Friday, September 30, 2022

TOEIC Preparation - Week 3 - Part 2 Questions and Answers

 TOEIC Preparation - Week 3 - Part 2 Questions and Answers









Warm Up: You saw that Knock Knock Jokes are a very common style of jokes in English that involve similar sounding words. To tell a knock knock joke, you must pretend that you are knocking on a person's door. The knock knock joke always follows the same pattern.
  • Joke Teller: "Knock Knock"
  • Listener: "Who's there?"
  • Joke Teller: "X"
  • Listener: "X who?"
  • Joke Teller: ...THIS IS "SUPPOSED TO BE" THE FUNNY PART

With your partners take turns clicking on the links and telling your knock knock jokes. You do NOT need to share your screen for this activity. If someone does not understand the joke, you can say it again. If nobody understands the joke, write down the number so you can discuss it with your teacher later.

Knock-Knock Jokes




Similar Sounding Words as Distractions

Task 1: Identify Common Distractor Types
One of the most common distractor types in Parts 1 and 2 of the test are the use of similar sounding words. In this exercise you will practice identifying words that rhyme. On the top of page 19 in your anthology, draw the same shape around each of the words that rhyme. In the final column, you need to make your own symbol or letter system to identify the categories of rhyming words. 

Click to see full size image


Task 2: To practice some of the common distractor types for Part 1 of the test, draw a line to connect items from the three columns (Type, Description, Example) on the bottom of page 19 in your anthology.

Click to see full size image




What is the Question Asking?

Introduction: The biggest strategy for Part 2 is to pay very close attention to what the question is asking. Once you know that the question is asking about a person, place, time, etc., it will be much easier for you to identify which responses are appropriate and which are not. The graphic below contains some common question categories. 

Click to view full size.


Task 3: Make two teams, A and B. For the first round, Team A is going to CLICK HERE. Team B should NOT look at it! Team A is going to read some different questions and Team B will quickly say what category the question belongs in. 

Task 4: Now it's time for Team B to read the questions and Team A to categorize them. Team B is going to CLICK HERE. Team A should NOT look at it!

Task 5: Now both teams are going to take turns playing another quick thinking game. Team A says the name of a student from Team B and then reads one of their original questions. The student on Team B needs to respond to the question with a socially appropriate answer. Then Team B calls the name of a student from Team A and reads a question. The idea is to see how quickly you can do this!



Book Exercises


Page 6 - Task A
Click to see full version.





Question Analysis

Instructions: Click your group link below. You will see 10 prompts. For each one, you need do the following:
  • Idenitfy what kind of information the question is asking.
  • Write a plausible answer to the question.
  • Look at the real answer choices and select the best option.
  • Classify the two distractors.







Focused Practice


Instructions: Work with your partners to complete some collaborative quizes. Choose the kind of questions you want to focus on below. Remember to check the transcripts after you submit your answers.

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Professional Practice I - Week 3 - Introduction to Case Study Reserach

 Professional Practice I - Week 3 -  Introduction to Case Study Reserach




Introduction: Hello and welcome to Week 3 of the Professional Practice I of the BA in English Teaching at ULACIT term IIIC 2022. In today's class we will explore the definitions, features, and applications of case study research and participate in a workshop about designing objectives.

Today's Goals:
  • Define the features, functions, and applications of case study research
  • Survey a range of case studies related to ELT and identify their components.
  • Experiment with different frameworks for articulating lesson objectives.
Guiding Questions:
  • What are the features, functions, and applications of case study research?
  • What similarities can I find between published case studies in ELT?
  • How can I write an effective lesson objective?







Warm Up: This or that?
Let's continue getting to know each other by playing this quick game. We'll spin the wheel and then you need to choose between to options. Briefly, say which one you prefer and why. You have to choose one!











Topic 1: Weekly Check-In
It's week three! What have you been up to since our last meeting?
  • Have you given any thought to the institution in which you would like to complete your hours?
  • Have you contacted anyone at the institution?
  • Have you thought about how you can arrange your weekly schedule in order to meet the in-person hours?
  • Have you done any site visits? If so, what did you notice?











Topic 2: Concept Review
Let's quickly review our topics from last week by discussing these questions.
  • We make sense of the world through two types of reasoning. What are the differences between these two?
    • Inductive Reasoning
    • Deductive Reasoning
  • We learned some technical terms related to the philosophy behind different research methods. What do these mean?
    • Ontology
    • Epistemology
    • Paradigm
  • We also learned about two important branches of research. What can you say about them?
    • Quantitative
    • Qualitative


Now let's test your understanding of the differences between qualitative and quantitative research. Click the link below and follow the instructions in the document.










Topic 3: Introduction to Case Study Research
Let's begin looking at the form of research that you will carry out in your schools this term. Click the group link below and follow your teacher's instructions.










Topic 4: Surveying Case Studies in ELT
A great way to learn more about case studies is to read studies related to your research interests. Click your link below and follow your teacher's instructions.












Teacher Development Workshop

Writing Better Lesson Objectives





Topic 5: Importance of Learning Objectives
For this week's Teacher Development Workshop we wil explore the topic of learning objectives. Follow along with your teacher's instructions.











Task 6: Ideas and Resources
Here are some resources with ideas about objectives, goals, and aims.
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Tuesday, September 27, 2022

Culture and SLA - Week 3 - Cultural Products

  Culture and SLA - Week 3 -  The Cultural Products




Introduction: Hello and welcome to Week 3 of the course Culture and Second Language Acquisition for the master's in English teaching at ULACIT term IIIC0 2022. This week we explore products, the visible dimension of culture and consider how products can serve as a portal to exploring other dimensions of culture.


Today's Goals:
  • Share a personal example of a cultural learning experience you have had by making reference to the four cultural knowings.
  • Explore the practices, perspectives, communities, and persons associated with everyday Costa Rican cultural products.
  • Create a culture map to examine the interaction between products, practices, and persons in a physical space.
Guiding Questions:
  • What kinds of knowledge are needed to fully learn a cultural feature?
  • How is my culture represented in the products I see around me?
  • How do products, practices, and persons intersect in a cultural place that I visit often?





Warm Up: Future Archeology

Archeologists study the material culture (products) of past civilizations. With some cultures, there is a written record that helps researchers understand their associated practices and perspectives. However, in preliterate societies or ones whose writing system has not been decyphered, these associations must be infered. David Macaulay (1979) wrote a humorous book called Motel of the Mysteries to explore this topic.


Now, play the role of a future archeologist exploring the ancient ruins of the lost civilization of Ti-qui-cia. Choose several everyday cultural products that are common in Costa Rica. What would a future researcher infer about the practices and perspectives associated with it? CLICK HERE to view an example from a previous group.


Task 1: Week 2 Recall
Last week we discussed the four cultural knowings that form the cultural experience. Let's quickly review these important concepts. 


Theory Review: The Cultural Experience

  • "As teachers, we have little difficulty listing cultural topics, but organizing them is another matter entirely. For good reasons. Culture is multifaceted and complex, and there is no consensus on what culture is (Moran, p. 13)."
  • "Culture has many definitions... For the most part, these definitions present culture as an abstract entity that can be separated from the experience of participating in it. While they do help us understand the nature of culture, these definitions remain abstract, disconnected from the people who live in that culture, and more importantly, from the experience of participating in that culture (Moran, p. 13)."  





Theory Break: The Cultural Knowings



  • "The cultural knowings framework offers a means for describing culture in terms of what students need to do in order to learn it - their encounters with another way of life. Once these interactions are specified, the learning objectives follow, as do the choice of teaching and learning activities and the appropriate means of evaluation (Moran, p. 15)."






  • Knowing How: - Participation - This is the experience of interacting with an aspect of the culture. This stage involves developing skills and appropriate cultural behaviors.
  • Knowing About: - Description - This is the act of gathering information about a cultural aspect through research, observation, or consulting members of the culture. The result of this stage is cultural knowledge.
  • Knowing Why: - Interpretation - This stage involves exploring the perspectives connected to the cultural aspect, many of which are implicit. The result of this stage is cultural understanding.
  • Knowing Oneself: - Response - This stage involves reflecting on your experiences, examining how you personally feel about the cultural aspect and making a decision about whether or not or to what degree you want to adopt it. The result of this stage is self-awareness.




  • "The cultural experience is highly personal, and therefore idiosynchratic. Individual learners need to understand themselves and their own culture as a means to comprehending, adapting to, or integrating into the [target] culture (Moran, p. 17)."
  • "In the end, individual learners set the limits of knowing about, how, and why. They decide. For this reason, knowing oneself is the organizing dimension of the cultural knowings. Learners' abilities to make such decisions depend on their awareness of themselves, their situation, and their intentions. The more aware they are, the more focused their work becomes in the acquisition of cultural information, skills, and understanding (Moran, p. 17)."






Task 2: Exploring the Cycle
Complete the following tasks with your partners to review these important concepts. 
  • The Teacher's Cultural Experience: Click on your group link below and complete the chart with the missing information by copy/pasting the names of the stages, their descriptions, and examples into the green spaces.
  • My Cultural Experience: Can you think of an example of a cultural learning experience you have had and describe it using the four cultural knowings? This could be an experience you have had with someone from another country, another part of your country, or even experiences adapting to a new school or work environment. 








Task 3: Exploring Cultural Products
For homework this week you read Chapter 5 Cultural Products in the Moran book and completed a study guide. Open your study guide and respond to the following prompts with your partners. 
  • What is a cultural product?
  • What are the four types of cultural products?
  • At the beginning of your study guide you were asked to write a vivid description of a busy place in your country or your first impressions of a different country. Read your descriptions to your partners and see how many cultural products you can identify. 
  • Now think about those same places you described earlier. Can you think of any of the following that are associated with this place?
    • Artifacts
    • Places
    • Institutions
    • Art Forms
  • In two tasks you were asked to describe the artifacts and layout of your living room. In what ways does the layout and organization of your living room represent typical organizational patterns of other living rooms in your culture? Why do you think Costa Rican living rooms are organized in this way? 
  • What could someone from a very different culture learn about Costa Ricans by stuyding their living rooms?


Theory Break: Cultural Products


  • "Products, the visible dimension of culture, are the gateway to the new culture, the new way of life. They are the first things that greet our senses when we enter the culture, and the differences stand out (Moran, p. 48)."
  • "Visible cultural products often appear discrete or isolated. However, if we look more closely at them, we see that they are almost always related to other cultural products, and that these collections of objects are ultimately linked to sets of cultural practices, set within specific communities, involving particular persons, and are carriers of meaning - cultural perspectives (Moran, p. 49)."
  • Cultural products can be broken into four categories:
    • Artifacts: The things of the culture
    • Places: Places or physical settings
    • Institutions: Social institutions to deal with "the business of living
    • Art Forms: Reflect the esthetic outlook, sensibilities, and philosophy of the culture (perspectives) CLICK HERE










Task 4: Artifacts as Portals to Other Cultural Dimensions
Since products are the most visible dimension of culture, they are often what we first notice when entering a new culture but we don't need to stop here. Since all products are associated with practices, persons, communities, and perspectives, they can serve as an entry point that helps us explore the rich details and connections under the surface. Return to the links in Task 1. Look at some of the cultural artifacts and explore the 5 Dimensions of Culture framework by responding to the prompts below.
  • Product: What is it? Where do you find it?
  • Practices: How do you use it? When?
  • Persons: Which people use this?
  • Communities: Which groups of people use this object?
  • Perspectives: Why do people use this? What significance does it have in the culture?
  • Additional Associations: If you have time, use the prompts below to guide your exploration of this cultural practices assocaited with this artifact even futher. Not all will be applicable.
    • Making/creating
    • Designing
    • Decorating
    • Buying
    • Selling
    • Trading
    • Losing
    • Using/operating
    • Maintaining
    • Storing
    • Damaging
    • Repairing
    • Discarding
    • Recovering 


Theory Break: Places


  • "Man-made settings are populated with numerous artifacts, arranged in particular ways within the physical space. The organization, layout, or interpretation of this physical space is a critical feature of places, just as much as the artifacts and their arrangements in these places (Moran, p. 52)."
  • Places are interesting cultural features to explore because of the reasons mentioned in the quote and also because it is within places that different cultural practices are carried out by communities and specific persons.






Task 4: Culture Mapping
Let's explore the topic of places in greater detail by drawing a culture map. Choose a public place that you are familiar with and draw a map of it from a top-down perspective. Be as detailed as you can and include the cultural artifacts in their locations. If your drawing skills are not great, just use simple shapes and symbols. 

Suggested Places: You can choose any public place but be sure it is a specific real place that you visit.
  • Bus station you use
  • Pulperia in your neighborhood
  • Soda/restaurant you are familiar with

Exploring the Culture Maps: Now share your maps with your partners and explain the following aspects.
  • Where is this place located within your city or neighborhood?
  • Describe the physical layout of the place and the artifacts found there.
  • What is the significance of the location of the artifacts?
  • What are the "hot spots", the points in the map where actions occur?
  • What can you say about the products, practices, perspectives, communities, and persons associated with this place?


References:

Moran, P. (2001). Teaching Culture: Perspectives in Practice. Heinle Cengage Learning. 
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Monday, September 26, 2022

Teaching and Assessing Listening - Week 3 - Semantic Processing

 Teaching and Assessing Listening - Week 3 - Semantic Processing




Introduction: Hello and welcome to Week 3 of the course Teaching and Assessing Listening for the master's in English teaching at ULACIT term IIICO 2022. In today's class we will explore the process of meaning creation when processing spoken input including schema theory, inferencing and reasoning, and what is needed for acceptable understanding.

Today's Goals:
  • Explore the role of prosody in highlighting new versus given information.
  • Compare your conceptual activation spaces in response to a given stimulus.
  • Analyze conversation transcripts to identify the use of cohesion devices and inferences needed for adequate comprehension.
  • Discuss the bi-modal nature of listening comprehension and its implications for the teaching and assessment of listening.
Guiding Questions: 
  • How do listeners identify new information and background information from paralinguistic cues in the input?
  • How are the conceptual schemata activated in my mind in response to a word similar and different to those of my classmates?
  • How do listeners use inference and attention to cohesion devices to make sense of discourse?
  • How do the unique properties of bi-modal sensory processing help explain some of the challenges of traditional approaches to teaching and assessing listening comprehension?







Warm Up: Forced Associations
A large portion of today's class deals with how we make use of an associative network of interrelated concepts in our memory to comprehend new information. Let's review some of the concepts from last week through a game that requires to make some interesting associations. Click the group link below.
    • Spoken Language vs Written Language
    • Intonation Unit
    • Prosody
    • Segmentation












Topic 1: Catch Up on What we Missed Last Week!
Because of time, we were not able to complete all of our tasks from last week. Let's quickly go over that important information now.



Syntactic Parsing

  • Nearly every utterance you ever hear is novel. Unless you listen to a recorded message, the content, organization, prosody, vocal qualities (psychoacoustic effects), and pronunciation in spoken input make each statement you hear unique.
  • "Novel expressions can be understood solely because the underlying linguistic system that the listener has acquired provides computational processes for generating stable linguistic structures (Rost, 2016, p. 37)." 
  • Listeners identify cues in the input to create a "syntactic mapping of the incoming speech onto a grammatical model (p. 36)."
  • This process occurs in two passes: sentence level and discourse level.
  • Sentence Level Cues: word order, subject verb matching, pronoun antecedent matching, case inflections (I vs me), morphology (ed endings), etc. 
  • Discourse Level Cues: organizational markers for coherence and cohesion, anaphoric reference (mentioned previously), cataphoric reference (to be mentioned), and exophoric references (external to the text).
  • This creates a syntactic reference frame or activates "an automatized syntactic reference frame" which is then used to make logical inferences about the meaning of what is being said and avoid the necessity to process each detail of the input separately.
  • Familiarity with formulaic language and pragmatic understanding of common communicative functions and routines help create activate these automatized reference frames.
  • Bottom-Up and Top Down Processing:  This popular information processing model from psychology, linguistics, and computer science helps explain the two information sources that need to be integrated in order to make sense of a text. 
  • Bottom-Up: Information from the text
  • Top-Down: Information from context/expectations, linguistic knowledge, content knowledge


Click to view full sized image.













Topic 2: Introduction to Semantic Processing
Let's take a moment to review some of the concepts from your assigned reading. Click the group link below and follow the instructions in the document. Please have your study guide handy in case you need to reference it.












Topic 3: Memory, Associations, and Comprehension
Today's class is all about the process of meaning making and how we make sense of the world through processing the sensory input we receive. Watch this video carefully and be ready to report your reaction to the class.


  • Describe your initial understanding of what you were watching.
  • How did the final moments of the video change what you were thinking?
  • Now let's watch another version of this video. How does knowing how the effect works change the way you interpret the structure of dragon now? (CLICK HERE)
  • This visual example shows how we comprehend sensory input by activating assumptions about the world in the form of concepts in our long term memory. However, our comprehension breaks down when we are presented with information that contradicts the concept that we have based our assumptions on.

Let's dive deeper into the topics of comprehension and schema theory. Click the group link below.





Remember that last week we discussed the intonation unit? Let's have another look at how speakers subconsciously use prosody to indicate new versus given information in their short bursts of speech.
  • Given Information: What the speaker assumes to already be activated in the listener's working memory. It is indicated through a rising or what is also called a referring tone.
  • New Information: What the speaker assumes is not currently activated in your working memory. It is indicated through a falling or what is also known as a proclaiming town.


Anlaysis of Prosodic Features of Speech
    • Quote: "Because comprehension involves the mapping of references that the speaker uses, the process of comprehending occurs in an ongoing cycle of updating mental representations, as the listener attends to speech (p. 50)."
    • "Without this interplay of new and given, there can be no meaningful updating, and no comprehension (p. 50)."












Topic 4: Inference, Use of Conventional Cohesion Devices, and Reasoning
The author also tells us that inference and attention to cohesion devices helps us connect the dots and build understanding of discourse. Click your group link below and follow the instructions in the document.








Topic 5: Importance of Visual Input
Let's also consider the role of visual input during listening in the meaning making process. Watch the video below and be ready to share your reactions with the class.


    • What are your reactions to the experiment?
    • The McGurk Effect shows the powerful effect visual stimuli can have on interpretation of auditory input. In this case, the experiment shows how our brains can be tricked but let's also consider the ways in which the visual input helps the listener.
    • My lip reading habit in intermediate Spanish.

  • Quote: “Speech processing is aided by consistent visual signals from the speaker, in the form of both gestures and articulatory movements (of the mouth, lips, cheeks, chin, throat, chest) that correspond to production of speech. Because of the importance of visual cues, psycholinguists consider face-to-face and audio-visual speech perception to be seamlessly bi-modal, involving an interplay of auditory and visual senses (p. 55).”
  • “Consistent with the principle of integration, when visual cues are completely absent (as in listening on the telephone), acoustic mishearings and other comprehension problems are significantly higher than in face-to-face delivery of messages (p. 56).”
    • Consider the contexts in which humans listened to speech for the vast majority of the estimated 200,000+ years that we have had language. How might this fact the evolution of this bi-modal processing?
    • Now consider the novel listening situations generated by technological advances in the last 100 years. How have they changed the kinds of listening scenarios we face?
    • How might this evolved strategy of bi-modal processing be underserved in the ways that listening comprehension is taught and assessed in the traditional language classroom?












Topic 6: Final Thoughts
Let's finish today's class by coming back to the two information processing orientations that help us construct meaning from what we hear and read. Next week we will consider even more top-down processes related to how we use knowledge of social conventions in communication (pragmatics) to interpret what we hear.
  • Quote: “This chapter has outlined the semantic, meaning-oriented processes involved in comprehension. This meaning level of processing that originates in the listener’s memory is often called top-down processing in contrast to characterizing the linguistic level, which originates in the speech signal, as bottom-up processing. If there is a misunderstanding during the listening process, we can often consider the ‘what’ is misunderstood to be the actual linguistic elements and the ‘why’ it is misunderstood as the semantic processing (p. 64).”


References:

Rost, M. (2026). Teaching and Researching Listening (3rd ed.). Routledge.  
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