EFS 689E - STANFORD UNIVERSITY

Learning English on Your Own

Notes

Home | Syllabus | Week 1 | Week 2 | Week 3 | Week 4 | Week 5 | Week 6

EFS 689E: Learning English on Your Own

Week 4: Techniques and Procedures for Improving Language Skills

            B. Cooperative learning at www.livemocha.com and www.mylanguageexchange.com 

            C. Working with your English persona

                    1. Review your answers; think of yourself as an actor playing this person

                    2. Have a conversation--ask and answer questions about your character; listen to what your partner says

                    3. Focus on your accent: try to sound as close as possible to the character you have chosen

III. Writing resources

            A. Methods
                1. Post to discussion lists at Dave's ESL Cafe or EnglishBaby
                2. Keep an English journal (just for yourself) or blog: www.blogger.com; http://blog.com
                3. Write to friends and colleagues or find a "keypal" at
                4. Post short stories and comments to yours or friend's Facebook pages or Google+.

            B. University of Wisconsin's Writer's Handbook

            C. Advice on proofreading (final editing)

            D. Online textbook in English for academic purposes

            E. Other links from the Advanced Graduate Writing website

            F. Email language exchanges: Interpals (www.interpals.net/).

IV. Group discussion: your independent project so far

            - What have you been doing?

            - How have you been doing it?

            - What do you think you could do to make it more effective?

V. Setting language learning goals and objectives

Although some people use the terms goal and objective to mean the same thing, it is useful to see them as different. We can think of goals as being

·         Large scale
·         Long term
·         Abstract
·         Not necessarily testable

Objectives are targets that you try to achieve on the way to a larger goal: objectives tend to be

·         Small scale
·         Short term
·         Concrete
·         Testable

A goal in sports for example might be “get in shape.” Examples of objectives would be “lose 5 pounds,” “do 50 pushups,” or “run 10K in under 50 minutes.” An important step in learning English on your own is to set both goals and objectives. The more specific the objectives are, the better.  

Objectives can be set in various terms. The best for language are performance objectives, stating what you can do, such as “tell a story about a recent event using appropriate verb forms” or “read a newspaper at 150 words or more a minute and be able to summarize its main ideas.” You can also set learning objectives, such as “learn 25 new words this week.” Another type of objective to set is by amount of material covered, such as “read a book” or “watch a movie”—often this should be accompanied by at least a general performance objective such as “and understand the main ideas”.  Finally, because there is a correlation between time and learning (though only a rough one), you can set time objectives, such as “read Google News stories for 30 minutes each day.”  

For your individual meeting this week, identify one general goal you have for English (this can be something we’ve talked about before). Then, set several specific objectives that will help you make progress toward that goal.

V. Some techniques and strategies

            A. Selecting materials and other resources. For the past three weeks you have been introduced to a variety of online materials and resources for learning on your own. Now you need to be looking ahead to what material you want to use in the future. Remember that the material that is best for learning is often

·         On familiar topics
·         Interesting to you personally
·         At an appropriate language level (not too easy or too hard, though this may depend on the objective)
·         Good quality in terms of sound and text clarity

In addition, for listening material it is good to have text support (captions and/or transcripts) available

            B. Dictation. Copying down exactly what you hear is called dictation or transcribing. This activity can help you improve your language processing, as well as help you identify vocabulary and grammatical forms you don't know. There are various ways you can do dictation, but one useful technique is to get as much complete information as you can in one "bite". For example, if you have a sentence like "For the past three weeks you have been introduced to a variety of online materials and resources for learning on your own," it is better to listen to part of it, pause and write that down, ("For the past three weeks") and then listen to the next part ("you have been introduced"), pause and write it down, and so on, rather than listening to the whole sentence and just writing down the parts you remember, and then listening to the whole sentence again and filling in some of the missing material. Over time, you can let those "bites" get longer and longer. The material you use for dictation should be material you can understand all or most of--I do not recommend using difficult material that you already find hard to understand. If you are at a lower level, try the easier dialogues at www.esl-lab.com or the simplified news stories at http://www.cdlponline.org/. Note that 1) you do not need to do whole sentences at a time and 2) it is usually best not to listen more than 2-3 times before checking your answer.

            C. Vocabulary selection and review.  For selection, look first to the basic word lists: the General service list and the Academic word list. You can also Google to look for a vocabulary list, lexicon, or glossary for a specific field like business or medicine e.g., "business glossary". As noted in previous weeks, you can put texts into the BNC 20 application to get a listing of higher and lower frequency words to help make your selection. Once you have identified words and placed them into some form of a database (such as an Excel spreadsheet) together with their definitions/translations and example sentences, you should break them into groups of words to review (groups of 10-20 are recommended). You can create paper flashcards for this. Simply studying lists is not recommended--there is a tendency to remember words in terms of their location relative to others in the list. There are also a number of online programs that help both with direct study of the words and with tracking and suggesting timetables for review. See www.flashcarddb.com; www.ichi2.net/anki; www.wordchamp.com. Note that these come with their own vocabulary lists if you would like to try them, but I recommend creating your own based on words of your choice. For those interested in studying idioms, quizzes can be found at http://a4esl.org/q/h/idioms.html.

Remember, reviewing vocabulary: keeping a word list is only the first step--it is critical to review it regularly. One recommendation is to review new words you have learned after 1, 3, 10, 30, and 90 days. Another is to review the words every two days for a week. For review, it's best to have a way to randomize the presentation of words/definitions. If you have them in Excel, and don't want to make vocabulary cards or use the preceding websites, you can use the RAND function (http://www.brainbell.com/tutorials/ms-office/excel/Random_Sorting.htm).

            D. A technique for reading practice

                    1. Go to Google News and find an interesting story.
                    2. Pick 3 or 4 different sources for that story,
                    3. Read the shortest story first quickly. After you finish it, do (E) below--read it again, looking up unknown words
                    4.  Read the rest of the stories--some of the words you just looked up will probably appear in a new context and be reinforced
                    5. Save useful words for review

            E. A technique for getting instant definitions of vocabulary words

                    1. Download Answer Tips to your Firefox browser.
                    2. Go to Google News or another website with source material in text-readable format (no pdfs)
                    3. After reading the material once quickly for the general meaning, go back and select unknown words that look interesting and alt-click on them for the definition
                    4. Copy the word, relevant part of the definition, and the sentence it occurs in into a table or spreadhseet for vocabulary practice

                        Note: if you already use Babylon, it will do just as well or better. You may be aware of other such "instant dictionaries" and may use one of them instead.

            F. An example procedure for working on reading speed

1. Collect several short news articles from Google News (you can use the procedure above to decide appropriateness). You can also use short academic papers for this.

2. Put them individually into word documents: you can take out unnecessary information (ads, etc.)

3. Without reading them, use the word count feature and write the total # of words at the bottom

4. Later, pick one out and read it as quickly as you can while maintaining comprehension. Check the time and figure out your words per minute.

5. Check comprehension by writing a quick phrasal summary of the main ideas.

6. Reread the material more slowly, checking what's there against your summary to get a sense of how well you comprehended. Reflect on what you picked up and missed and why.

VI. Return to motivation: your "English self": What is your ideal self as an English speaker in both the short and long term? Think about this and we'll discuss it more next week.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Homework

1) FOR THE INDIVIDUAL MEETING - Come prepared to discuss your individual project. Identify one general goal you have for English (this can be something we’ve talked about before). Then, set two or more specific objectives that will help you make progress toward that goal. Identify some materials and techniques that are consistent with those objectives. Think about your "English self" (who you actually want to become, not your "persona" or avatar).

2) FOR MONDAY AUGUST  6 - Write a report on the individual assignment.  Include the following information:
        What were your objectives?
        What materials did you use?
        What techniques did you use? (give examples--you don't have to list every detail)
        How successful were you at meeting your objectives? How do you know?

Email the report to me by 10:00 PM Monday August 6.

3) FOR THE NEXT CLASS - Come prepared to talk about your goals, objectives, and favorite materials and techniques with your classmates. Also, start thinking about your final presentation: the assignment appears below. We will discuss this in groups during the next class.

Personal Course Outline Assignment

One lesson: Give a detailed description of one lesson you will do during the first week. Include the materials you plan to use and the procedure you will use for going through it. (see example below)

Part II.

Six month program (after your one-month course)