May 24, 2013

New General Service List Now Online

To the uninitiated it sounds like some sort of bureaucratic menu, but the General Service List, first developed in 1953, is a set of 2,000 words selected to be of the greatest "general service" to learners of English. In printed form, the list is a medium-sized red book, organized like a dictionary. The list had a wide influence in English language teaching over the latter half of the 20th century, serving as the basis for graded readers as well as other material. But it has also been criticized for being based on a corpus that is considered to be both dated and, at about 2.5 million words, too small by modern standards.

With the guidance of Professor Paul Nation and approved use of the Cambridge English Corpus, Dr. Charles Browne, Dr. Brent Culligan and Joseph Phillips have worked together to created a new General Service List (NGSL) of important vocabulary words for students of English as a second language. The new list has 2,368 "word families" compared to the original's 1,964 and is based on a corpus of some 273 million words.

While still in some respects a work in progress, the NGSL is available for download free of charge, in both lemmatized and headwords-only formats, from the New General Service List website

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2013 ELTon Winners

The ELTons, sponsored by Cambridge ESOL and now in their 11th year, were held in London on May 22. The ELTons are the only international awards that recognise and celebrate innovation in English language teaching (ELT).

2013 ELTon Winners:

Excellence in Course Innovation
Hooray! Let’s play! - Helbling Languages

Innovation in learner resources
DVD Readers – Mary Glasgow Scholastic

Innovation in teacher resources
Film English – Kieran Donaghy

Digital innovation
Cool Speech: Hot Listening, Cool Pronunciation – Speech in Action/Firsty Group

Local innovation
English in Action: Teaching and Learning Programme – English in Action, Bangladesh.

The Macmillan Education Award for Innovative Writing
CLIL-Biology Towards IGCSE: Content and Language Integrated Learning towards International Science standards – Y.L. Teresa Ting

The Lifetime Achievement Award
Brita Haycraft

Watch a recording of the awards and find out more about the winners on the British Council website

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May 23, 2013

Computer Research Project Shows Shift in English Language

Here's an interesting one for you English language history buffs

University of Illinois English professor Ted Underwood recently wrapped up a research project involving more than 4,200 books. Since that work revealed dramatic shifts in the English language between the 18th and 19th centuries, he’s now expanding his research to include more than 470,000 books—almost every English language book written during that era and preserved in a university library.

...

He initially set out simply to confirm his hunch that the English language acquired a bit of starchiness around 1800. “There’s a very Latinate diction that sets in around that time,” he says. “I had a vague sense that written English became more formal. For example, you no longer ‘need’ something; you ‘require’ it.”

Read the full article from R & D Mag.

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May 22, 2013

Macmillan Education in ELT partnership with Knewton

Macmillan Education has announced a global partnership with personalised learning specialists Knewton to produce a new generation of digital English Language teaching materials.

The publisher's Knewton-enhanced materials will become available to students in 2015 and will offer "a fully adaptive experience, featuring real-time student recommendations and highly personalised instructional and assessment content specially designed for language learning".

Bryan Fletcher, Macmillan Education global digital publishing director, said this was Knewton's first global English Language teaching deal.

"What Knewton does is take learning data, and have a very robust system of data categorisation and analysis. The partnership will help us come up with better learning analytics and recommendations," he said. "We'll create big online courses, blended courses . . . When a student does something online, a lot of data is generated. We will be able to analyse that to understand students' weaknesses and strengths, and analyse what type of materials help a particular type of student. We can personalise learning."

A New York-based adaptive learning startup launched in 2008, Knewton also has partnerships with a number of learning companies, publishers (including Pearson, Wiley and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), universities and schools. The company has said it expects to reach 5 million students by the end of this year.

Read a related story from Gigaom.

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May 21, 2013

Watch ELTons Live on BC Website

The ELTons, sponsored by Cambridge ESOL and now in their 11th year, will be held in London on May 22. The ELTons are the only international awards that recognise and celebrate innovation in English language teaching (ELT). Watch the event live on the British Council website, where you can also see the full list of this year's nominees in categories such as Excellence in Course Innovation and Innovation in Teacher Resources.

The red carpet interviews will be from 18.15-18.45 and the ceremony will be from 19.00-20.00 UK time.

British Council website

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Upcoming Events in Korea, Singapore

A quick reminder of two major events coming up in Asia in the next week.

The Korea TESOL National Conference 2013 will be held this weekend, May 25-26, at the Korea National University of Education. The conference brings together several key concepts in contemporary TESOL (including professional development, second language acquisition, theory informing practice, classroom-centered research projects, and pedagogy) into a meaningful theme, Developing Professionally: Plug-and-Play SLA Pedagogy, which seeks to provide teachers with practical ideas that can be readily applied in their classrooms.

The international plenary speaker is Dr. Keith Folse, an internationally renowned scholar and lecturer. Perhaps best known for his many books on grammar, he is an Associate Professor of TESOL at the University of Central Florida. Invited guest speakers include Dr. Kim Jeong-Ryeol (President of the Korea Association of Foreign Languages Education) and Robert S. Murphy, a leading voice for “neuroELT” in Asia.

KOTESOL website

At the National University of Singapore, the CELC Symposium 2013 will be held between May 27-29. It is the fourth international symposium for English language teachers held by the Centre for English Language Communication, and combines classroom-based research paper presentations, workshops, demonstrations, poster sessions, and colloquia to give presenters and participants an enriching professional experience. This year's theme is Alternative Pedagogies in the English Language and Communication Classroom and the keynote speakers are professors Christopher Candlin (Macquarie University), Ulla Connor (Indiana University), William Grabe (Northern Arizona University), and Ann Johns (San Diego State University).

CELC Symposium 2013 website

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Study Shows How Bilinguals Switch Between Languages

The Association for Psychological Science reports on research into how bilinguals switch between languages.

Individuals who learn two languages at an early age seem to switch back and forth between separate “sound systems” for each language, according to new research conducted at the University of Arizona.

The research, to be published in a forthcoming issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, addresses enduring questions in bilingual studies about how bilingual speakers hear and process sound in two different languages.

“A lot of research has shown that bilinguals are pretty good at accommodating speech variation across languages, but there’s been a debate as to how,” said lead author Kalim Gonzales, a psychology doctoral student at the University of Arizona. “There are two views: One is that bilinguals have different processing modes for their two languages — they have a mode for processing speech in one language and then a mode for processing speech in the other language. Another view is that bilinguals just adjust to speech variation by recalibrating to the unique acoustic properties of each language.”

Gonzales’s research supports the first view — that bilinguals who learn two languages early in life learn two separate processing modes, or “sound systems.”

The study looked at 32 Spanish-English early bilinguals, who had learned their second language before age 8. Participants were presented with a series of pseudo-words beginning with a ‘pa’ or a ‘ba’ sound and asked to identify which of the two sounds they heard.

Read the full press release.

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