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Paul Beaufait

How To Learn A Language Fast: The 4 Steps To Fluency - 0 views

www.4stepstofluency.com/how-to-learn-a-language

communication fluency grammar language acquisition languages lexis phonetics syntax vocabulary wink_students

shared by Paul Beaufait on 10 Jul 14 - No Cached
  • Paul Beaufait on 10 Jul 14
     
    In this post, Oli introduces a four-step guide to becoming fluent in additional languages. The first step focuses on sound and writing systems; the second, on basic lexis and syntax; the third, on what is personally relevant; and the fourth, "coming soon," on communication.
Paul Beaufait

SLWIS Newsletter - March 2011 - 0 views

newsmanager.commpartners.com/...2.html

assessment automation ESL essays evaluation machine scoring writing

shared by Paul Beaufait on 15 Mar 11 - No Cached
  • several problems are inherent in machine scoring. First, though Ferris (2003) claimed that students will improve over time if they are given appropriate error correction and that students use teacher-generated feedback to revise things other than surface errors, students rarely use programs like MY Access! to revise anything other than surface errors (Warschauer & Grimes, 2008); paragraph elements, information structure, and register-specific stylistics are largely ignored. Second, although teachers can create their own prompts for use with the program (more than 900 prompts are built into MY Access! to which students can write and receive instantaneous feedback.), MY Access! will score only those prompts included in the program. Third, regarding essay length, in many cases, MY Access! seems to reward longer essays with higher scores; consequently, it appears that MY Access! assumes that length is a proxy for fluency.
  • Overall, students’ opinions regarding MY Access! were mixed; students found useful aspects as well as aspects they termed less helpful.
  • Some students found working with the program very helpful in discipline, encouraging multiple revision. Others liked working with the many tools provided, finding them very helpful in the revision process. On the other hand, some students, lacking basic computer skills, found the program stressful and unusable. Others were discouraged by the seeming overabundance of feedback; in some cases, writers found it overwhelming, so they tended to disregard it. Our most disheartening finding: When some of the students were unhappy with their scores, they found ways to raise them by simply inserting unrelated text to their essays.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • They appreciated the help MY Access! offered in finding grammar errors, but they were not always sure how to fix them. Further, the program offered no positive comments about what students were doing well, which could negatively impact student motivation. In addition, after working on a prompt once or twice, many became bored and wanted to switch to another prompt. Many of the student writers used MY Access! for surface editing only and rarely used it for revision. In general, students in this study did not use features in MY Access! (e.g. My Portfolio, My Editor), possibly because their teachers did not explicitly assign them.
  • Locally controlled assessment is important; when assessments are created from within, they are specific to one context―they are developed with a very specific group of students in mind, considering what those students have learned in their classes and what they are expected to be able to do as a result of what they have learned in that context. Standardized tools such as the many machine-grading programs available today cannot address this specificity.
  • Paul Beaufait on 15 Mar 11
     
    "Though Crusan (2010), Ericsson and Haswell (2006), and Shermis and Burstein (2003) offered a more thorough treatment of machine scoring in general, in this article, I concentrate on one program―MY Access! (Vantage Learning, 2007)―briefly describing it and discussing a small study conducted in a graduate writing assessment seminar at a midsize Midwestern university in which graduate students examined second language writers' attitudes about using the program as a feedback and assessment tool for their writing in a sheltered ESL writing class" (¶2).
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