Tech tools in EAP: an #EAPchat contribution

The topic for next Monday's #EAPchat is:

"What tech is good tech for EAP?"

As I'm going to be away and will miss the chat, I thought I'd share my contribution in advance here instead. To be honest, on the very short, intensive, pre-sessional courses I teach on, I don't get much chance to play around with all the tech stuff I'd really like to, but below are a few things I have managed to squeeze in successfully in the past:

Online dictionaries: Perhaps unsurprisingly with my lexicography background, I'm keen on teaching/ encouraging dictionary skills and I think for EAP, that element of independent learning is even more important, so I use dictionaries a lot in class. Having them up on screen means I can more easily highlight useful features like collocations in examples and specialist senses (which are often the ones relevant in EAP and which students often miss down at the bottom of an entry). I tend to swap between the different online learner's dictionaries available to demo what's available to students:

OUP:  http://oald8.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/ 
CUP: http://dictionary.cambridge.org/
Macmillan:  http://www.macmillandictionary.com/

Vocabulary Profiler: I try to demo the Compleat Lexical Tutor vocab profiler at least once with each class when I'm talking about the nature of academic language and the AWL. I put a text we've been working with through it to highlight the AWL words and show the breakdown of vocabulary (top 2000, AWL and 'specialist'). I don't generally make a big thing of the AWL (there isn't time on such a short course), but I find it helps students get a feel for academic vocabulary and style. Some students, especially from science and engineering tend to like the statistical/mathematical element of it and in my last group, a couple of students (one engineering and the other seismology) independently put their own writing through it and brought me the results. One lad consciously worked on getting his AWL 'score' up to 15% and I have to say, his writing style did noticeably improve! It's probably not an approach I'd actively promote, but if it works for some students ...

Corpora:  I also try to demo a corpus search at least once with a group and again, it depends on the type of students as to whether they latch onto it or not. (I don't push it if it doesn't get a good reaction.) A few years ago, I had a group of mostly Taiwanese English teachers preparing for an MA TESOL who were very into language and loved it. I try to introduce it when a language query has cropped up in class or in feedback on a writing task. I probably wouldn't risk doing a live off-the-cuff search as a first demo (in case it turns out to be messy and more confusing than helpful), instead I'll trial it at home first and if it's looking good, I'll repeat it in class. Patterns following a particular word (following prepositions or verb forms) work particularly well as they show up really clearly on screen (search for the key word then sort right and the patterns appear as if by magic!). Nowadays, I tend to use the BAWE corpus, made up of student writing, because it's the most relevant to what my students are aiming to produce. I know it's available on various platforms, but I access it via Sketch Engine: https://the.sketchengine.co.uk/open/ 

Whenever I use a tool or website in class, I put the link and some basic instructions on Blackboard (the university's online platform on which each class has its own space), so that students can follow up for themselves if they want. I'd love to experiment with other things, but on an intensive course there are so many competing priorities and things to fit in, I'm just pleased with whatever I can squeeze in and even more happy when it turns out to be just the thing to pique some students' interest.

Sorry I won't be able to join in on Monday, but I'll look forward to catching up on all your tips and links after the event ...

The future of dictionaries (2): lexicographer versus computer

Some 20-odd years ago, as a young, Linguistics undergraduate, I became interested in the concept of computers ‘understanding’ human language. I did my undergraduate dissertation on Natural Language Processing (NLP), considering how far computers might go in really understanding language in all its subtle, complex, nuanced detail, and holding up the talking computer Hal, from Kubrick’s 1968 film 2001, as what I then suggested was an unobtainable goal. I went on to start a Master’s course in Computer Speech and Language Processing. I only lasted a term – mainly because I discovered I really hated all the computer programming involved, but also because I was disappointed to find that most of the course seemed to revolve around the speech processing side (i.e. voice recognition) and the language processing component came down to rather vague theoretical discussions that didn’t go much beyond my basic undergraduate research. Okay, that may be a bit of a distorted recollection of the actual course content, but I was only 21 and that’s how you see things when you’re barely out of your teens!

Obviously, in the intervening decades, technology has come on in leaps and bounds. Speech recognition has improved immeasurably - I'm actually dictating this blog post using speech recognition software and while it's not perfect, it's considerably more impressive than my early efforts are programming! I have to hold up my hands here and admit that I haven't kept up-to-date with developments in NLP, but I suspect progress has been much slower; we're still an incredibly long way from communicating with our technology in the same fluent way we can chat to our friends.

So, what’s any of this got to do with dictionaries? Well, let me try and explain my train of thought, triggered by the announcement by Macmillan back at the start of November that they are to stop printing paper dictionaries and focus on their online content:

• If publishers aren't actually selling paper dictionaries but are mostly focusing on a free online service, how much are they going to be prepared to spend on the time-consuming and labour-intensive work of lexicography?
• Of course, they'll be looking into other related income streams, selling dictionary data for other uses, and online advertising, but without a tangible, on-the-shelf product, will that justify quite the same budget?
• Reduced budgets often suggest a drive towards more automation, something we've already seen with the emergence of developments such as ‘TickBox lexicography’.
• Will more automation and “more efficient” ways of working inevitably lead to a drop in standards?

Clever developments in making the dictionary compilation process more automated do supposedly speed it up, for example, by automatically selecting ‘good’ dictionary examples from a corpus, to save a human lexicographer having to trawl through by hand. But any lexicographer who's worked with them will know that they only work to a degree and only speed things up to a certain extent … probably not quite compensating for the increased rate expected of said lexicographer without a drop in quality.

And then there's the whole established process for keeping dictionaries up-to-date. Currently, most dictionaries undergo a revision and a new edition every five years or so. This is a long, slow, and labour-intensive process that involves a team of lexicographers (mostly freelancers nowadays) going through the whole A-Z, looking at each entry and checking whether it needs updating. This doesn’t just involve adding trendy new buzzwords like ‘omnishambles’ or whatever – which are rarely of much use, or interest, to the average foreign learner anyway. There are all kinds of more subtle changes in the usage of existing words, sometimes due to linguistic trends and sometimes just as a result of changes in the real world. As one commenter on the Macmillan dictionaries blog pointed out, MED still contains an entry for Inland Revenue as the name of the UK tax authority, even though it changed its name to HMRC in 2005. And having done a quick search myself, I found it also has a couple of example sentences that rather unhelpfully in a digital age refer to cassettes (She slotted another tape into the cassette player. @ slot into, He quickly undid the screws that held the cassette together. @ undo).

 And I’m not just trying to pick holes in Macmillan here; all dictionaries naturally date as language and usage changes. Thus the need for new editions. And there are changes in style and presentation too as different aspects of language come to the fore within language research and teaching. More information about collocations has become de rigueur over recent years, for example. And whilst corpora are wonderful tools for researching collocational information, it still needs a team of lexicographers to trawl through each entry and decide where it’s worth adding a bolded collocate, or in some cases, whether a particularly strong collocation should actually be shown as a phrase or an idiom.

Which comes back to where I started … computer technology can do lots of wonderful things, but for me, when it comes to language, there still needs to be a human drudge working their way through that data to make intelligent decisions about what to present in a dictionary and how. In a world of online-only dictionaries, will dictionary departments have the clout to take on a team of lexicographers to do those regular sweeps through the database or will they just have a couple of people on the lookout for interesting, newsworthy nuggets that give the appearance of being “up-to-date”?

The future of dictionaries: is online enough? (1)

The news at the start of this week that Macmillan are to stop producing paper dictionaries and just focus on their online version provoked mixed feelings for me. I'm not terribly surprised by the move, but at the same time, I feel slightly wary about it becoming a trend. Leaving aside professional concerns at the moment about my future work as a lexicographer and the quality of online dictionary content (a topic to return to in another post), it got me thinking about how I feel about paper versus electronic dictionaries as a user. And I guess the short answer is; I use both.

Having worked as a lexicographer for some 14 years now, it's not surprising that I own a collection of some 50 odd dictionaries of various kinds, many of which admittedly I really never use. On the coffee table in my living room, there's a chunky copy of the Oxford Dictionary of English which I use when I'm stuck on the crossword - a purely pleasurable and strictly away-from-my-desk activity! 

When I'm working at my desk, whether I use an online or paper dictionary depends partly on my mood and partly on what I'm looking for. I have some more specialist dictionaries on my shelf that aren't available online - perhaps the one I use most being the Oxford Learner's Thesaurus. There are also features, like usage notes, that appear in print but not always online. And if I'm comparing the treatment of a word across several dictionaries, then it's definitely quicker to just pull them off the shelf than to open several windows in my browser, wait for them to load and then have to keep flicking between them. And I think it's generally the constant flicking between things on screen that sometimes drives a preference for just leaving a paper book open on the desk.

Having said that though, I do use online dictionaries a huge amount too, especially for those occasional quick lookups. Generally, for consistency's sake, I'll use the dictionary of whichever publisher I'm working for at the time. So if I'm doing some work for Macmillan, I'll use MED, if I'm working on the project for a OUP, I'll have OALD open.

There is also a third option that I turn to occasionally; a CD-ROM dictionary. I have the electronic version of the Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary loaded on my computer, mainly because I worked on it way back when and because I did a series of talks about it, I feel like I know its features inside-out. I use its SMART thesaurus facility, which is less sophisticated than the OLT, but throws up a wider set of vocab within a general semantic set, which is often useful when you're writing materials. I also love its advanced search feature which allows you to search by grammatical labels (all verbs followed by -ing), register (all words labelled literary) etc, which again is great when you're looking for inspiration for a language activity.

I've also blogged before about my general tendency not to even bother with dictionaries just to check a quick spelling, instead I'll just start typing the word into the Google search box at the top of my browser and wait for the correct spelling to come up.

So, how do I feel about the trend towards online dictionaries? Well, I guess I'm fine with it so long as all the big publishers don't follow suit (which I don't think they will) and at least a handful of quality print dictionaries remain available. As convenient and flexible as the online format is, there's nothing quite like thudding a pile of dictionaries down in the classroom to get students actively involved in looking things up and I'm certainly not going to be firing up my laptop to settle a dispute in a game of Scrabble this Christmas!