their activites, health tips and favorite holidays, etc. The lockstep nature of the whole thing is distasteful. It squelches creativity. And while I do sometimes ask learners to write on some of the topics fixed for them in the autobiography, I have never asked them to do the whole thing the way the writers of the book suggest. I find the whole thing really uninteresting, from any perspective I try on it (with the possible exception of the publisher who is getting paid for mostly blank pages). Instead I get learners to write in their journals and I give them different topics or similar topics with a different focus we all agree are more interesting. But it is still text.

Blogs can be a better alternative, if you intend to make a lot of use of them in a course. But for lower level learners and learners who don’t have the computer literacy, or when we just want to allow for a little more creativity in a face to face classroom-based situation, there is a flexible tool available. It is called Glogster and allows you to make a digtal multimedia “poster.” Like the autobiograhy title page in the writing textbook, it is a single blank page. But unlike that page, it screams out to be filled up with images, video, info or poetry.  As a platform it forces the learners to think about design and content. And the results are engaging. The posters on display at the site are now organized by categories (rather loosely, however), and you can take a look at some of the ways others have expressed themselves: travelogues, interactive calendars, cartoons, movie intros (with the preview, critics’ opinions, etc.). A great resource, no registration and no downloading required.

There is a Second Life-like site that I recently came across. It looks more like a wholesome version of the Sims, with buggy or jet ski races, fashion shows, scavenger hunts and other such activities and events. It might be a good alternative to Second Life, especially for younger learners. I haven’t tried it yet, but it looks like it could work well. Sign up is free for now.

Chatroll is a chat-discussion tool that recently opened. Learners can join or start discussions on any topic.

As I mentioned in my last post, increasing the amount of time learners engage in English is essential for success. Of equal, or I should say related importance, is the need to provide activities where learners can participate in communities of use–places where they can construct identities of themselves as English users. Hanna & de Nooy (2003) asked students learning French to participate in online debate forums at the Le Monde newspaper website. Their students met with mixed success. The ones who wrote simplistic messages asking for help learning French were ignored or met with sarcastic comments. Others who tried hard to actively participate and express their ideas, met with better success. The focus for everyone–the native French users in the forum and the learners–had to remain on the content of the discussion. Hanna and de Nooy say “…the critically important message for this study, framed in the vernacular, is that if you want to communicate with real people, you need to self-present as a real person yourself. From an instructional perspective, encouraging (or requiring) students to participate in noneducationally oriented online communities would involve teaching students how to recognize genres, and subsequently, how to engage in discussion that does not ultimately revolve around the self…as the exotic little foreigner/the other” (pg. 73). That means that using the language and participating as an individual is essential to identity formation and language development.

Which brings us to the big problem of where. Forums for language learners are often too simplistic (”Hi, my name is Hanako and I like music. Do you like music?”) or learners may have been forced to participate and are not likely to participate further (”I’m Ali. I lke pretty girl….aaaaammmmmmmaaaaaaaaaaa!!!!!!!!!!”). Large forums for native speakers (or near-natives) may be out of reach for many or most of our learners, as the Le Monde exercise showed. The answer might be smaller forums on much more specific topics that learners already have expertise in. Lam (2000, 2004) followed the development of a learner who found his voice and his entrance-way into linguistic competence (of a sort, anyway) by participation in blogs related to a Japanese pop singer. On the negative side, the dangers of this type of learning don’t go away so easily. These sites can also just as easily host predators as active learners. Students need a little heads-up training in online community self defense.

A new site and promising site for this kind of participation is Chatroll, where people find chat partners by topic. The name is made from combining chat with blogroll. There are already lots of topics here, but users are free to create their own topics. This latter function is what makes the site really useful, I believe. Learners can more easily get to linguistic competence and an identity as an English user if it develops through their topic identity. But they need to be able to find or create a group that specifically matches that topic. By being part of a group of similarly-interested individuals, the chances of meaningful interaction are greatly increased. The only problem at this point is that there aren’t that many people in the Chatroll system yet. Hopefully that will change. There may be some topics here that instructors are uncomfortable with ( the flirting group comes to mind immediately, and there is probably some more dicey or racy content). I plan to get my students to report on what they do in their blogs so I can monitor as best I can how they participate.

It seems that there are almost too many tools available these days to allow students to interact with course material and with each other. In a Treasure Hunt column many months ago I introduced Splashcast and how it can be used in Moodle to deliver student-produced content into a course. What I did at the time was to record students as they spoke in class in a Speech and Debate class and then feed the recordings into a Moodle page with a Splashcast player. This allowed all students the chance to hear (and compare) the voices of all students from one page. It was fun, it worked well and the interface was easy to use. The downside (or the upside, depending on your point of view I guess) was that the entire exercise had to be controlled by the instructor. It didn’t take all that much time–the students simply took turns doing their short speeches into my laptop along with their turns speaking for different partners in class. But it did provide a few logistical challenges, and if you have more than 10 or 12 students, the exercise will probably be unmanageable to do in class, and that means more scheduling challenges. A better way might be to use VoiceThread. Here, students can post sample speeches, and post comments on any image or media you load onto the page. They have the choice of voice comments or text (for those students who don’t have a microphone) and the interface is very clean and very intuitive. Though the VoiceThread people have created a safe space for K-12 learners and educators, EFL students are left to their own in the regular part of the service. That said, I searched around and didn’t find any content anyone in my classes might need to warned about. I love the way student comments are arranged around the media: this can make the experience more classroom-like (by which I mean familiar, in a good way). Registration needs an e-mail address and a password, as well as a name.

Update: There is a good tutorial available for VoiceThread here. The authors are especially interested in using this tool for digital storytelling.

A teacher at my college recently introduced me to iKnow, a vocabulary self-study site for Japanese learners (the interface is only in Japanese at present). It teaches vocabulary and then provides dictation exercises a little bit similar to the Nintendo DS　えいご漬け (Eigo-zuke) games, which are very popular. The interface is very clean and the audio quality is good and it loads quickly. Like Eigo-zuke, my only complaint is that it is a little too focused on sentence-level language and there is not a lot of context provided. However, iKnow seems to be making a lot of use of collocations and that is quite a nice characteristic to have (instead of the usual semantic groupings of items we find on most vocabulary sites) and the recordings used in the dictation are clear and at a good speed not painfully slow (or overly_separated_and_annunciated) as is often the case . A very nice resource, especially for self-studiers.

Two games to introduce here that are accessible to English learners in Japan. The first is Phantasy Quest. It is simple but engaging with limited vocabulary. You play a shipwrecked sailor trying to find his way around an unfamiliar island with suspicious inhabitants and find the woman who was on the ship with him before the shipwreck. The next is Job Pico, a challenging problem/mystery-solving puzzle in which you try to escape from a room. The situation is that it is a kind of job interview task that you need to perform to show that you have the smarts needed for the job. It’s a nice interface (playable in both Japanese or English for people who might get stuck and want to remove the language barrier for a while). The game has great 3-D walk-through graphics and could be used for some reading practice or, even better, for a type of do and report orally assignment.