Google Lab's Ngram Viewer

Sorry not to have been with you for a week but my week has been a bit busier than usual!  (= awesomely busy!!!)

'Awesome' is not a word I normally use regularly.  How long has the word 'awesome' been around?  10 years?  100 years?  How can I find out?

One very quick way of checking is to visit the Google Ngram Viewer:  http://books.google.com/ngrams/

If you feed in the word 'awesome' like I did, you get a graph like this:

From this we can see that the word 'awesome' does not appear to have been widely in use before 1870, and became very popular and frequent around 1980. The graph shows how a word which has existed for hundreds of years but has always been very rare can suddenly acquire a much more general meaning and become a part of the everyday language when it gets picked up by teenagers. 

So what exactly is the Google Ngram Viewer?  Well, around 5.20 million books written in English, French, Spanish, German, Chinese and Russian were digitalised.  This produced a database containing 500 billion words which had appeared in these books (published between 1500 and 2008).  

On the Ngram Viewer website, you can feed in a string of up to 5 words, click and within seconds, a graph charting the frequency of use of the word or string of words appears. 

For more information (and some fascinating examples of how world events and trends can influence the use of words), I thoroughly recommend the following TED talk. You'll see why I chose to use the word 'awesome' at the start of this blog post!!!

http://www.ted.com/talks/what_we_learned_from_5_million_books.html

Read More

Recording students describing photos

Hello again!  Sorry I've been 'missing' for a few days but life has been even more hectic than usual this week!  And it hasn't been for a lack of ideas to share with you on this blog, believe me!  I have a file full of materials and lots of links saved in my 'For later' file on my computer.

So, let's make a start on one of them!

As I told you recently, I gave a talk at the TESOL Spain 2012 Convention.

As well as giving my talk, I was able to attend a few sessions.  The first one I went to a Keynote presentation given by Russell Stannard.  Here he is in action:

(Thanks Donna Koniholm for the great photos you took at the Convention!) 

I've been reading articles and tips from Russell Stannard for a long long time.  Quite deservedly, his website http://www.teachertrainingvideos.com/  has won lots of awards.

For a quick (3 minute) presentation of the site by Russell himself, I recommend watching this video.

During Russell's TESOL presentation, the tool that really caught my eye was MailVU:  http://mailvu.com/.

This allows you to record video clips on a computer using the microphone and webcam and then send them to an email contact.

Here is Russell's description of the potential use of this site for language teachers:

… you can get the students to do recordings of themselves speaking in English at home … and then sending those recordings to you, you can then listen to them and obviously give them some feedback on their oral performance…

Watch Russell explaining this site here.


So, of course, me being a Cambridge ESOL teacher and teacher trainer, I thought:  What a fantastic tool to practise the 1 minute talking about photos tasks in the Cambridge English: Preliminary, First, Advanced and Proficiency Speaking Tests!!!

Let's consider how you could go about this:
For homework, tell students which photo(s) you want them to talk about and the question you want them to answer in relation to the photo(s)

For example,

Here are your photographs.  They show people spending their free time in different ways.  I'd like you to compare the photographs and say what are the advantages and disadvantages for the people of spending their free time in these different ways.  

Source:  First for Schools Handbook

You send students a link to MailVU by email.  They open the link, record themselves doing the task, and send you the clip by email.  You watch it and can give them feedback (by return of email/record a video of yourself talking about their performance/discuss the clip with them in class (maybe while you both watch the video).

I believe it has fantastic potential for working on this part of the Cambridge ESOL speaking tests!

If you try it out, please let us know about it!

Read More