Gabi Witthaus's List: Languages & linguistics

Immerse yourself in the language you are learning, DuQuette tells IBD. His idea is similar to the teachings of Stephen Krashen, an expert in theories of language development. In his books, including "Principles and Practice in Second Language Acquisition," Krashen says a key is natural communication in which speakers zero in on messages while in a low-anxiety atmosphere.

Krashen:
"A recent article on Investors.com ("Land another language, Dec. 29) describes a new commercial foreign language teaching product, Yabla, that, we are told, "is similar to the teaching of Stephen Krashen."

I thank Yabla for acknowledging my work and I am happy it was helpful.

I need to point out, however, that this is the first I have heard of Yabla. Some of what is described appears to be similar to my conclusions on second language acquisition, but some is not.

Lacking more detailed information, all I can say is that I should not be blamed for the failure of Yabla, nor given credit for its success.

Stephen Krashen"

Stephen Krashen's commercial enterprise

Over 101,000,000 downloads of over 1000 different educational audio lessons, video lessons, and iPhone application by people just like you looking to have fun learning German and learn at their own pace.

"Abstract

This paper evaluates the relative quality of three popular online translation tools: Google Translate, Bing (Microsoft) Translator, and Yahoo Babelfish. The results published below are based on a 6 week survey open to the general internet population which allowed survey takers to choose any language, enter any free-form text, and vote on the best of all translation results side-by-side (www.gabble-on.com/compare-translators). The final data reveals that while Google Translate is widely preferred when translating long passages, Microsoft Bing Translator and Yahoo Babelfish often produce better translations for phrases below 140 characters. Also, in general Babelfish performs well in East Asian Languages such as Chinese and Korean and Bing Translator performs well in Spanish, German, and Italian."

Annual Review of Applied Linguistics reviews research in key areas in the broad field of applied linguistics. Each issue is thematic, covering the topic by means of critical summaries, overviews and bibliographic citations. Every fourth or fifth issue surveys applied linguistics broadly, offering timely essays on language learning and pedagogy, discourse analysis, teaching innovations, second language acquisition, computer-assisted instruction, language use in professional contexts, sociolinguistics, language policy, and language assessment, to name just a few of the areas reviewed. It provides over 500 new citations each year. The theme for Volume 26 (2006) is 'Lingua franca languages'.

Learning languages on the Web

"The discussion was given impetus by Dr. Bax's vision of the future and his notion of "normalisation" of CALL, which he elaborated on in his article "CALL - Past, Present and Future" (2003). The article was made available to participants and can still be found at the IATEFL COMP-SIG website, courtesy of Elsevier Science Ltd.
http://www.iateflcompsig.org.uk/media/callpresentpastandfuture.pdf"

An estimated 7,000 languages are being spoken around the world. But that number is expected to shrink rapidly in the coming decades. What is lost when a language dies?

Canada's terminology and linguistic databank

HyperGrammar2: Summary

HyperGrammar2 is a self-teaching tool designed to help you improve your knowledge of English grammar, which deals with such topics as spelling, punctuation and capitalization.

This tool is an adaptation of HyperGrammar, a self-teaching software developed by the Department of English at the University of Ottawa.

Note: HyperGrammar2 is available in English only. However, a similar writing tool, Le Bellerive, is available in French.

From MA TESOL Module 2 Planning Unit:
Alternatively you can go to David Brett’s website and use his ‘phonetic typewriter’ to write words or phrases phonemically and then copy and paste them into your Word documents. We recommend that you then scan the document and save it as an image (eg a ‘gif’ or ‘jpeg’ file) so that you can send it to us digitally. The typewriter can be found at http://davidbrett.uniss.it/index.