Lexitronics

The Ways with Word Courses - which currently comprise Write Like an Academic and LexiCLIL are both open to individual users for no fee at present at http://lexitronics.org. More courses are in the pipeline for the new year, including, hopefully, the next in our series of eReaders.  Updates will follow!

Will update the links shortly – but just to note that the Lexitronics Scribd account – http://www.scribd.com/lexitronics seems to be working exceptionally well as a publishing base for various Lexitronics research and articles. Really, all credit to the Scribd community for an outstanding project…

Now that we have opened our Write Like an Academic and LexiCLIL online courses at http://lexitronics.org a very obvious question is  what is LEXICLIL? LexiCLIL  suggests an approach to CLIL (Content and language integrated learning) that is heavily driven by a lexical focus . It is also strongly corpus-informed and as with most of our lexitronics work draws on the principles and tools of Web 2.0 to a very large extent.  The course material might hence be of interest to anyone working in CLIL, but also practitioners in EAP, ESP, as well as more generally in ELT…

Take a look at the September 2009 issue of the Reading Matrix online journal at: http://www.readingmatrix.com/current.html, where you can view and download John and Steve’s article on the development of eReaders. (http://www.readingmatrix.com/articles/sept_2009/eldridge_neufeld.pdf).

The Write Like an Academic  and Lexiclil Teacher Development Courses are now up and running and open officially as of today at: http://lexitronics.org/.  We’ll post more information over the next few days, but in the meantime feel free to take a look….

Steve and John spent an interesting couple of days exploring CLIL and all things lexical at the new English School of Kyrenia this August. A busy summer for Steve, since he has been delivering a course in instructional technology in Cesme, Turkey. Meanwhile Nilgun is off to the Middle Eastern Technical University, Ankara, Turkey shortly, to present a keynote address on how the Write Like an Academic Course was put together. She’ll be accompanied by her PhD supervisor, Gulsen Musayeva.

Just a note that the Lexitronics MOODLE now has a new address at: http://lexitronics.org

At the moment we’re just tidying up the site, in preparation for the launch of the new online Write Like an Academic Course for postgraduate students and researchers, and the LexiCLIL teacher training course. Both products should be up and running within the next couple of weeks.

Hi,

Here we are again after our summer break:

Here are the details for a conference taking place in our neck of the woods at the Eastern Mediterranean University, Famagusta:

http://www.elt-emu.org

Plenary speakers included Leo Van Lier and the mercurial Tom Cobb.

Steve says to Yongyang:

…I was reflecting on the portfolio tasks and the idea that John first floated by me of having students create an ‘i-corpus’ of their own work.  Learner corpora are quite common these days.  However,  I haven’t come across the idea of individual corpora kept and used by each student as a record of their own personal language development. Have you?  Just as an example, I’ve attached a sample of one of my students’ portfolio tasks to give you a flavour of the standard of English.

Now, combining John’s idea of the i-corpus with your idea of a reference corpus starts to make sense to me as a very practical way to help ELT teachers-in-training (or in-service) whose first language isn’t English analyze and improve their own level of English.  The thread that binds both would be common words in English, and an analysis of frequency would yield the common words that have special significance in ELT, plus the offlist words that define the ESPishness of ELT.

I’ll pursue that a bit, perhaps by building up a reference corpus of some of the classic ELT texts on methodology to being with, and see if anything emerges that has potential.

And John says – there look like two very profitable lines of enquiry there… and two articles!

Don’t know how this will work – but I just wanted to put some references to sites that may help those interested in using NING for educational purposes:

Ning in Education – Using Ning for Educational Social Networks

A community of educators using Ning to build social networks.
education.ning.com/