MHC Languages

This web journal is dedicated to publishing research in the fields of TESOL and Applied Linguistics. We encourage readers to sign up for the publishing notification service for this journal.

SynPhony is an open-source project that will assist in teaching literacy skills for alphabetic writing systems. It is a database system designed to systematically present the patterns of a language and track a user's progress as they acquire reading skills. There are four main components to SynPhony: linguistic, pedagogic, user knowledge base, and reports. Although English is the first language being targeted, the structure and methods used will be suitable for many other languages as well.

Simulations in Higher Education (SHE) is a focus for these initiatives at UWE. It is part of the E-learning Development Unit, which works with colleagues across the university to help with developments in curricula and delivery that use ICT. This SHE website describes the projects, technologies and underpinning pedagogies that these initiatives draw upon, and develop.

The International Corpus of Learner English (Version 2) is a corpus of writing by higher intermediate to advanced learners of English. It contains 3.7 million words of EFL writing from learners representing 16 different mother tongue backgrounds (Bulgarian, Chinese, Czech, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Norwegian, Polish, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish and Tswana). It differs from the first version published in 2002 not only by its increased size and range of learner populations, but also by its interface, which contains two new functionalities: built-in concordancer allowing users to search for word forms, lemmas and/or part-of-speech tags and breakdown of the query results according to the learner profile information.

f4audio helps you transcribe audio data such as interviews or dictation. It is the digital answer to well-known cassette transcription equipment such as the Stenorette. The main functions include the variable playback speed, the rewind interval and operation via the f4 key or a footswitch from any computer programme (e.g. Word).

Intercultultural Competency Across the Curriculum Infusing Culture and Language Campus Wide October 15-16, 2009 Hosted by Baldwin-Wallace College Berea, Ohio

The Linguistic Politeness Research Group was established in 1998 in order to bring together researchers who were working on the analysis of linguistic politeness and impoliteness. We felt that there had been a significant change in the way that politeness was analysed and that these theoretical changes made politeness a subject which was of wider interest to linguists as a whole, and had implications for research in many areas of linguistics. Working in a post-Brown and Levinson model of politeness, we are all attempting to develop new ways of theorising and analysing politeness and impoliteness.

Our long term goal is to promote research relating to the acquisition of French as a second/foreign language, by providing access to a growing database of French Learner Language Oral Corpora. The contents of the database are being made freely available to the research community, in the form of digital sound files and related transcripts formatted using CHILDES software. A search facility is also provided which enables researchers to select the sound files and transcripts they wish to download from the site. The database currently contains over 4000 files (sound files, transcripts and morphosyntactically tagged transcripts). The website also aims to include an inventory of other French interlanguage corpora not available within FLLOC but held by other researchers and institutions.

The Pinyin tutor is an online tool that promotes Chinese learners in their phonological perception (including the perception of Chinese tones, initials, finals, etc.). Through a series of online Pinyin dictation tasks and corresponding feedback, the tutor helps students be conscious of their errors and thus improve their phonological perception in Chinese eventually.

Red5 Flash Server is a module package for Drupal which allows you to record Flash video files (FLV) by using a standard web cam (or built-in web camera) together with the Red5 Open Source Flash Server (http://osflash.org/red5). The difference to similar video recorder modules is that we want people to be independent of third-party providers. People should run their own Red5 Flash server instead. The advantages are: * you can create your own video conversation community * you have full access to your Flash video files * you can record high quality videos without paying a license fee (because Red5 Flash server is open source and free - but offering same functionality as Adobe Flash Server)

This wiki describes tools and formats for creating and managing linguistic annotations. `Linguistic annotation' covers any descriptive or analytic notations applied to raw language data. The basic data may be in the form of time functions -- audio, video and/or physiological recordings -- or it may be textual. The added notations may include transcriptions of all sorts (from phonetic features to discourse structures), part-of-speech and sense tagging, syntactic analysis, "named entity" identification, co-reference annotation, and so on. The focus is on tools which have been widely used for constructing annotated linguistic databases, and on the formats commonly adopted by such tools and databases.

Allows you to customize the TV listings to show only the channels you're interested in. Can search for channels to find the programming even on international cable.

The Berkeley Language Center has created a library of foreign language clips, each tagged for the vocabulary in the target language and for English descriptors (culture, linguistics, speech acts). Instructors are able to search the library for a clip of interest and then 'order' the clip (a URL is created linking to an mp4 file; the URL stays active for two weeks). Currently we have 5200 clips in 15 languages, and those numbers continue to grow.

Interactive report of faculty responses to the 2009 ella survey at MHC.

Interactive report of student responses to the 2009 ella survey at MHC.

Describes how "citizen journalism" was used for the annual Sakai conference to expand the conference from in-person attendees to an online community.

Interest piece from news station in Minnesota about decrease in second language programs in elementary schools. Features Elaine Tarone from CARLA at University of MN.

WordReference is opening up and offering you the ability to add a miniature version of WordReference for your website. It has much of the functionality of WordReference including most of our most popular dictionaries.

Phonetics course for French from Middlebury

'Reading Workshop' Approach Lets Students Pick the Books - Series - NYTimes.com