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Overnight, I thought about Steve Jenkinsens' discussion provoking MC experim...

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Overnight, I thought about Steve Jenkinsens' discussion provoking MC experim...

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Overnight, I thought about Steve Jenkinsens' discussion provoking MC experiment with the East India Company. It did indeed promote some interesting discussion about how other players were supposed to respond. But it occurred to me that there is also a much wider discussion that might be worth exploring. Namely, is MC as a virtual space too "nice?" To judge from what I've seen here, everyone in the community is tremendously friendly, generous, helpful, kind, sympathetic, supportive, etc.

But the real world isn't like that. I was reminded of a research article which looked how ESL/EFL textbooks handled various social actions such as invitations, requests, and so on. The author found that overwhelmingly invitations were accepted, requests were granted, opinions were agreed with. In short, the projected "culture" of the ESL/EFL textbook-world was a utopian world of harmony. But that's not the reality of actual life. Leaving aside the large issues of war, famine, etc., in our everyday lives, we all reject invitations, refuse requests, and disagree or more subtly disaffiliate. In aspects large and small, living in the real world involves conflict resolution. We are doing our ESL/EFL learners a disservice by not providing them with social and linguistic tools to manage these situations.

So, is the MC world too nice?

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Hey Steve and Don, I promise this will be my last intrusion on your conversation, but I don't want you to feel like your ideas are strongly opposed. We can see by the silence from the rest of the community on this that maybe it is just me who saw it differently.

Had I seen the post about the teaching idea and the context come first and then the role play post come second it would have made total sense to me - it would have provided me a context for why I was seeing a post about taking lands and enslaving people at the initial opening of the G+ page. That's all.

Don't feel my opinion and our ensuing differing of opinion as anything other than that. We have in the past had frank and open discussions on difficult issues in our community, but those always came with a contextual grounding first. Again, I just had no context for what I was seeing so it hit me differently.

I had a similar situation occur in a class I was teaching in which the subject matter in a game hit too close to home for a student. It was never something I intended or even though may happen. So yeah my initial gut reaction to your post was "What if an Indian teacher came to our page and that was the first thing they saw?" And again I'd like to stress I thought this as I did not see posts setting up a context.

I don't want this to be an obstacle to us having a great time on the server where you should absolutely feel welcome to create anything you'd like. My apologies if my posts made you think anything otherwise.

Here's the thing, in an actually teaching situation, I would imagine that ONLY Steve's students would have access to the particular server that he would be running. So the scenario of the "Indian man" happening across it wouldn't happen. If it were me, I might plan it out something like this. Step 1: Spend the development time to create the micro-world in MC. I would remove any actual historical names and make it a generic situation where a powerful "dominant" class ruled over and enslaved and traded members of subject classes. Step 2: I would ask students to "visit" this world, look around, figure out how it works. participate however they wish (short of destruction) Step 3: Once they had all had a chance to be in this world for a while, I would have the students write an essay (like a diary) about what what they did in-world and what they saw and how they felt about it. Step 4: With the ideas of their essays fresh in their minds, have a discussion in class (not in MC and not via online docs) where the teacher could introduce topics such as "equality" "social classes" "ethnic groups" and "slavery" (in the broad sense of having complete and total control over another person). Step 5: Once all of this was done, the teacher can introduce examples and materials regarding specific historical cases of this happening. The East India Company. The horrors of Belgian imperial rule in the Congo (well that might be a bit to much for younger children), slavery in the US, enslaving of sub-Saharan refugees in Libya today.

So in this sense the self-contained MC world would be a lead-in for the main elements of the lesson.

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Overnight, I thought about Steve Jenkinsens' discussion provoking MC experim...

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Press question mark to see available shortcut keys Overnight, I thought about Steve Jenkinsens' discussion provoking MC experiment with the East India Company. It did indeed promote some interesting discussion about how other players were supposed to respond. But it occurred to me that there is also a much wider discussion that might be worth exploring.

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Just found this link on the ISTE webpage: Meeting the needs of ELL student...

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Just found this link on the ISTE webpage: Meeting the needs of ELL student...

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A very well-written article that clearly lays out the objectives, implementation, tools used, and outcomes. Yes, it was a little bit frightening in terms of the technical skills needed to design and support this project. I strongly suspect that the estimated 100 hours of development time wildly understates the full amount of investigation, trail-and-error, etc. involved. This is far more effort than is typically necessary (read "time-cost effective" for teachers) for a single course. But it's certainly on par with effort needed to creating course materials that will be used over and over for many years.

One quote that bears attention is this:

"Focus on creating a need to be in Minecraft. If the activity can be done without it, it is probably better not to use Minecraft."

Of course, one obvious need is when learners cannot be physically co-present.

There is a great danger that the glamour of new technology will end up as a case of "old wine in new bottles." My experience with conversation analysis (and to a lesser extent corpus linguistics) has shown me that much of the "bread and butter" of the traditional ESL/EFL syllabus is just plain wrong, for example the so-called "short answers" which are seriously out-of-step with interactional realities. The short answers are not only wrong in a structural sense, they can be socially disastrous, e.g. A: Would you like to go to a movie? B: No, I wouldn't. And then there is the dogmatic treatment of the verb system, which is at odds with research from discourse analysis and corpus linguistics.

Let me take one small example, based on investigation of naturally occurring conversational interaction. It has been shown that the unmarked ("no problem") design of a response to a Wh-Q will be in phrasal form, i.e. not a full sentence (as is the norm in most ESL/EFL materials). For example: A: Where are you from? B: New Zealand. This contrasts with a full sentential response that displays misalignment, disaffiliation or rejection of the presuppositions of the question, e.g. A: Where are you from? B: I live in New Zealand. (In this real instance, it turned out that although B had lived in NZ since he was a child, he was originally from Pakistan and so didn't feel that an unmarked response was appropriate.) Yet, we continue to teach this same old content decade after decade, simply repackaging it in bright new methodologies, textbooks, and technologies.

Actually, it would be very interesting to see how this plays out during MC play. Lucy, this is something that you might be able to look at in your MC recordings. (And of course, I would be happy to help/collaborate.)

"Grammar, of course, is the model of closely ordered, routinely observable social activities." (Sacks, 1992:31)

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Just found this link on the ISTE webpage: Meeting the needs of ELL student...

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A very well-written article that clearly lays out the objectives, implementation, tools used, and outcomes. Yes, it was a little bit frightening in terms of the technical skills needed to design and support this project. I strongly suspect that the estimated 100 hours of development time wildly understates the full amount of investigation, trail-and-error, etc.

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Want to swim and play with turtles :) . Update Aquatic is the upcoming 1.13 M...

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Want to swim and play with turtles :) . Update Aquatic is the upcoming 1.13 M...

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Want to swim and play with turtles :) . Update Aquatic is the upcoming 1.13 Minecraft update with new mobs, such as turtles, and lots of new things for the ocean bioms and some on land as well. Here's a video looking at the changes (you'll get used to his exuberance :) ) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=llrDB5h7B5M

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One of my favorite quotes:

War Department Technical Manual TM30-944, Dictionary of Spoken Russian (1958: p.iv)

"The meaning of a word or phrase is always the sum of all the situations in which a word or phrase is used."

I like the way you describe language and I agree with you in regards to grammar.

My context is different. I don't have the constraints of time and curricula and I agreed with the center that my students will be able to advance in my classes from one level to another without having to pass an exam. I also agreed with my students that we are going to take our time and not rush the courses and to forget about obtaining any certificate until at least level 3 or 4.

Do you think a set up like mine makes a difference in how a teacher chooses learning material?

I try to separate "the truth" from what is necessary in any given teaching context. Research provides at least a window on the truth about language and language use. It is the professional obligation of every language teacher to expand his or her awareness of the nature of language. But we all also live and work in a real world with often ridiculous obstacles of all sorts. I try to teach my pre-service teachers to be "language revolutionaries." They will always be constrained by the system, but whenever they get the chance to break out, even if only for 15 minutes a week, they should have a clear idea of . what exists outside the constraints of the system.

But I wonder, do you really agree that GRAMMAR DOESN'T EXIST?

No, I don't agree that it doesn't exist. I think that what I used to and many still think is grammar is a very limited view of it and I agree that teaching or learning a language should not be about learning the rules and knowing how to pass an exam based on those rules. Memorizing a list of vocabulary doesn't work either.

I agree with the idea of the chunks of language. The sentences that people say, their different nuances and flavors in different situations.

One of the things that I agree with my students is not to expect a rule for everything and not get stuck on trying to understand why something is said in a specific way, at least not at the beginning.

I have to run but here's more about what I think and What I learned and am still learning. I may need to explain a bit more about these statements later, we'll see :) .

I didn't learn any English at all from school.
I thought of grammar as a description of how native speakers constructed language.

Then came a book that I bought years ago Style.

Then came this course that I took three years ago I think but still go back to "Write101x" offered by the University of Queensland through edX and this is a video from it that expanded my idea of grammar https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B7fPCv4hgHo

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Want to swim and play with turtles :) . Update Aquatic is the upcoming 1.13 M...

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Press question mark to see available shortcut keys Want to swim and play with turtles :) . Update Aquatic is the upcoming 1.13 Minecraft update with new mobs, such as turtles, and lots of new things for the ocean bioms and some on land as well.

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+Don Carroll Here's how to get subtitles. 1. Click on the ellipsis to open tr...

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+Don Carroll Here's how to get subtitles. 1. Click on the ellipsis to open tr...

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+ Don Carroll Here's how to get subtitles. 1. Click on the ellipsis to open transcript. 2. Then on the upper right corner of the transcript click on the vertical ellipsis to toggle timestamps. 3. Copy and scroll down and past it on word. Save it as .txt file. =)

Oh my word! This is so easy! I can't believe I didn't know how to do this before! I also tried copying it WITH the timestamps and that makes it a bit easier to process visually in terms of editing it.

Actually, I can hardly wait to show some of my students who to do this.

Here's a side-by-side (well, top-to-bottom) comparison of my own transcription of the first part of the video with the auto-transcription. There are some obvious discrepancies, but I wonder whether these would be significant in terms of the validity of word frequency statistics.

What I had in mind was to compile the transcripts from many videos into one single corpus. This YouTuber easily has over 100 videos (and over 2 million subscribers) on MC.
https://www.youtube.com/user/Logdotzip/videos
This one video alone yields a text of around 4,000 words. So with one hundred video, we'd already have a corpus of 400,000 words!!! I'm not sure if the Lexical Tutor tools have a limit on the corpus size they can process, but imagine crunching the frequency statistics for an entire channel!!!

MY TRANSCRIPTION

Oh my god! Oh my god. Oh. Three. Oh..my..(word). Hey, what's going on, guys? Logdotzip here. Kelp blocks, turtle eggs, phantoms, oh my! Oh my goodness, it's finally time, it's finally here. The aquatic update snapshots have begun. This is snapshot 18w, zero-seven-ay. And there's been so much added to this. That's why there's no webcam, that's why the editing is pretty minimal 'cause I wanted to get this video out to you ASAP. We have so much to cover (in the) latest one-point-thirteen snapshot new mobs, new blocks, new mechanics, new enchantments, a whole bunch of new. Look at all these chests (I used here). Look at all these chests out here. Endless, you all ready

YT AUTO-TRANSCRIPTION

00:00
Oh oh my gosh oh three oh hey what's
00:09
going on guys logged on tip here kelp
00:12
blocks turtle eggs
00:13
phantoms oh my oh my goodness it's
00:17
finally time it's finally here the
00:19
aquatic update snapshots have begun this
00:22
a snapchat 18 w 0-7 a and there's been
00:26
so much added to this that's why there's
00:28
no webcam that's why the editing is
00:29
pretty minimal because we want to get
00:31
this video out to you ASAP we have so
00:33
much to cover in today's latest 1.13
00:35
snapshot new mobs new blocks new
00:38
mechanics new enchantments a whole bunch
00:40
of new look at all these chests how you
00:42
say it's a Leo he's just out here
00:44
endless y'all ready you gotta strap your
00:47

Yes, it's very exciting! Let's get started. Perhaps we need to discuss which channel we would like for our corpus. We can include different channels, but we need to specify the differences. For example, monologue vs dialogue, game play vs. tutorial types.

Very good point. We might also want to consider age variation, i.e. videos by adults vs. videos by children. There may also be other criteria. For example this guy, Logdotzip, is using a "funny voice" and/or a mock dialect/sociolect throughout the video. We'd think it was pretty weird if a language teacher spoke to students in this way.

If we do look at different categories of video, such as those you suggest, we should be looking at multiple videos within each category. Maybe a sample size of at least 10...and the more the better. Given the facts-of-life about conversational interaction, I suspect we would get "cleaner" transcripts from monologues. Maybe a good place to start would be to compare monolog tutorials (like this one) with monolog game-play commentary. (Although to be honest, there may not be a sharp division between the two types, since the commentary style ones almost always occasionally including gaming information for listeners).

Anyway, we need to give this some serious thought.

Can you also walk me (us) though how you used the Lexical Tutor website to get your stats? I've used this before but perhaps not in the same way...and it's been a while. Plus, I think other people would be very interested in knowing about this.

I'll do that first thing tomorrow morning.

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+Don Carroll Here's how to get subtitles. 1. Click on the ellipsis to open tr...

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Press question mark to see available shortcut keys + Don Carroll Here's how to get subtitles. 1. Click on the ellipsis to open transcript. 2. Then on the upper right corner of the transcript click on the vertical ellipsis to toggle timestamps. 3. Copy and scroll down and past it on word.

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So what do you all think of the language learning potential of these video of...

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So what do you all think of the language learning potential of these video of...

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So what do you all think of the language learning potential of these video of people doing "online commentary" as they play Minecraft? They certainly put you squarely in the learner's seat when confronted by such materials.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xz5mnohamv8

Japanese & Foreigners EPIC FAIL at playing MINECRAFT with Meltia【Torii series #1】｜外国人とマイクラ実況をしてみた鳥居編

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BTW, from the moment you wrote "Sure" (even before looking at the rest of the post) I knew that you would be disagreeing. : ) . I wonder how many English learners are away of things like that.

LOL. Did you notice you did it first? "Sure....but..." I like our discussions. It gives me a clearer idea why we're analyzing these videos. You know, I always question why textbooks need to teach these exact questions: "What is this?" "Is this a pen?" "What color is this?" "What time do you go to bed?" (the list goes on) and not other interrogative sentences. So I'd like to compile the set of questions that players ask during game play. I was also interested in cartoons because Mattie grew up watching blues clues, mickey mouse club house, the cat in the hat, and Thamas and friends (the trains). I wanted to compile a cartoon corpus and analyze it as well. Okay...I'm going off topic.

This semester I taught an entire course as an exploration of questions-that-aren't-really-questions, that is question that are primarily vehicles for other social actions or interactional goals. For example, "Why weren't you..." is hearable as a "complaint" or even accusation and regularly get treated as such in the next turn. There are so many of the non-questioning questions that actual questions ('requests for information") are perhaps in the minority. Even what is ostensively a "question," for example, "What time does store close" can be heard to be doing something else...like saying "HURRY UP, WE'RE LATE! If fact, just last month I was invited to give a 2-hour workshop on this topic to local EFL teachers.

As for why standard EFL texts teach "Is this a pen" and "What is this? there are two answers. First, the words in these fairly useless questions are just placeholders in a syntactic formula, the old "boxes" approach to teaching syntax. This is a pen = Subject + Verb + (Article) + (Noun/Object). It is assumed that once students can say "This is a pen" they will be able to plug in other vocab items to make useful statements.

But really the main reason is that overwhelmingly consciously or unconsciously the vast majority of English teachers world wide are still teaching questions based on 1960's transformational thinking. This is a pen --> . Is this a pen? Even teachers who have never heard of Noam Chomsky or Transformational Generative grammar teach questions by transformation. This is almost certainly NOT how native speakers create questions (And it sure isn't how passive statements are created.) This transformational approach leads to students forming stupid questions like "Are you a teacher?" They ask these stupid questions because they can formulate a statement about something that they know to be true, which is what statements are, and then they have been trained to transform statements into questions like algebra equations. EFL textbooks also teach questions primarily a syntactic structures rather than from a functional perspective.

Now I'm finished with my rant about teaching questions. Back to our regularly scheduled programming. LOL.

There are so many things to analyze. For now we should focus on 1) our CA analysis of game-play and 2) the vocab frequency analysis of YT videos. Of course, we will each have other side projects going, for example, I'm supposed to put together a chapter on proto-narratives in L2 talk.

But once we have a corpus of talk we can examine it for all sorts of things, including questions of different types and what those questions might have been doing.

BTW, here are two CA papers that EVERY SINGLE ESL/EFL teacher in the world needs to read. You will never view or teach questions (or answering) the same.

Hayano, K. (2013). Question design in conversation. In J. Sidnell and T. Stivers (Eds.), The Handbook of Conversation Analysis. West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell.

Lee, S. (2013). Response design in conversation. In J. Sidnell and T. Stivers (Eds.), The Handbook of Conversation Analysis. West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell.

Interesting! Feb 4 was last month!! I'll check the library to see if they have this book.

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So what do you all think of the language learning potential of these video of...

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Press question mark to see available shortcut keys So what do you all think of the language learning potential of these video of people doing "online commentary" as they play Minecraft? They certainly put you squarely in the learner's seat when confronted by such materials.

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I recently connected with Robert Swier, a Ph.D. candidate at Kyoto University...

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I recently connected with Robert Swier, a Ph.D. candidate at Kyoto University...

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I recently connected with Robert Swier, a Ph.D. candidate at Kyoto University...

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I recently connected with Robert Swier, a Ph.D. candidate at Kyoto University who is working on MC interaction with language learners. He published a pa... - Don Carroll - Google+