• "Making EFL Conversation Class Participation Grades Transparent" by Eric Prochaska

• "Extending Vocabulary Knowledge with Computers" by James Thomas

MAKING EFL CONVERSATION CLASS PARTICIPATION GRADES TRANSPARENT
by Eric Prochaska
International Graduate School of English,
Seoul, South Korea
eric@igse.ac.kr

Native English speaking instructors of large EFL classes at universities often assign a grade to a somewhat vague item labeled "participation." Philosophizing that "grades are arbitrary, anyway," some teachers admit openly that this part of their grade, which I have known to be as much as forty percent, is subjective. While grades may be arbitrary on a theoretical level, students consider grades in a more concrete fashion. And though I am sure that most teachers have some basis for determining how many points to give for this "arbitrary" and "subjective" gray area, they also need to remember to make these points known to learners throughout the semester. When students complete a test, paper, or assignment, they can see their grade; but most teachers I have known only calculate the participation grade at the very end of the semester. To address such a situation, I apply a two-step remedy to the situation: clarifying what constitutes "participation" and sending regular, personalized participation grade reports to each student, with the help of a spreadsheet and e-mail merge software.

Letting Students Know Precise Grading Criteria

Of course, most teachers let students know what they expect for participation in their class. Unfortunately, this "orientation" might come in the form or a speech during the first class (which many students may not understand), or as just a few lines on a syllabus (which many students may never read). However, if we do not provide students with a thorough description of our expectations in document form, we cannot expect them to understand the degree of importance we place on that item or what kind of performance we consider successful. Any description of our participation grade needs to include not only the amount of the grade, but also precisely what kind of behavior will secure that score.

There is nothing wrong with a "plus, check, or minus" system of grading participation. However, teachers need to consider how those marks will translate into the final grade before they begin using such a system. Does each day add up cumulatively? Or is there a set threshold that must be met? Is it an all-or-nothing grade? Or are points assigned directly for each plus, check, or minus? Let’s face it: we have to determine how the grade pans out at some point before turning our final grades in to the administration, so why not get that out of the way at the beginning of the semester? This allows the added benefit of making the participation grade transparent to students.

Whatever grading scheme you wish to use, the next step is to write descriptors for each step on the scale. These descriptors may serve the purpose of justifying a grade, but, more importantly, they offer guidelines according to which students can adjust their participatory behavior. In the Appendix, I have included a set of descriptors that I recently developed for an advanced class, which was discussion-oriented and small in size. These clearly cannot be applied to large classes in which little discussion occurs, but they offer a model by which teachers can compile descriptors appropriate to their own classroom situations.

Though the bulk of this article is devoted to a method of publishing participation scores to students on a regular basis, the foundation of such a practice is clear descriptions of what constitutes the participation grade. I refer to this as "transparency" in the same sense that large, publicly held companies are urged to be transparent about their business practices. It is the students’ right to know what is going on in our curriculum. Not only does the software solution I propose here inform students of their grades; it also urges them to become responsible for their own grades. As can be seen in the Appendix, my point scale is accompanied by calls for students to reflect on their scores, and to adjust their own participation as necessary. To constantly keep students aware of their role in shaping their own grade, I suggest including the descriptors and a message encouraging self-regulation, such as appears in the Appendix, inside each participation grade e-mail.

Preparing to Publish Participation Grades

The second step in making participation grades transparent is to publish the grades to students during the course of the semester. If a mob of students has ever gravitated around you (and your grade book) after class, you know how interested students are in monitoring their grades, and you should quickly recognize the upside of using a mass e-mailing program to eliminate that situation. The benefit using a mass mailing program to send e-mail is that each person who receives the mail sees only their address and name in the "To" e-mail header, and a reply will send it only to the e-mail address listed in the "From" header. The added benefit of e-mail merge software is that distinct information can be sent to each member of a mailing list, and you only have to compose one message. If you have ever made mailing labels from an address book file, then you have an idea of how merging works. Believe it or not, for our purposes, I find using the e-mail merge software even more simple and user-friendly than making labels, and the possible applications of e-mail merge software is only limited by one's own creativity.

It is not my intent to promote a particular software title, and readers should know that there are several alternative software solutions available, but because of my familiarity with a program called WorldMerge, its ease of use, and the fact that a fully functional free version is available for download, I will discuss how to prepare and send an individualized mass e-mailing to students with this software. (WorldMerge can be downloaded for free from this page: http://www.coloradosoft.com/download.htm. Alternatively, you can find similar software from such download depots as Tucows.com or Download.com.)

Before you can send a mass e-mail, you will need a database. With WorldMerge, you can use various formats, including "generic" formats such as tab-delimited text. I recommend using a spreadsheet application (WorldMerge uses Lotus 1-2-3 or Microsoft Excel) because it can serve both as the file for the mass e-mail and as a continually updated grade file. After all, using software is all about making tasks easier - more automated - so it makes little sense to use tab-delimited files, which do not include the data manipulation features of a spreadsheet.

When preparing your database, be absolutely sure to include descriptive column headings. You will need to select from these headings later in the WorldMerge program. Also, be sure not to use the topmost line of the spreadsheet for data entry, because the WorldMerge program will read those entries as column headings, and that student will not receive an e-mail. If you use the headings, the problem is solved both ways. The minimum information your database must contain is the e-mail addresses of your students. If you have a file with only e-mail addresses, you can prepare and send a mass e-mail to everyone on the list. This is great for making announcements, for example. Since we are planning to publish grades, we will also have columns for each grade, and each column will need a distinct heading. I have provided the information from an Excel file in table form below to show what such a spreadsheet might look like.

Starting a New Mail Project

Let’s use the Sample_data.xls file (download from here, or refer to the table above) to go through the steps of using WorldMerge to send personalized grade reports to each student. To follow along on your own computer, you will need to download and install WorldMerge before beginning. Otherwise, you can still read along and see whether this solution will meet your needs, and download the software later.

First, with the spreadsheet file closed, launch the WorldMerge program.

1. You will be presented with a "splash" screen from which you can select "Use the Free Version" to continue without purchasing or registering the software.

2. Next, you will be prompted to "Open an Existing Mail Merge Project" or "Create a new Mail Merge Project." (See image) We want to do the latter. Click on the radio button to select a new project then click "OK."

3. Next, you will be presented with the option of composing you message in "Plain Text" or "HTML." (See image) For this trial run, let’s stick with plain text. Click the radio button, and "Next."

4. The next screen has two options. (See image) First, you will need to select your database file type from the drop down menu. (See image) Our sample file is in Microsoft Excel format, so select that. Then click on the “Browse” button to locate your database file. After selecting the proper file, click "Next."

5. If your database file has more than one worksheet, you will be presented with a dialogue box to select the sheet with the necessary data. (See image) In our case, it is the first sheet, "Data." (When making your own files, you can simply delete all other worksheets, which will let you bypass this step.)

6. Next, you will be prompted to "Select the field in your database which contains the email address." (See image) This is the first time that those column headings become helpful. Without them, you wouldn’t know what to choose. Click "Next." You will see one more screen, but all you need to do is click “Finish.”

Composing and Sending the Mail Message

You should now be looking at the main WorldMerge window. Within the program you will see three tabs along the top: "Message," where you can edit and view your message; "Mailing List," where you can view, select, and unselect recipients of the message; and "Sent Items," which displays a log of the files you have sent. For the most part, your work will be done within the "Message" window, which is the default view. (See image) The "Message" interface reflects a common e-mail client. In the main text area, right-clicking the mouse allows you to input a field. (I currently use WorldMerge version 4.0. ColoradoSoft, the maker of WorldMerge, lists the ability to input fields in the "Subject" line of the e-mail as a new feature in version 4.2 on its website: http://www.coloradosoft.com/worldmrg/index.htm) The following is a description of basic steps used to create a message:

• When you right-click your mouse, you will be presented with a menu consisting of your column headers (in this case, Student Name, Student e-mail, Score 1, Score 2, etc.). (See image)
• When you select one of these headers, it is entered as a field. You will recognize this because of the [[ ]] which set it off from the rest of the text. You can place a field anywhere in the e-mail.
• Let’s begin writing our e-mail by typing a salutation, such as "Dear", pressing the space bar once (just to enter a blank space before the data from the spreadsheet), then right-clicking the mouse.
• Select "Student Name" from the fields and click "OK."
• You will need to click your mouse once in the window again to relocate the mouse at the end of the line. Then type a comma and press <Enter>. What this will do is create an individualized salutation for each member of the mailing list.
• Now you are ready to write the body text. If you type a sentence like "Your participation score for this week is," press the space bar once, then right-click and select "Score 1," each student will receive a personalized score.

That’s all there is to it. Now, the added functionality of a spreadsheet means that you can report running totals easily. All you have to do is type another line like this: "Your total participation grade for the semester is," space, right-click, select "Total." If you enter new grades throughout the semester, and have a running total entered in your spreadsheet, the updated totals will also appear in the e-mails. Any teacher who is using spreadsheet software to keep track of grades should consider how simple it would be to publish that existing information by using an e-mail merge program.

Alternatively, you could make an entry for each week’s points, followed by a total; you could make an entry for only the most recent week, with or without a running total; or you could just enter the running total, and not the weekly points. Frankly, since the goal of this software solution is transparency, it only makes sense to send out all available data, i.e.: every weekly score and a running total. However, you may way to put the total at top, followed by the most recent scores, in descending order. There are countless variations on how such a tool can be used to automate the reporting of grades.

Once you are ready to send the message, you can use the built-in spell-checker and preview function to make sure the format and information are correct. If you are making a text mail, the preview will not differ much from the composing area. However, if you use HTML to format your message, the HTML preview is invaluable.

Before sending a message out to students, you may want to test a few on yourself. This can easily be done by replacing the bogus e-mail addresses in the Sample_data.xls file with your own e-mail address. In fact, I recommend this step just so you can see - and trust - that each student will get only their own personalized data, and never be able to see anyone else’s. You may even want to add your own name and e-mail address at the bottom of your actual database just so that you get an e-mail to confirm each mailing you send out.

When you are ready to send, go to the "Send" menu and select "Send Message." You will see a dialogue box reminding you that you are using an evaluation version. Click "OK," and you are finished! To check on the status of your mail, you can go to the "Mailing List" tab. If the mail has not yet been sent, you will see a white envelope to the left of each list member. If the mail has been sent successfully, the envelope will have a green check mark on it. And if the mail failed to go out, there will be a red X on the envelope.

One last note about mailing: you can mail as frequently as you want: weekly, monthly, or daily. It’s up to you to find a balance that serves your needs - and serves your students.

Formatting Tips

It won’t take long to become comfortable with the software discussed in this article. When you feel like moving forward, I would suggest using HTML tables (and colors) to enhance the presentation of your mail. Even if you don’t know how to write HTML, you can simply use a WYSIWYG (What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get) HTML editor, such as CuteHTML, Macromedia Dreamweaver, Netscape Composer, or Frontpage Express. In fact, WorldMerge’s recently released version 4.2 also boasts a visual WYSIWYG HTML editor plug-in. These editors allow you to create HTML documents the same way that you create formatted documents in word processors. You can use them to create a mail format, including a blank table with enough columns or rows to support the data you wish to report, then copy the source (you may need to select View > source to see he actual HTML), and paste it into WorldMerge (you will need to select HTML when starting WorldMerge). When cutting and pasting in WorldMerge, you cannot use the right-click menu, as the right-click opens the field options. Instead, use the drop down menus at the top of the window, or use the standard <Ctrl>+C to copy and <Ctrl>+V to paste. Once you have pasted your HTML formatted document into WorldMerge, you can place the mouse where you want data to appear, right-click, and select the field for that spot.

If you are not familiar with HTML, viewing the source code may be a little intimidating, and you may not know just where to insert your fields. A solution to that is to type "place markers" in the HTML editor (before copying and pasting). For example, say you design a table into which you want to insert the running total. In the WYSIWYG editor, type something like "TOTAL" (using all capital letters will make it easier to find later). In fact, it is a great idea to enter the actual column headers, as you will not be confused about which one belongs where when you replace them with fields. You can then replace these place markers with the actual fields by going through the source code in the WorldMerge Message window, double-clicking to select the place marker, then right-clicking to replace it with a field.

If all of this HTML talk sounds a little above your head, let me give you a tip for formatting a text e-mail. If you want to send out a series of scores, for example, I would suggest putting each score on a new line, aligned to the left. This should make a fairly even column of scores. If you are only sending out a few numbers, putting them right into a sentence shouldn’t cause any difficulty in reading for the recipient. As mentioned above, until you are confident in using the software, send a test mail to yourself first to make sure it comes out the way you intended.

Since many ESL teachers work with students whose names use non-alphabetic characters, you should be aware that WorldMerge does not seem to support other character systems. However, this can be overcome in a few ways. The first, and simplest, is to Romanize the spelling of students’ names. This solution bypasses the issue altogether. The second is only available if you are using HTML mail, and if your students will be reading the mail on a computer which also supports the foreign character system. My own case is that I teach in Korean, and essentially every computer in the country can read Hangul, the Korean character system. When I want to send an HTML e-mail with Hangul, I go to the <head> section of the code and make sure that the character set is a Korean one. When using a WYSIWYG editor on a computer with a Korean operating system, this occurs automatically, so I don’t need to do anything. Still, I always check, because if the character set is western, the foreign characters will come out as gibberish.

Finally, WorldMerge inserts a short message at the end of every e-mail to announce that the user is using evaluation software. While I cannot disclose the exact "remedy" (for fear of liability), I will say that there is a simple way to reduce the visibility of this message when using text e-mail, and a simple way to completely hide the message when using HTML mail.

Final Thoughts

The combination of e-mail merge software and spreadsheet programs offers various options for simplifying and organizing broadcasting tasks. Aside from distributing grades, I have used the software described in this article to conduct surveys, schedule appointments with students, and to publish personalized class news, and I am currently using it to coordinate participants in a research project. Using software to publish participation grades is an effective method of informing students of their grades, and allowing them to take responsibility for their grades, when such an approach is coupled with a published description of the criteria for participation. Since participation is key to a conversation class, and since it is graded that way in many schools, it is not only proper but necessary to find ways of making the participation grade transparent to students.

Appendix

In-Class Participation Point Scale Used in an Advanced Discussion Class

I have developed a list of criteria to describe the points you will receive for in-class participation. Additionally, I will be e-mailing each student a weekly update of their in-class participation grade. When you receive these e-mails, be sure to compare your points with the scale below. If you feel you are not getting high enough scores, you can see from the scale how much you have been participating, and adjust your in-class behavior.

Each day, you can receive 0 to 4 points for participation in class. These points are based on frequency and quality participation.

0 - No participation at all. (Simply saying “yes” after someone else makes a statement is not participation.)

1 - Makes a few comments; does not initiate or direct the discussion; presence does not influence the discussion significantly

2 - Makes intermittent comments; comments may echo the sentiments of others, but do not contribute significantly to the discussion

3 - Regular participation; adds opinions, makes suggestions, comments on major points; contributes valuable input to the discussion

4 - Constant contributions to the discussion; contributes significant material which helps to direct the discussion; without this person, the discussion would be completely different

These criteria are intended to help you gauge your performance in class. If necessary, we can revise their wordings to clarify them or make them more descriptive. The main point is that you are aware of your daily grades so that you have the chance to modify your participation if you would like a higher grade. The responsibility of the grade should lie with the students, and this is a step in that direction.

EXTENDING VOCABULARY KNOWLEDGE WITH COMPUTERS
by James Thomas
Masaryk University
Brno, Czech Republic
thomas@informatics.muni.cz

When learners of a foreign language actively observe new vocabulary when reading, they might wonder if the new word, new phrase, interesting collocation etc, is worth learning. As experience tells us, "knowing a word" is much more than knowing its denotative meaning. In the effort to make a vocabulary item available not only for receptive purposes but for productive purposes as well, it is necessary to know the company it typically keeps. For example, what do you make of the third word in this headline from the Sydney Morning Herald?

Scientists all agog after discovery of fossilised menagerie

Sometimes a single context suggests the meaning, but this is not always the case. Dictionaries usually help, but not always: Cobuild's E-dict tells us: If you are agog, you are excited about something, and eager to know more about it. On the other hand, the fact that it is not in the Cambridge Learner's Dictionary (CD version), suggests that the lexicographers considered agog to be beyond learners’ needs. Since it is no more practical for students to learn every new word they met, than it is for a dictionary to include every word in a language between its covers, it is necessary to prioritise. The following section discusses a variety of computer-aided approaches to prioritising.

One criterion we apply when deciding whether or not to learn a vocabulary item is the need it fulfils: does agog do anything that its synonyms don’t? By putting the cursor on the word and hitting Shift F7, Microsoft Word 2000 offers the following synonyms for agog: eager (1351), excited (1803), impatient (677), keen (3710), avid (161), interested (8787), enthusiastic (1431), curious (2098). Notice that two of these synonyms appear in E-dict’s definition above. And a list of synonyms certainly gives some idea of the field of meaning. An internet view on synonyms is the beautiful display at Plumb Design Visual Thesaurus. Click this link and hit its "click to launch". Then at the bottom of the new screen, enter any word whose synonym you would like to follow. You can read a short review of this at Yahoo Picks.

At the opposite end of the scale of "near-perfect combination of content and design" is another on-line source of synonyms called Wordnet. After searching for a word, it provides you with that word’s categories. For example, if you were writing an article describing an experiment and found that the word experiment was too frequent in your text, you might want to use a synonym. Wordnet offers three categories for this word, [click here] from which you can then choose to look at its synonyms [click here], and equally important for discourse, its hypernyms, hyponyms, holonyms, antonyms, meronyms, depending on what is available for your search word. The simplicity of design is not a liability.

A second criterion in deciding whether or not to learn a vocabulary item is an item’s typicality. The numbers beside agog’s synonyms represent the absolute count of each word in the British National Corpus which has approximately one hundred million words: agog itself occurs only 25 times in the BNC which is a good clue as to why it was not included in the 35,000 meanings included on the CLD CD. If we accept that a non-native speaker’s language production becomes more native-like as he or she employs more and more native-speaker like elements, the issue of typicality becomes important.

However, despite agog being a rare word relative to its synonyms, the Sydney Morning Herald chose it for that headline possibly because its rarity gives weight to the headline, possibly because "all agog" is an eye-catching cliché, and possibly because one would not expect scientists to be "agog". It is quite usual for a specific context to place constraints on the synonyms that can be substituted, so that of the eight listed above, the scientists could perhaps have been "excited" instead of "agog", but at the expense of a shade of meaning. Regardless, the newspaper was able to use this word because native speakers know it.

The scenario then is that students of a foreign language are meeting new vocabulary items while reading. Looking them up in a dictionary leads to a better understanding of the current text, but does not automatically lead to them being available for productive purposes. Meeting a word in a single context cannot exemplify the range of grammar patterns that a word has, nor the semantic fields it appears in, nor its various collocations. More focussed work is required if a student wants to learn a word. There are many ways to skin a cat, as the English idiom has it, and one way of elevating passive vocabulary to active vocabulary is by studying it in multiple contexts, and preferably authentic ones. One would have to read a lot of English text before coming across agog in such contexts. One could search a corpus, however. To be sure, a corpus is a database of multiple texts and a concordancer is a program which searches it.

Concordancing is a computer-based activity undertaken by people studying language for both academic and practical purposes. After searching a database of natural language, a corpus, for a particular item, usually a word, the program typically returns a page of text which has the target item vertically aligned down the centre of the screen. In this way, concordancing offers two simultaneous views on the target item: the horizontal view in which multiple contexts of the item can be observed, and the vertical in which the item’s co-text is displayed. This data can then be interpreted and used to address the question that initiated the search. The diversity of a language can never be comprehensively presented in a dictionary and few dictionaries provide much information about a word’s grammar or its collocations. For simple searches, it takes a concordancer seconds only to search a corpus, and the human interpreter of the data can often find the answer almost as quickly if the question is well-framed and the search query properly formulated. These skills are as learnable and as useful as the multitude of computer skills that people now take for granted. For language students, teachers, translators and people writing in a foreign language, access to data for checking one’s intuitions on the fly is invaluable.

The corpus I use with my students is the Collins Cobuild Corpus Concordance Sampler (henceforth CCS), available on-line most of the time. They occasionally have server problems, e.g. a hacker brought it down for ten days in November 2002. Being a sampler means that the CCS does not offer a full range of functions - for this, one must become a subscriber. For example, the above BNC word counts for agog’s synonyms cannot be derived from the CCS. Nevertheless, as an introduction to how a corpus can help a learner address such issues as a vocabulary item’s "company", its typicality and usefulness, it is ideal.

One way of learning to use something is to use it. So without further ado, click this link Collins Cobuild Corpus Concordance Sampler and Type in your query, agog. Then click Show Concs. Eight concordances appear - an unusually and gratifyingly small number to deal with.

What do you notice about the layout?

• The search word is centred.
• The concordances (the lines of text) are "cut off" which means that complete sentences almost never appear.
• The text on the screen cannot be read as a single text because the concordances come from different sources.

What do you notice about agog?

• Two concordances are preceded by all, as is the newspaper headline above.
• Agog In The Ether looks like the name of something. To resolve this, copy and paste the phrase into an internet search engine: Google found the phrase 52 times (when enclosed in inverted commas - "Agog In The Ether"), almost always capitalised as here, and clearly the name of a piece of music, so this phrase is probably not important in “knowing the word”.
• Four concordances(50%) are preceded by some form of BE.
• And you can often see the reason for someone being agog: the news, the performance, over the arrival, to see the world, to hear the news. Thus, it would seem to be a reaction although there is no indication of it being a positive or negative reaction.

What has been learnt about the word in the process of making these observations?

• The company the word keeps is easily spotted: grammatical (be), lexical (all), semantic (the reaction).
• It is a very infrequent word if it only occurs eight times in "56 million words of contemporary written and spoken text", as is written at the top of CCS’s main page.
• You are now in a position to consider if the word is worth learning, and if so, what there is to learn about it.

The CCS allows a great many types of searches which can answer many simple questions that crop up when reading and writing: this includes translating and marking students’ written work. My website, A Ten-step Introduction to Concordancing through the Collins Cobuild Corpus Concordance Sampler, aims to instruct people in forming search queries and utilising the results. As its title indicates, it is an introduction to concordancing, not specifically a manual for the CCS. Relevant linguistic concepts are illustrated and a wide range of search activities is provided. There is also a plethora of links from this site to related topics.

DIY concordancing

Once students are familiar with reading concordances and understand what a unique and valuable perspective can be gained by observing vocabulary items in multiple and authentic contexts, there is another resource available on the Web which can be utilised, if the reading text is available in electronic form.

The Compleat Lexical Tutor offers a wide range of vocabulary learning facilities. We will look here at only one of them. Click the link and go to the Hypertext Builder in the "Teachers" column. Once you have a text pasted into the text box, the program creates a hyperlinked version of it. This means that while you are reading and studying it, you can click on any word to see it concordanced in a lower part of the screen. You can also click to see the word in a WordNet window with the facilities described above. It literally takes seconds to copy and paste a story from the Internet, e.g. from a news service such as the Sydney Morning Herald or The Guardian, into the Hypertext Builder and have the page available for reading and studying in these ways.

In conclusion, it has to be admitted that it takes some investment in time to learn how to use concordancers and derive the benefits that are available. Part of this investment is coming to understand what vocabulary per se is, and my Introduction to Concordancing website is written with that in mind. In an era which so highly values learner autonomy and discovery learning, concordancing has much to offer. In an era when more and more teachers and students have easy access to on-line resources, dictionaries, thesauri and concordances open up paths to linguistic independence undreamt of even a decade ago. But these are little more than toys in the hands of novices: language learners need learner training to understand what they need to know.