DATE: 09/13/2007 11:51:04 / MOOD: technology and esl

Online courses and even online degrees are gaining traction these days as the internet becomes more pervasive and more of a household commodity like cable and telephone. We've all seen the incessant advertisements for the "University of Phoenix" online degree program. More and more people opt to take up professional degrees online these days. If my uncle, who works for the UN and once stationed in Ukraine, pursued an online degree in public relations, why wouldn't aspiring ESL students seek out online ESL courses?

 

For beginning ESL students, this may be a more challenging task as some knowledge of English is required to even operate a computer and navigate the world wide web. But there are clear advantages; easy access to learning anytime and anywhere and possibly a lot less costly. Some ESL programs (see news article on Rio Salado College) are offering online courses already and they view it as a complimentary offering to their existing classroom courses.

 

Quote from the article:

Online ESL is a new concept to many ESL students and may seem intimidating," Skeen said. "If students are reluctant to start off with an online class, a hybrid course is a perfect alternative for students to experience the interactive components of an online course as well as the guidance of an in-person instructor."

 

 As online offerings of ESL courses become richer in content and more sophisticated methods of pedagogical delivery are concocted, I expect such medium of teaching ESL to become a staple in the future.

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DATE: 08/14/2007 17:46:18 / MOOD: computational linguistics

In this post I would like to direct the ESL community to some of the Text-to-Speech systems that have been developed. The following are some pf the publicly available demo/downloadable systems:

1. AT&T 

2. Microsoft Text-to-Speech Package

3. OddCast

4. Cepstral

5. Festival (Download Version)

The first 4 are links to online demos, while the fourth, which is a product of academic research, is a downloadable system (though this may require the use of linux and for you to be somewhat of a tech geek). AT&T’s demos includes voices from different ethnic backgrounds, such as American english, British english, Indian english, Latin english etc. Text-to-Speech is also referred to as Speech Synthesis. Some of the ESL software products may use some of these existing TTS systems already. In my opinion, although these systems are understandable, they still sound unnatural and mechanized to an extent. Do you think one could have begining ESL students practice their pronunciation with the help of these TTS systems? Or would you be worried that they might all sound like HAL?

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DATE: 08/09/2007 13:05:35 / MOOD: technology and esl

There is an article, Adultsface dearth of ESL classes: The waiting lists are long ,that highlights the scarcity of ESL classes for adults in the US. This isn’t something new that I have or we have heard. I’ve met a number of immigrant adults who want to learn English but have failed to find the right class or the right time for it. Their complaints usually are that the classes do not teach them what they require, in most cases, for their jobs. And this is understandable given that classes cover material that is more general than what they need.

There is definately a shortage of ESL teachers in certain locations, but increasing the number of ESL teachers does not seem to be a sufficient solution to this problem. Their needs are too specific that could perhaps be more adequately met by one-on-one tutors. Online learning is slowly taking shape, at universities and through ESL publishers. I think that over the next few years, online learning will start to cater to a wider group of adults seeking ESL lessons as the internet becomes even more of a household utility. Through online learning, more personalized lessons can be provided. Additionally location is no longer a factor and neither is time really. This leads me to ask, who are the front runners in providing online ESL courses?

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DATE: 08/09/2007 13:01:34 / MOOD: computational linguistics

This should not be “fresh news” to anyone in TESOL. After all, we have all heard and read about how ETS has started to use software that automatically grades student essays here, here, and here …. It’s not just ETS, but professors at some colleges are starting to let students improve their papers by using software graders before they submit them. But of course, the final grading is still done by the professors, atleast for now. Most articles you read will tout the ability of such software and throw techno-linguistic jargon at you. Is it fact or fiction? Can computers really grade essays? What is this LSA stuff they talk about? Can students fool the computer into giving a good grade?

Statement: Yes, computers can really grade essays, it’s a fact and it is inevitable that such “intelligent” software will become more pervasive in the future.

That’s what you will read about and hear from the researchers and companies that have developed them. That’s what they want you to hear. I agree with the above statement …. I agree with the experimental results that show a high degree of agreement between human judges and the computer software …. however, I would caution readers who are not familiar with computational linguistics, that such software do not really/fully understand what is written, the current state-of-the-art that is. Most are based on LSA (Latent Semantic Analysis), which is “A mathematical/statistical technique for extracting and representing the similarity of meaning of words and passages by analysis of large bodies of text.” (http://lsa.colorado.edu/Boulder) As stated in the definition, it is at best a statistical technique that measures the similarity of words. Such a technique is then used to compare the students essay to a gold-standard, which is one or more essays written by an expert. Note that LSA measures similarity between words; it does not build a computational semantic model of the underlying meaning of the sentences etc. in the essay and hence does not fully understand what is being conveyed in the essay. Nevertheless, this technique has proven to be effective.

So, can students fool the computer? A well trained student who understands how the computer grades the paper will likely be able to hack a good grade. With systems that use LSA, one could possibly still score well by writing an essay that does not make much sense but still contains the set of “words” of ”concepts” etc. required for a given topic. More sophisticated methods are currently being explored that would handle these cases and have perhaps been implemented in some of these systems. LSA also does not take into account syntax, i.e. grammar. This leads us to the question of grading ESL essays automatically:

Turns out, taking account of syntax/grammar is actually simpler than making sure the semantics are intact. Syntactic parsers that perform fairly well exist. Such parsers could be and has been used to check for grammar in essays. LSA could still be used to make sure that the ESL student has written about a topic that is similar to the one stated in the question. The strength of the vocabulary used can also be measured by assigning levels to the words in the lexicon/dictionary.

The current generation of these software grade essays in GMAT, physics, etc. The next generation of e-Raters, computer graders, automated essay graders, … whatever you may want to call them, will most likely fill the shelves of Best Buy and find themselves into the PC’s of many students who will use them to improve their essay writing skills without the need for an ESL tutor. or will they? Will you use them if they tend to score according to your own judgement/evaluation to grade your students essays?

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