Word Booster update

Last year, I wrote a review of Word Booster, an online tool that allows you to create an ELT lesson from an online text. It creates a (fully credited) pdf of the text that you can print out for students, along with definitions for key words and a follow-up vocab quiz. At the time, I was disappointed that an idea which seemed so promising fell short on a number of important details.

As soon as I’d posted the blog, the creator of Word Booster got in touch. He was really positive about my feedback and keen to improve the tool as quickly as time, manpower and finances would allow. I was really impressed by his commitment and even more impressed when he got in touch again recently about the latest updates to Word Booster.

• The latest version of the tool uses a learner’s dictionary (the Cambridge Advanced Learner’s Dictionary) which makes the definitions appropriate and accessible to the average learner.
• Whilst the tool makes suggestions about which words in a text to focus on, the user/teacher is now free to accept or reject these suggestions and to choose whichever words or phrases they feel are most appropriate for their learners or for the aims of the lesson.
• The tool suggests an appropriate definition for each word, but allows the user to check it’s the correct sense manually and change it if necessary. This is a massive improvement as automated sense selection can be a bit hit and miss. You can see in the example below, using one of my own blog posts, that when I click on 'folk' in the text, I'm able to select the appropriate sense for the context (the tool had automatically selected the more frequent, 'music' sense). [Click on the picture to view it more clearly full-screen.]

• There are also options to (de)select example sentences and to adjust the quiz activities slightly – although not to make edits beyond shuffling around which words appear in which activity type.

All of these changes make the tool far more usable. It still has a few minor technical glitches that I’ve passed back to the Word Booster team, but overall, it’s something I’d now happily recommend for teachers to try out.

I do, however, still have a few reservations.

Dictionary definitions in vocab activities

As a lexicographer myself, I’m a big fan of learner’s dictionaries, but I’m still slightly wary about the use of dictionary definitions in vocab practice activities. Research seems to show that using dictionary look-ups or referring to glosses while reading a text helps students’ incidental* vocabulary learning (Laufer & Hill, 2000). By actively looking up a word, focusing on the form and meaning, and relating it to the context, students are more likely to remember it later. And this is exactly what learner’s dictionaries are intended for. Definitions are written in the expectation that the students will come across a word and look it up to check the meaning – they’re intended for decoding. That’s what the first part of the Word Booster tool caters to perfectly.

Where I feel we get onto shakier ground is in the ‘reverse engineering’, if you like, where students are essentially given a definition and asked to guess the word. This is potentially a much more challenging task and isn’t something that dictionary definitions are designed for.  Without the target word alongside, a dictionary definition can seem vague, rather abstract and certainly very difficult to tell apart from definitions for similar words. 

That’s not a criticism of dictionary definitions, it’s just the nature of the beast. Definitions have to be concise, so there can’t be lots of detailed explanation to differentiate between similar words**. They have to be written within a defining vocabulary (a limited set of words that avoids the definitions being more difficult than the words they define), so they necessarily can’t be as subtle and nuanced as those in a dictionary for native speakers. They also have to cover all the possible uses of a word, which can make them a bit vague and sometimes slightly awkward. As a lexicographer, you split out clearly different senses, but you can’t just keep on splitting endlessly, you have to lump similar uses together at some point (e.g. this two-part definition from Cambridge Dictionaries – “option: one thing that can be chosen from a set of possibilities, or the freedom to make a choice”).

As a materials writer, if I want to create a practice activity around definitions (which, by the way, I’d do sparingly anyway), whilst I might start off by looking at a dictionary entry, I’d invariably edit the definition. I might change the wording, for example, losing slightly formal passives (e.g. “one thing that you can choose”). I might make it a bit more specific to the context at hand – so I’d choose just the relevant part of the above two-parter. And, if I was dealing with near synonyms, I’d probably add a bit more detail to help make the distinctions clearer.  

At the moment, many of the quiz questions generated by Word Booster are at best very tricky and at worst, downright confusing just because of the nature of the dictionary definitions. Being able to edit the defs in the quiz questions would undoubtedly help, but at the same time, it would add to the time required to create the material (which kind of negates one of the key selling points of the tool) and I guess, the ‘authority’ of the definitions would be lost somewhat. It seems to me that the key here is to use the activities sparingly and to choose items carefully, keeping an eye out for odd and confusing defs or combinations and deselecting them. Which brings me onto my main takeaway about this tool …

… it’s how you use it.

Just like any other tool, the success of what’s produced comes down not only to the features of the tool itself, but to how it’s used. As a novice teacher many years ago, I didn’t have fancy online tools like this, but I certainly fell into the trap of choosing a news article that I thought was interesting, photocopying it, picking out some random vocabulary and quite often writing out dictionary definitions for students to match to words from the text. The result was a bit of a confusing mess of a lesson, in which we’d invariably end up decoding the text as a class line-by-line because it was too hard for the students to manage. I’d have to give extra explanation of the definitions of above-level vocab and I’d often struggle to remember the correct answers to the questions that seemed obvious when I wrote them, but which, in the middle of a lesson with a load of confused students, suddenly didn’t make sense any more.

To use a tool like Word Booster effectively, the teacher needs to consider:

1. The choice of text – is it at the right level for the students both linguistically and cognitively? A few above-level words might provide challenge and interest, but too many will be confusing and demotivating. Is it the right length for the lesson?
2. The choice of vocab – in my last post, I wrote about the importance of choosing reasonable vocab sets to work with and about having a clear aim for vocab activities (Are you focusing on receptive or productive vocab? Do you want students just to decode the text or are these words useful to learn?). How many words is it reasonable to highlight and practise?
3. The choice of definitions – the option for the user to pick the correct definition is really useful, but it requires some skill. How is the word being used here and which def fits best? Is the word being used metaphorically? Is it actually part of a phrase, a phrasal verb or an idiom? Is the correct sense available in this learner's dictionary at all?
4. Activity selection – personally, I think one short-ish definition-based activity per text, using carefully-selected definitions that don’t cause confusion, is probably enough. I might stretch to a second that uses example sentences, but for me, any more than that and it’s becoming a bit mechanical and repetitive. I’d then want to supplement the material generated by Word Booster with some of my own content. Just mining a text for vocabulary doesn’t amount to a successful, engaging lesson. At a minimum, I’d want to add some kind of comprehension questions – whether those were traditional written questions about the text or looser points for discussion. I’d then want some kind of follow-up – a response to the content of the text, perhaps in the form of group discussions, maybe a writing task.

Overall, I’m really impressed with the improvements that Word Booster has made over the past year and I know the team have more upgrades in the pipeline to continue refining their algorithms and adding more features. I’d certainly say it’s worth trying out though. Whilst creating a usable lesson involves a bit of work in terms of choosing the vocab, checking definitions and selecting appropriate quiz questions, I think it does save time in creating a basis for a lesson that you can then build around.

*The term incidental vocabulary learning, doesn’t mean words that students just come across by accident. Incidental learning can be quite planned and intentional, but it just isn’t the main focus of the activity. So in a reading lesson, the main focus is on understanding the text, maybe for discussion or to answer some comprehension questions, but there can be a conscious focus on vocab too – this would be incidental learning.

**When I was working on the Oxford Learner’s Thesaurus, we often needed to add whole extra sentences to help differentiate between synonyms.

Reference:

Laufer, B. & Hill, M. (2000) ‘What lexical information do L2 learners select in a CALL dictionary and how does it affect word retention?’ Language Learning & Technology

2017 Part 2: What’s next?

In my last post, I talked about some of the reasons why I’ve become frustrated with my work in ELT publishing and started to question where I want to go next. In this post, I want to share some of the thoughts that have been floating around my head, in no particular order, about what I can do to change that.

One of the first questions I’ve had to face is whether I still enjoy working in ELT at all. And you’ll be pleased to hear that the answer is essentially yes. When I’m not getting frustrated dealing with fees and schedules and restrictive briefs, and it’s just me and a Word document and a load of language, then yes, I still love it. What’s not to love about playing with words for a living? The task ahead, then, seems to be one of picking the right projects or as Tania Pattison put it in her recent blog post, taking on projects that “fit with your vision of yourself as a writer” … which is perhaps easier said than done!

Having started off as a lexicographer, I’m still at my happiest using a corpus to tease out how language works. I really could happily spend all my time investigating how words fit together; making lists of collocations and phrases and colligations and dependent prepositions and explaining all the subtle and quirky differences between them. That should equate to writing vocab materials, but having done a lot of that in recent years, I know it’s not always as satisfying as I’d like. The briefs for many vocab projects involve a pre-determined syllabus and format, and an infuriating reliance on wordlists which take no account of chunks and phrases and multiple meanings or the difference between receptive and productive lexis*. And you find yourself being told that you can’t use a word because it’s ‘above level’ or been ‘covered’ before or … any number of other completely nonsensical reasons why you can’t do what you know is pedagogically sound.

Which perhaps leads me naturally to think about breaking away from publishers to go it alone. Several people I’ve spoken to have talked about self-publishing as an alternative. It does have a certain appeal, but from what I’ve heard of others’ experiences, self-publishing involves a huge amount of investment of both time and money, for very little return. You simply don’t make money from self-published materials. And whilst I’m not only in it for the money, this is my job and I do need to pay the mortgage. From a practical point of view, that means either writing something quite small in scope, like the How to Write EAP Materials title I did for ELT T2W, or stretching work on a bigger project out over a longer period of time, squeezing in bits and pieces when I can. I do have a few half-ideas floating around, but nothing fully formed and ready-to-go just yet.

Another option is to more actively push for the types of work I enjoy most … again, not always easy. A few of my ‘big breaks’ and changes of direction have come from proactively pushing. My first book (Common Mistakes at Proficiency) came about because I was doing corpus research for the series and I summoned up the courage to ask the editor if they had authors for all the titles. They hadn’t and she asked if I’d like to write one of them. Other work has come, either directly or indirectly, from chatting to the right people at conferences. A huge amount is down to luck and timing, but sometimes going along to the right events and making your interest in a specific area well known can help. To this end, I’ve started to nudge myself in a couple of directions …

Firstly, I’ve realized that one of the things I enjoy most is messing about with a corpus. Sadly though, it’s something that only rarely do I get paid to do. So I’ve started to edge my way a bit more into the corpus linguistics world. Back in October, I went along to a Corpus Linguistics in the South event in Cambridge. Most of the people there were academics talking about their research, but there are a few other folks who bridge the gap between the academic and the commercial. I haven’t yet spotted an obvious opportunity for work beyond what I’ve already been involved in, but I’m enjoying getting back into the academic side of the discipline and you never know what might crop up. I’m planning to put a proposal in for at least one corpus linguistics conference in 2018, so we’ll see where that leads.

Another aim is to get away from my desk a bit more. Most years, I manage to go to a handful of conferences and events, either as a participant or a speaker, and I generally come back feeling energised and having learnt something new, about a different teaching context or a different area of ELT. Unfortunately, unless I can get sponsored by a publisher to do a talk on their behalf, the costs come out of my own pocket, and with lots of conferences expecting speakers to pay a conference fee as well as their travel expenses, that soon becomes unaffordable. One option I’d like to explore more though is doing more teacher training. I love getting to meet and work with teachers from different places and, as well as being fun, it feeds neatly back into my writing. I recently ran a teacher training workshop in Moscow, which I really enjoyed, and I’ll be looking out for more similar opportunities in the year ahead.

So I guess that’s a few leads to be getting on with, nothing radical and no magic bullet solution, but hopefully, a general push into slightly new directions for 2018.

*I'll be talking about wordlists and their (mis)use in ELT publishing at the IATEFL conference in Brighton in April.

2017 Part 1: Decisions, decisions ...

This time last year, I was getting stuck into the first assignments of an MA in Forensic Linguistics and, to be honest, I was ready to turn my back on ELT for a new career in language and the law. A few months on though and I realized that maybe the career path towards being a forensic linguist wasn’t the right one for me (for all kinds of reasons) and so, after lots of thought and a very intense week in Porto grilling as many forensic linguists as I could manage to collar, I decided to cut my losses and left the course.

This left me feeling slightly broke and at somewhat of a professional loose end. At around about the same time, my partner was also made redundant from his job of 10 years, so we decided to take the opportunity to have a good long break and do a bit of travelling. We headed off for a month travelling first to Belize where we trekked through unspoilt rainforest, tried to stay cool in 40°C heat and I found myself shooing tarantulas out the bathroom! Then it was onto Mexico to explore ancient Mayan ruins and marvel at the noise and colour of Mexico City. It provided the perfect antidote to worrying about work and career for a few weeks and gave me a chance to properly recharge my batteries.

I came back to a flurry of new (ELT writing) work – projects I’d managed to put off ‘until I get back’, but which then suddenly turned out to be way too much to fit into my schedule! In many ways, it was a good thing, because my bank balance seriously needed topping up and while I was busy working towards one deadline after another, I didn’t have time to dwell on the big “what next?” question.

After 7 months of working flat-out, long hours, weekends, lots of negotiating of new schedules and extended deadlines because there just weren’t enough hours in the day or days in the week, I was absolutely shattered! So last week, I took some time off and went away for a ‘reading retreat’; a week in a country cottage, holed up with a pile of ELT stuff to read. It was also a chance to step back and think about where I want to go next.

So, I guess the first question to deal with is why I wanted to move away from ELT in the first place. I’ve been working in the field for some 25 years now and for the past 17 as a freelance writer.  Being freelance has given me the freedom to explore different areas – lexicography, writing, editing, corpus research, vocab, EAP, teacher training. As a freelancer though, while my career has morphed and changed, and along the way, I’ve achieved several goals (authoring a number of books, travelling to various countries, giving a plenary at a conference, etc.), there’s no formalized career progression. I feel that I’ve moved on enormously over the years, my knowledge, experience and expertise have continued to grow, but the work I often find myself doing – and the rates I get paid for it – don’t necessarily reflect that. 

Recently, I’ve started to feel frustrated and undervalued, not so much by the ELT world in general, but specifically by the people I work for. Of course, there have always been good projects and less good projects, editors who make you feel valued and those who just drive you round the bend. In general though, my sense is that I’m spending more and more of my time haggling over fees, being asked to work to unfeasible schedules, being messed around with delays and uncertainty, having briefs changed halfway through projects and, as I mentioned in a recent post, getting less and less creative control. I’m sure a lot of that is down to me getting older and wiser and having higher expectations, but I don’t think it’s just me. The whole industry seems to be going through a difficult time, readjusting to new realities and not always managing to do so very smoothly. And I’m well aware that it’s not just the freelancers who are feeling the strain. Many of the big publishers have undergone restructuring and job losses in the past few years, so I know that many of the people I’m working with in-house have been having a rough time of it too.

So what’s the answer? Where do I go next? Do I look for another alternative career? Do I just plod on and hope that things improve? Or is there a way that I can stay within ELT, but steer my career down a more satisfying path?

The first option probably isn’t going to happen. After my foray into Forensic Linguistics, I’ve realized that at this stage in my life, I can’t really afford to make a completely fresh start, either financially or in terms of time … although if the right inspiration or opportunity came along, I’m not totally ruling it out!

The second option just isn’t in my nature, at least not in the long term.

Which leaves me looking for new inspiration in ELT … a topic which will have to spill over into another post …