Captioned videos

If you are thinking ‘Patrick hasn’t posted anything for a long time’ then you’d be right! That usually means that it has been particularly busy at work and yes, it is marking time again. But, better late than never as the saying goes.

Readers who are interested in Britain may have been following the General Election in the UK which I mentioned a few times over the last few weeks. Well, it’s over at last and well, it was really exciting! You might remember me mentioning this guy:

and saying that nobody knew who he was. Well, now he’s our Deputy Prime Minister! Nobody saw that coming. (If you know his name then you win a prize.) We are in for a real test to see if our political system can manage a coalition government. The worst thing of all is that now I am older than the Prime Minister.

Everybody is getting in on captioned videos. I have to say I think this is where internet technology is really useful for language learning. When you can listen and read what people are saying your language learning can really take off. My advice to learners is to listen first, then read afterwards to get the bits which you missed and then listen again and read at the same time. If you listen to the hard bits several times as you read the words then you can start to separate the flow of sound into distinct words. The latest site with captioned videos which has come to my attention is 22frames.com. I had an e mail telling me: It is well known that that captioned and subtitled videos are useful for learning English. However, many are scattered across the Internet and mixed with the billions of other videos. 22frames aggregates them so that they can be found easily. Several users are now using the site to train themselves with English, particularly idioms, slang, and commonly mispronounced words. Well, I had a look and I liked it. Tell us what you think by leaving a comment. 22frames.com is here.

Exams aren’t so bad!

We were all looking forward to the day after the General Election in the UK when we would finally get the politicians off our TV screens. No such luck! Most unusually, no single party has a majority in parliament – what we refer to as a hung parliament. Some countries get this all the time, but it’s new for us, so we don’t know what to do about it! Poor old Nick Clegg (the leader of the third biggest party) has to decide who to support and so who will be in government. Whatever he does, he is going to make a lot of people unhappy. He is between a rock and a hard place – by which I mean he is in a very difficult position.

Many of my students are getting ready for exams. Many students get themselves into a panic over exams. Look at these comments about exams:

“I just panic: I freeze up. I talk on the phone when I should be revising, and I stare out of the window when I should be writing in the exam.”

“I always run out of time, sometimes I even miss out a whole question, and I just think, whoosh, there go 10 easy marks, and I come out and I want to cry.”

(From The Study Skills Handbook, by Stella Cottrell)

Does this sound like you? If it does, you need to re-evaluate (look again) at how you think about exams. Today’s link is to material based on Stella Cottrell’s Study Skills Handbook in which the focus is on revising for exams. One of the most important things about getting ready for exams is getting organised well in advance. This means spending time thinking about your exams, which ones are most important, and drawing up an exam revision timetable. Read through the material and get some useful advice about organising your revision here.

Proofreading your work

It is bank holiday in the UK. That means two things: the weather is horrible and the DIY shops are full! Just as we headed into the long weekend, the temperature fell and it started raining! How does it know to do that??

Classes at my university have finished for the year which means that exams are coming up in a few weeks. Examinations are particularly hard for overseas students, especially if they have to write essays. I always tell my students to make sure they do two important things in an exam: spend time thinking and planning your writing before you start the real essay, and make sure you finish early so that you can check your work before the end of the exam. Students who just plunge straight into writing an essay often make so many corrections and additions as they go along that when they hand in their work it looks terrible and is difficult to read. Presentation is important! Think about the poor examiner who has to grade hundreds of essays. If your essay has a plan at the start of it, followed by the essay itself, it is likely that the marker will be impressed. One lecturer told me that if he saw notes in the plan that the student had not managed to get into the essay for some reason (like running out of time) then he would still be inclined to give marks for the ideas.
The other thing to do is to check your work carefully for grammar and content and after you’ve written it. This is a skill which you can practise and get better at. The Online Writing Lab at Purdue University has lots of good material on academic writing. Check out its ‘Finding Common Errors’ page here.