Fluency MC does collos!

Just connected with an edu-rapper, Fluency MC (Jason R. Levine), who creates music videos highlighting what he calls "collos" (short for collocations) of English vocabulary. In a recent conversation with Dr. Nellie Deutsch (WizIQ: Conversation with Jase: Teacher, Trainer[,] and Entertainer, 2012.09.20), he suggested that he might come to Japan in the future.

On his YouTube page, Levine defines a collo as "a high frequency CHUNK of language" (About Fluency MC). The following featured video, posted less than 24 hours ago, presents dozens of verb+noun collos to help English-as-an-additional language learners remember ways to use the verbs make and do.

 

If you like that, be sure to check out other videos in his English/EFL/ESL ColloLearn playlist. There are 34 of them as of today.

[125 words]

Wow, What Did I Miss? (2nd sem., day one)

In case you're not back from your summer holidays (or forgot classes started today, like I did about this time last year :-), here is a snapshot of class notes reflecting what we did. The main activities and assignments today covered accuracy (labeling issues), fluency (free-writing and extensive writing), portfolio (PF) foundation building, and homework.

To get a closer look, please click on the graphic (above). To find out details, please ask a classmate or peer who attended. If you have questions about classwork and other assignments shown here, questions your classmates and peers cannot answer, please post them in comments on this post. 

Last but not least, please plan to attend every class meeting for the rest of the semester, or to gather this sort of information on your own from now on. Thank you in advance for your cooperation. 

See you next week!

[145 words]

"Listen to English - learn English: the podcast website ...

... for people learning English" (title and tagline). This website presents prepared texts accompanied by audio recordings (MP3s) about three times a month on various topics of interest. Colloquial expressions, cultural notes, customs and traditions, ...; you name it, and you may be able to find it!

Can you imagine 40 to 50 thousand people all listening to Peter Carter, of Birmingham, England (Author and Copyright, 2005.12.25), at the same time? Recent recordings show download histories numbering in the tens of thousands. Apparently plenty of English learners and teachers around the world are making this one of their favorite sites. The visitor map in the sidebar indicates that there have nearly 17,000 visitors already this month, and over a million site visitors since 2006 (Visitors [ClusterMaps], Listen to English sidebar, 2009.05.12).

The quality of the recordings that I've sampled is impeccable, and the delivery, deliberate. However, the sophisticated language Carter uses might challenge intermediate level learners, especially those who give the MP3s a go without pre-reading his scripts or reading along while listening.

[172 words]

Essays that Weren't, and How to Make Them So

This is a follow-on to comments on a post that the blog author entitled "university life," but which was not even close to becoming an essay on university life. To provide a bit more background for the general advice about writing that follows, first let me share a comment I made confirming what one of the author's classmates had been quick to notice during peer reviews this morning. I wrote: "S... K. was ... right. What you wrote was too short to call an essay (only thirty-some words)" (pab, May 21, 2008).

I'd call the post on which S.K. and I left comments a quick post, rather than an essay. I recommend labeling it, and all other posts on your blogs like it (anything shorter than a five-minute typing test), "quickposts". Quick posts are fine for day-to-day fluency practice, and for logging ideas that you plan to write more about later (brainstorming). Book reviews, however, must be longer than typing tests; and essays, longer yet.

The minimum length for essays in Writing III is growing steadily:

1. 250+ words for self-introductions,
2. 300+ words for personal reviews of the movie Shrek, and
3. 350+ words for essays on university life (due Sunday, May 18, to be precise).

Other basic requirements are that essays be carefully composed and organized:

• composed in original sentences (neither copied nor machine-translated), and

• organized into five or more well-developed paragraphs (five or more sentences in length), including introductory and concluding paragraphs.

(... University Life - A reminder, May 14, 2008)

The author of the quick post on which we left those comments this morning expressed a desire to develop skills while he/she is studying at the university. Well, brainstorming, outlining, composing, (re-)organizing, and summarizing in writing ARE skills that you must demonstrate in essays, book reviews, and other posts on your blogs, if you want credit for this course.

[315 words]

Writing III Poll...: Comments - revisited

Last Wednesday (Sept. 26, 2007), three students made some very honest and thoughtful comments about blogging on a follow-up post about a poll we did at the end of spring semester: Writing III Poll (pukman, July 2007). I've thanked them for their comments in another comment on that post. Now I'd like to respond further here.

As I see it, blogging isn't always about correspondence; sometimes it is just like keeping a diary, or a notebook for ideas that you want to remember. For an example of a rough and ready notebook-type blog, used for various purposes, see pab's potpourri.

Some personal blogs get shared with only a small group of friends. In fact, some blogging tools let you decide about each and every post whether to keep it private or make it public. For example, pab’s vox blog is currently private.

As far as personal vocabularies go, I'm convinced that reading lots of easy books (remember your book review assignments?) and writing lots of blog posts will:

• Refresh vocabulary knowledge that you have already,
  
• Increase the size of your vocabularies, and
  
• Eventually make it easier and easier to produce written ideas with the words you know and are still learning.
  

Certainly, if your writing skills are not yet as good as you wish they were, blogging provides virtually endless opportunities to practice writing. So blog on!

[231 words]

A learner's view on fluency

学習の学習

... [L]anguage learning is only a tool; finding what you can do with it is much more important than being fluent.

(Nakao, 2005, p. 6)

What Nakao suggests, as she reflects on difficulties in a challenging new environment, is belief in a need to actually use the tool that you're getting in order to find out "what you can do with it."

I share her belief in the necessity of language use both in learning a language and in remembering what you've learned.

Use it or lose it; blog!

Reference

Nakao, Yuri. (2005). Discovering learner/teacher autonomy in myself: remarks on the one-day LD Conference. Learning Learning: JALT Learner Development SIG Newsletter, 12(1), 5-10.