http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9225180/10_Spelling_Checker_Secrets_for_Microsoft_Word?source=rss_latest_content&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+computerworld%2Fnews%2Ffeed+%28Latest+from+Computerworld%29&utm_content=Google+Feedfetcher

 - Computerworld

10 Spelling Checker Secrets for Microsoft Word

These tips can prevent you from confusing 'advice' with 'advise,' stop Word from flagging acronyms, and make you look more literate.

Helen Bradley

March 14, 2012 (PC World)

You use Word's spelling checker every day, and probably just as often encounter some of the tool's puzzling behavior. Do you know how to get rid of a word that you mistakenly added to its dictionary, for instance, or how to hide the red wiggly lines that appear all over your document?

The following ten tricks will help you to work more efficiently in Word 2010, and they will even make you and your documents look smarter.

1. Control the 'Check Spelling as You Type' Feature

This default feature reviews spelling within your document as you work, indicating with a red wiggly line any words that are missing from the spelling checker's dictionary. The feature can be distracting, but it's easy to disable. To do so, choose File, Options, Proofing, click the Check spelling as you type checkbox to clear it and reverse the current setting, and then click OK.

2. Check Foreign-Language Spelling

Word isn't naturally bilingual, but you can train it to process more than one language at a time. Ordinarily, when you're working on a document that includes text in, say, French, Word likely won't recognize the other language if you've set your primary language to U.S. English; in this case, Word will add wiggly lines under the assorted foreign words, suggesting that they are all misspellings.

You can avoid that situation by setting Word to check the French text using a French word list. To arrange this, select the text in French (or whatever foreign language you're using), and click the Review tab on the Ribbon toolbar. Then click Language and choose Set Language in the Proofing group of buttons. The Language dialog box will appear. Here you should click the language to use for the selected text; the listed languages displaying checkmark icons are available for use in checking spelling. Click OK to finish.

3. Add Unusual Words to the Dictionary

If you know ahead of time that you will be using some unusual words, and if you do not want Word to report them as possible misspellings, you can add them to the dictionary.

Choose File, Options, Proofing, and click Custom Dictionaries. Click the custom.dic file--or the name of the dictionary to add the words to, if you are using a special dictionary--and click Edit Word List. Type a word, and click Add. When you're done, click OK to exit the dictionary.

Adding words one at a time is sensible if you have only a few. But if you have a long list of words to add, it's best to do so by editing the dictionary file itself.

First, from the Custom Dictionaries dialog box, make a note of the file-path entry that shows where the custom.dic file is located. Then launch a plain-text editor such as Notepad or WordPad, and use it to open the custom.dic file. Type or paste your words, one word per line, into the document and then save it. Word will automatically sort the items into alphabetical order when it next uses the file.

4. Remove Misspellings in the Spelling Checker

If you add a misspelled word to the dictionary by accident, Word won't identify it as misspelled until you remove it.

Choose File, Options, Proofing, and click Custom Dictionaries. Select the default dictionary in the list; typically this is the custom.dic file. Click Edit Word List to open the custom.dic dialog box, which contains a list of words you have added to Word's custom dictionary. Scroll down the list, click the errant word, and then click Delete and Close. In the future, if you use this misspelling in a document, Word will properly flag it as a mistake.

5. Determine What the Spelling Checker Checks

Depending on the type of work you do, you may discover that Word either finds errors where none exist, or fails to catch the embarrassing errors you do make. For some terms, such as email addresses, URLs, or items containing numbers, you can decide whether Word checks their spelling or leaves them alone.

To see the preferences that Word is currently configured to use, choose File, Options, Proofing. Here you can set preferences, such as 'Ignore words in UPPERCASE' and 'Ignore words that contain numbers'. If you don't want Word to report email addresses and URLs as misspellings, for example, click to enable the Ignore Internet and file addresses checkbox.

You can also disable Flag repeated words if you find Word's highlighting of repeated words annoying. When you are done, click OK to return to editing the document. These changes apply instantly, and will remain in place even after you shut down and restart Word.

6. Hide the Wiggly Underlines, Just This Once

If you like to work with 'Check spelling as you type' enabled, but wish to hide the wiggly underlines for one document only to reduce distractions, you can do so. This feature lets you control the visibility of the wiggly lines on a document-by-document basis, without disabling the spelling checker itself.

Choose File, Options, Proofing. Within the 'Exceptions for:' group of options, make sure the current document name appears in the box, and click Hide spelling errors in this document only. Click OK, and the document will stop showing wiggly underlines. You can still spelling-check the document, of course, by clicking the Review tab on the Ribbon toolbar and selecting Spelling & Grammar, or by pressing the shortcut key, F7.

7. Configure Text So That Word Doesn't Check It

Computer programming code, scientific data, and other specialized text often includes words that don't live in Word's dictionary, so the spelling checker frequently flags them. To disable spelling checks for such situations, first select the text in question. Then click the Review tab on the Ribbon toolbar, and choose Language, Set Proofing Language. Click the Do not check spelling or grammar checkbox, and click OK. Word will no longer proof the selected text, now or at any time in the future.

8. Use Multiple Dictionaries for Different Projects

Many businesses have their own language. For example, a doctor's office uses medical terminology, and a mining office uses mining jargon. If your business uses certain industry terms, it's convenient to have a dictionary of those terms on hand, to prevent Word from flagging them as misspellings.

You can either add the special terminology to your own custom.dic file or create a second dictionary file of the specialized terms. Maintaining a second file can be beneficial, as you can share it with other users without sharing your own personal custom.dic or needing to overwrite the other user's custom.dic file with your version.

To create a second dictionary, choose File, Options, Proofing, and click Custom Dictionaries. Click New, type a name for your dictionary file, and click Save. Now you can add words to the dictionary as detailed in Tip 3 above.

If you are using two dictionaries--both custom.dic and a second one of specialized words--you'll want Word to use words from both files when it makes suggestions for correcting the items it has flagged as spelling errors. To make sure that Word is configured to do this, click File, Options, Proofing, and confirm that the option Suggest from main dictionary only is disabled. If not, disable it and click OK.

9. Share a Custom Dictionary With Other Users

Once you've created a dictionary file, you can share it with other users so that they can employ it in their version of Word. To do so, in Windows Explorer, locate the .dic file you created, and then send the recipient a copy. The other person, on their computer, will need to place the file in the same folder as their own custom.dic file.

Then, to add the file to Word, the recipient should launch Word and choose File, Options, Proofing, Custom Dictionaries and click Add. The user should then locate and select the new .dic file, which will be in the folder that the dialog box points to, and click Open to add it to Word's Dictionary list.

10. Flag Words Misspelled in Context Only

In some situations you may find yourself using a word that's correctly spelled but incorrect in the context. Homophones, such as stationary and stationery, or advice and advise, can be confusing--all the more so because the spelling checker won't always flag their misuse. In addition, if you tend to overuse a word, you may want Word to alert you so that you can change it on certain occasions. A solution to both issues is to exclude the problematic words so that the tool will flag them.

To exclude one or more words, you must add them to the Word exclusion file, which is already created for you and installed with Word 2007 and 2010.

Start by searching for ExcludeDictionaryEN*.lex using Windows Search. In the search results, you will find multiple files, one for each English variant. The four-digit code in each filename tells you which .lex file belongs to which language variant. For example, 0409 is for the United States, and 0809 is for the United Kingdom. See Microsoft's site for the IDs for each locale; look for the number in the LCID Hex column to identify the files for the language variants you use.

In Windows Explorer, open the folder containing the exclusion files, right-click the ExcludeDictionaryEN*.lex file for the first language variant you use, and choose Open With, then WordPad. Type the words to exclude, one per line, and click Save. Repeat for any other language variants that you use. Close and reopen Word.

In the future, when you type any word that's in the exclude dictionary file, Word will flag it as a spelling error. Take care to click only 'Ignore Once'--not 'Ignore All' or 'Add To Dictionary'--to move past the word when you're using the 'Spelling and Grammar' dialog box. Otherwise, the spelling checker won't flag the word as a misspelling in the future.

Wordnik’s Online Dictionary - No Arbiters, Please

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/01/business/wordniks-online-dictionary-no-arbiters-please.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

 - NYTimes.com

TRADITIONAL print dictionaries have long enlisted lexicographers to scrutinize new words as they pop up, weighing their merits and eventually accepting some of them.

Erin McKean is a founder of Wordnik, the online dictionary.

Not Wordnik, the vast online dictionary.

No modern-day Samuel Johnson or Noah Webster ponders each prospective entry there. Instead, automatic programs search the Internet, combing the texts of news feeds, archived broadcasts, the blogosphere, Twitter posts and dozens of other sources for the raw material of Wordnik citations, says Erin McKean, a founder of the company.

Then, when you search for a word, Wordnik shows the information it has found, with no editorial tinkering. Instead, readers get the full linguistic Monty.

"We don't pre-select and pre-prune," she said. "We show you what's out there now. Then we let people decide whether to use a word or not."

At one time, she was the head of the pruners, as principal editor of the New Oxford American Dictionary. She is also an author and columnist. (She wrote "On Language" columns for The New York Times as a substitute for William Safire.)

But Ms. McKean has chosen a different path at Wordnik. "Language changes every day, and the lexicographer should get out of the way," she said. "You can type in anything, and we'll show you what data we have."

When readers ask about a word, Wordnik provides definitions on the left-hand side of the screen. But it is the example sentences, featured on the right-hand side, that are crucial to a reader's understanding of a new term, she said.

"Dictionary definitions tend to be out of date or incomplete," she said. "Our goal is to find examples on the Web that use the word so clearly that you can understand its meaning from reading the sentence."

To do this, the site processes a vast reservoir of language, keeping tabs on more than six million words automatically, said Tony Tam, Wordnik's vice president for engineering. "But the numbers change every second," he said. "It's not a static list."

Where does all this text come from? "You'd be amazed how fast people write articles on the Web," he said.

Wordnik does indeed fill a gap in the world of dictionaries, said William Kretzschmar, a professor at the University of Georgia and the former president of the American Dialect Society. He provides American pronunciations for the new online Oxford English Dictionary.

"It takes time for words to get into the more formal, published dictionaries," he said. "Wordnik is sensitive to what people are interested in now."

Wordnik, which has raised $12.8 million in venture financing, plans to use its vast database of words and word associations at the site and in many business partnerships to be announced this year, said Joe Hyrkin, the president and C.E.O.

The products will be similar to recommendation engines, but more powerful, he said. If you like a particular book, for example, Wordnik can recommend a similar one based on its understanding of words used to describe the book, he said.

"We're not just using tags and descriptors," he said. "Our system understands and identifies matches at a concept level."

The company is already providing many other word-based services, including one used on the Web site of The Times to define words in articles. Wordnik is also providing a financial glossary for SmartMoney.com.

Geoffrey Nunberg, a linguist at the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley, who talks about language on "Fresh Air," the NPR program, appreciates Wordnik's breadth. "There's a lot of useful information here," he said. (He has also written commentaries on language for The Times.)

But he thinks that hands-on lexicographers could fine-tune the entries.

"The idea that you can pull lexicographers out of the loop and have an algorithm to mediate between me and the English language is goofy," he said. "Without hand citations done by trained people, you get a mess."

To illustrate his point, he noted flaws in a number of Wordnik's definitions. The first definition of "davenport," for instance, in three of the fives sources used by Wordnik is a kind of small writing desk. "It hasn't meant that since Grandma was a girl," he said.

People use a dictionary to find out what is correct, and what is incorrect, he said. "If I were a journalist looking to see if a word was being used correctly," he said, "I wouldn't put my eggs in the Wordnik basket."

Mr. Tam of Wordnik said the site was constantly improving.

"We discover these words with algorithms, but they are never perfect," he said. "We constantly have to make them better."

WORDNIK and other new linguistic databases have come about largely because of the vast body of text on the Internet and improved algorithms for searching it, said Mark Liberman, a professor of linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania.

"We now have an archived shadow universe that contains almost everything we've written — trillions of pages of text of published books, and now, broadcast archives as well," he said.

Readers could always tap this reservoir by looking up examples of new words in Google Books or Google News. "But what Wordnik is giving you is not as raw as a Google search of examples," he said, "because Wordnik sorts and clusters the examples into different senses of the word."

Another innovative database is at Brigham Young University, where Mark Davies, a professor of linguistics, has amassed a collection, the Corpus of Contemporary American English, 1990-2011, containing millions of words of running text from articles, transcripts of conversations, and other sources. The collection, which indexes 425 million words of text — 1,000 may be from a newspaper article, for example — has been built over the last three years. It shows how often a word is used, and the types of discourse in which it is found, be it conversational speech or academic prose.

The collection also lets users see words found near a new word. "If you want to see how a word is used and what it means, the best way is to look at words nearby," Dr. Davies said. The words are called collocates. To look up collocates of "fantasy," for example, seehttp://bit.ly/rImCuH.

Dictionary builders have come a long way since the days of Johnson and Webster, said Dr. Kretzschmar at the University of Georgia. "But we have computers," he said. "We can manage this vast network of words online and appreciate it in ways that Johnson and Webster never could."

E-mail: novelties@nytimes.com.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: December 31, 2011

An earlier version of this article misspelled the given name of Wordnik's chief executive. He is Joe Hyrkin, not Joel.

YouTube for Schools: All the TED Talks, None of the Cat Videos

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/youtube_for_schools_all_the_ted_talks_none_of_the.php

YouTube has launched a new initiative called YouTube for Schools, which will enable educators to open up classrooms to the wide world of educational content on YouTube without all the junk. Open Internet access in schools is tricky, with all the distractions and time-wasters out there, so Google is taking this step to make educators' lives easier.

Network administrators can turn on YouTube for Schools to give school computers access to the vast library of YouTube EDU content from partners such as the Smithsonian and TED. The content is organized into topical and grade-level playlists. You can view the lists at youtube.com/teachers.

YouTube for Schools allows unfettered access to educational videos without any of the YouTube stuff that's inappropriate for school. Schools can customize their YouTube portals with playlists and topics tailored to their curricula. And teachers can find videos arranged by topic and grade level to help them formulate lesson plans.

In 2010, Google's launch of encrypted search ran afoul of school network administrators by clashing with the Children's Internet Protection Act, a federal law that would have required schools to block Google. Google had to move encrypted search to a new, separate domain to fix the problem. With this specialized version of YouTube, it looks like Google has figured out how to better serve the needs of schools.

YouTube has run some interesting educational promotions this year, such as a contest to perform your science experiment live from space.

Read more about YouTube for Schools on the YouTube blog.

Learning a Language From an Expert on the Web

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/29/technology/personaltech/29basics.html

 - NYTimes.com

The message from the 14-year-old Tunisian skateboarder was curt. "Totally wrong," he said of my French. My conjugation was off and I should study spelling. On a scale of one to five, he said, my French practice essay was worth a one. Then he disappeared into the anonymity of the Internet.

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A listing of some recordings of native Italian speakers at RhinoSpike.com.

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A section from a LiveMocha lesson on French.

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Two people looking to practice their Norwegian on MyLanguageExchange.com.

If there is any truth to the old Russian proverb that enemies parrot yes while friends say no, then it is easy to form fast friendships on Livemocha.com, a Web site devoted to helping people learn languages by swapping messages over the Internet and then correcting each other's messages.

As my young Tunisian tutor was showing me, the Internet, with its unparalleled ability to connect people throughout the world, is changing the way that many people learn languages. There is no still way to avoid the hard slog through vocabulary lists and grammar rules, but the books, tapes and even CDs of yesteryear are being replaced by e-mail, video chats and social networks.

Livemocha, a Seattle company with $14 million in venture capital financing, mixes a social network with lessons for more than 38 of the world's more common languages.

The initial lessons are free, but unlocking some of the additional features requires a fee to Livemocha (starting at $10 for a set of lessons) or an agreement to correct the work of others, something my friend in Tunisia was doing for me. The lessons, whether they are flashcards, quizzes, audio recordings or written and spoken essays, are delivered through a Web browser. Michael Schutzler, Livemocha's chief executive, says the Web site's advantage is the ability to practice with a real person.

"The great irony is that even if you have years of classroom Spanish, you don't have a lot of confidence to go into a bar and have a conversation," he said.

The casual connections with real people throughout the world, however brief, are not just fun and surprising but reveal more about how the language is really used. The boy from Tunisia, while knocking my conjugation, passed along slang and attitude, something rarely found in textbooks.

I doubt that many traditional students of French find their way into conversations with so many diverse people. Maria, an older woman from Brazil who speaks French, was kinder and offered slightly different corrections. Melina, a woman from Southern France, used blue to emphasize her corrections to my work. It was a kind touch.

"What actually cements the ability really comes down to interacting with human beings." Mr. Schutzler said. He added, "My mom aced all of her English Lit before coming to the U.S., but when she came to the U.S., she couldn't get a cup of coffee at the diner."

Livemocha is experimenting with a variety of ways to motivate people that resemble the social games found on Facebook. The flashcard exercises, for instance, are scored, and the totals earned by studying and teaching appear on the front page. I earned a bronze medal, actually an icon of one, on my first day for helping many people with their English. The site even hopes to help its best contributors to sell their services to the more serious students.

Not every service is as well structured. MyLanguageExchange.com just maintains lists of people who know certain languages and want to learn others. Anyone can search the database, but only gold members, who pay $24 a year, can send e-mail easily to others.

Each person sets up a profile and includes a short description of age, location and what he or she would like to talk about. There is a big demand to practice English, and I found many possible pen pals.

Marie, 40, was born in Spain but lives in France near the Bordeaux region. She wants to improve her English and "perhaps find a job in sales export." Serge, a Parisian who is retired, studies genealogy and wants to improve his English, Spanish and Swedish.

MyLanguageExchange.com claims it has more than 1.5 million members studying 115 languages.

I find the right partner through what are essentially classified ads. If I wanted to study Luxembourgish, the Germanic tongue of Luxembourg, there were 11 people looking to study English. There are 32 willing people who are fluent in Tswana, a Bantu language generally spoken around Southern Africa, mainly in Botswana. An e-mail or two is all it takes to find a study partner.

Maria, one of 113 people ready to help with Uyghur, which is spoken in western China, says she is also fluent in Mandarin but wants to practice Russian, Hindi and English. It is a big database.

"Our site tends to attract more of the serious language learners," said Dan Yuen, who helped found MyLanguageExchange.com in 2000. "They are also more likely to be effective language partners. In turn, this helps to attract more language learners to our community."

Some of the other choices are more limited but still useful.RhinoSpike.com set up a market for recordings spoken by native speakers. Anyone can post a selection of text and anyone can post a recording.

"The problem for many people learning a language is that they can't hear what the text is supposed to sound like," said Peter Carroll, one of the founders. "We built RhinoSpike to get native speakers to read the text that we post, so that we can both see and hear what is being said." Almost 2,500 recordings have been posted since the site opened in March.

Companies like RosettaStone.com, GermanPod101.com,ChinesePod.com and a surprisingly large number of other Web sites are competing to offer lessons and tutoring to students throughout the world. I found dozens of others offering what was found only on PC software a few years ago.

There are even more casual approaches that come with even less infrastructure and fewer of the protections for consumers that it may offer. It is easy to find, for instance, people who want to practice languages with a free phone call through the forums run by Skype. One click and you can talk free with someone who wants to practice another language. The standard protocol is to spend half the time on one language and half the time with the other.

Some sites, like UsingEnglish.com, englishcafe.com andEnglishbaby.com, are devoted to helping people practice English but add the elements of sharing photos and interests like a dating service.

The depth and quality of random conversations like these vary greatly, but they are generally easier and more free than meeting people in bars, stores or in public.

Orlando R. Kelm, a professor at the University of Texas, Austin, who uses Livemocha and other tools in his language classes, says he finds that working with a partner on written words is often easier than with spoken conversation.

"A lot of times people write better than they speak," he said.

Still, he finds it ultimately worthwhile to work with others on the Web and search for the better partners because that provides a real connection that cannot be found from a book or a simple computer program.

"When I have to do an exercise and submit it to the world, when I know that real people are going to look at it and comment on it, it really jacks up my brain," he said.

A version of this article appeared in print on July 29, 2010, on page B8 of the New York edition.

美国教育: 高科技设备

http://www.usa101.cn/edu/edu004.asp

克赖姆斯 华盛顿报导

维吉尼亚州阿灵顿县跟美国首都华盛顿仅一河之隔，这个地处维州郊区的社区面积不大，但是人口稠密。该县公立学校学生人数超过1万8千人，学生来自127个国家，讲100多种语言。 阿灵顿县公立学校大约三分之一的学生来自低收入家庭，他们享受学校的免费或者减价午餐，但同时阿灵顿县又是非常富有，他们刚刚斥资9500万美元建造了一所现代化高中。 这所学校里有不少电脑，这并不稀奇，让人感到意外的是，学校用一种高科技、多用途的显示装置代替了每间教室的传统黑板。 华盛顿-李高中科技协调人桑迪·芒内尔说："这种产品叫做智能板，是一种交互式白板。老师站在白板前面，通过触摸控制电脑。老师可以用这种奇妙的办法跟全班同学共用一台电脑。" 芒内尔讲解智能板各种功能时颇费了一些工夫，因为它能做的事情可真不少。智能板看上去跟墙上的普通白墙没什么两样，但是它的表面是触摸式的，在智能板的顶部，探出一根操纵杆，外端装有一台视频投影机。 学校小型电视演播室播出的早间通知可以通过教室的智能板让学生看到。你可以在万维网上浏览，用一种特制的电子笔把网页的某个部分重点画出来。这种特制电子笔外加一个书写识别软件之后，还可以跟粉笔一样写字。 生物老师杰森·布罗多夫斯基借助智能板向学生讲述如何使用显微镜。 布罗多夫斯基说："只需把显微镜跟数码照相机连接上，就能在智能板上显示，这样全班就能看到显微镜工作的全部过程。这样一旦我把图像聚焦之后，学生们就会说，噢，我知道你刚才讲得是什么了。接着，他们可以操作自己的显微镜，亲自做试验。这样就有趣多了。" 华盛顿-李高中有差不多600台电脑供学生们使用，相当于每三个学生至少有一台电脑。整个教学楼有好几个电脑机房，宽敞、明亮的图书馆不仅有图书，还配备了电脑。 华盛顿-李高中订阅在线参考书，这些参考书频繁更新。学生们在校外也可以上网使用这些网上参考书。 互联网上有大量有价值的资料，但是也有不少内容不适宜青少年。因此，学校安装了软件，专门封锁以色情等内容为特色的网站。不过，图书管理员林内特·康斯坦丁内兹认为，阿灵顿县公立学校学生的多元化，使得学校难以保护青少年免受互联网不良影响。 康斯坦丁内兹说："学校可能有学生来自蒙古，不错，阿灵顿这个地方来自蒙古的人口虽然不多，但是却不容忽视。来自中东的移民也属于这种情况。我们在他们后面，看着他们登上他们母语的网站，但是根本不知道他们在干些什么。" 那么，学校的网络过滤器能否过滤乌尔都语或者普什图语吗？ 康斯坦丁内兹说，"不能。即使是过滤英语网站过滤器也不特别管用。" 华盛顿-李高中图书馆放学后还要继续开放两、三个小时。来自伊朗移民家庭的学生萨翰德·米纳耶正利用这几个小时，在图书馆的电脑上网。 他说："我在为吉他班在网上找乐谱。我想为吉他班找到几首乐谱，为我们在网络咖啡馆演奏做准备。我们在所有的网站上搜索，尽量多搜集些古典音乐、民间音乐和现代音乐。" 楼下的网络咖啡馆有28台电脑，那里舒适、诱人，但不卖咖啡。科技协调人桑迪·芒内尔说，开设这个网吧主要是方便学生，特别是家里没有电脑的学生使用电脑。 他说："阿灵顿县对这个网吧投入了大量资金，尽可能让它舒适，因为我们知道，信息技术带来了经济鸿沟，我们要缩小这个差距。在学生正常上课时间，整个教学楼有许多电脑可供使用，可是放学后学生们上网的机会就没有那么多了。" 芒内尔说，即使他们使用了所有的最新科技，仍然不能保证这个新的现代化教学楼不会过时。华盛顿-李高中目前大容量的线缆还可以再使用几年，但是未来几代学生很可能会无线上网。

Robot teaches English as Second Language

http://www.pasadenastarnews.com/news/ci_18767575

 - Pasadena Star-News

Janette Williams, Staff Writer

Posted: 08/26/2011 06:33:10 PM PDT

PASADENA - Say "How do you do" to Mike and Michelle, face-to-face tutors for English learners. They'll correct your grammar, answer questions, converse on a variety of topics, be there 24/7, and won't charge a dime. And they're doing very well, thank-you. The on-screen "English Tutor" interactive robots and their creator, adjunct Professor Ron Chang Lee of Pasadena City College, are heading to England's Exeter University in October as one of four finalists in the 2011 Loebner Prize for Artificial Intelligence. "I always wanted to create something to help students, like a tutor," said Lee, who has taught English as a Second Language at PCC since 1991. "It's a talking robot, so (students) are not afraid of asking anything," Lee said. Interacting with a robot is less intimidating for ESL students than conversing with a professor, he said. "A community college like PCC has many international students, and first they have to listen to English, to communicate with their professors," he said. "So the first year they have to take ESL." Just 15 minutes a day with Mike or Michelle can really help, he said. "It's just like having a native speaker - they correct mistakes, spelling and grammatical errors. You type in `You is a good teacher,' and the robot corrects you. `Say you are, never say you is."' Lee's ESL site started out as a class project in 1994 at the University of Illinois, where he began studyingin 1992 after a career teaching English in China. He followed a master's in ESL with a Ph.D. in educational technology in 1998.Over the years, the program has grown more sophisticated, he said, now with robots able to chat on 25 topics in 2,000 available conversations. "You can ask `What is the capital of any countries, any states of the U.S.?' `Who is the president or king of each country?"' Lee said. "It knows how many countries in the world, the population of major countries, the longest river, and the highest mountain." The robots can detect the 800 most common errors learning English-speakers make, Lee said, and know all the irregular verbs, provide different tenses, explain grammatical terms and give advice on how to learn English. They can get personal, too. "Are you married?" Lee typed in. "Not at the moment," Michelle replied, maybe inviting more questions. He's steadily improving the program, Lee said. "The robots are learning from their mistakes. People are chatting with them, and I can see all the questions they asked," he said. "I am training the robots." Miranda Yousef, director of a planned "Untitled Smartbot Project" documentary about the Loebner Prize, said Lee brings something different to the table. "Dr. Lee's a very intriguing character because, unlike most people who enter, who are computer programers or developers, he's an ESL teacher," she said. "His goal for the `chatbot' is to eventually develop a free on-line tutoring system that can be used world-wide - it's a wonderfully different approach." Lee said he used artificial intelligence software to develop his site and in 1996 got a $30,000 grant from the William and Flora Hewitt Foundation. He won $250 for making it to the Loebner's top four, and a chance to win the $4,000 top award. The financial reward isn't huge, Lee said, but the prestige could give a boost to his efforts to raise funding. "There's not a lot of investment these days" in artificial intelligence, Lee said. "Yes, I'm disappointed, I've found (raising money) hard to do." He'd like to work on fixing Mike and Michelle's limitations, Lee said. Users still have to type in their questions, rather than speak, although he said users with speech recognition software can talk into the microphone. "But again, speech recognition is not perfect," he said. "It sometimes makes mistakes, especially when the user has a foreign accent." The computer-synthesized voices Mike and Michelle use are "getting closer" to actual human voices, Lee said, but they still sound artificial. And, except for welcoming users to the site, he has turned the voices off to save money, he said. "Later on, if I get a grant that's big enough, I'm going to do an upgrade makes it possible to hear the voice," he said. "Students really like to hear the voice." Lee said his rong-chang.com site has become the top ESL destination on the web; combined with his eslfast.com, Lee said, he gets about 11,500,000 monthly hits and 800,000 unique visitors. His next step is finding a way to make the robots "think" before answering a question, tailoring the response to the user. It won't cost as much as people might think, Lee said. "It will not require as much investment as IBM has put into their `Watson,"' he said, referring to the super-robot who beat out the human champions on "Jeopardy" in February. "But it can certainly compete in a general knowledge test on TV." janette.williams@sgvn.com 626-578-6300, ext. 4482 Read more:http://www.pasadenastarnews.com/news/ci_18767575#ixzz1WFaw6zh

An Archive of English, Spoken in Many Different Accents

http://www.voanews.com/learningenglish/home/education/Speech-126723748.html

 | Education | Learning English

This is the VOA Special English Education Report.

Steven Weinberger is the director of linguistics in the English Department at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. Professor Weinberger says students in his beginning phonetics class are mostly interested in teaching English as a second language. They wanted to study how non-native speakers pronounce different sounds.

STEVEN WEINBERGER: "So we sent the students out to record non-native speakers, and we compared those speakers to each other and to native speakers of English."

Professor Weinberger wrote a paragraph for all of the speakers to read. The paragraph uses common words but contains almost all of the sounds used in English. Here is that sixty-nine-word paragraph read by our own Bob Doughty:

BOB DOUGHTY: "Please call Stella. Ask her to bring these things with her from the store: Six spoons of fresh snow peas, five thick slabs of blue cheese, and maybe a snack for her brother Bob. We also need a small plastic snake and a big toy frog for the kids. She can scoop these things into three red bags, and we will go meet her Wednesday at the train station."

In nineteen ninety-nine, Professor Weinberger put the recordings online. The Speech Accent Archive is for anyone who wants to compare and analyze the accents of different English speakers.

For example, here is a thirty-two-year-old Iraqi man:

IRAQI MAN: "Please call Stella. Ask her to bring these things with her from the store."

And here is a twenty-three-year-old woman from Eritrea:

ERITREAN WOMAN: "Six spoons of fresh snow peas, five thick slabs of blue cheese, and maybe a snack for her brother Bob."

Some people think the archive would be better if it included natural speech -- people talking freely, not just reading the same words. Professor Weinberger recognizes the strengths and weaknesses of his site.

STEVEN WEINBERGER: "The biggest plus, of course, is that it is so uniform that you can immediately compare a Kiswahili speaker to a native English speaker. But the downside is that a less-than-skilled reader will have difficulties with the paragraph that might not demonstrate their true phonetic abilities."

People often use sounds from their first language until they can reproduce the ones used in the language they are learning.

Professor Weinberger says the site gets a million visits a month.

STEVEN WEINBERGER:  "We get notices from speech pathologists, from computational engineers who do speech processing, from PhD students who want to do research on bias and accent judgments, from actors who need to learn a special part."

The archive contains more than one thousand five hundred recordings. These can be searched many ways, including by place of birth and the age at which the speaker began to learn English.

Professor Weinberger would like more people to send in their own samples of the sixty-nine-word paragraph.

STEVEN WEINBERGER: "Right now we only have samples from about three hundred fifty languages, including English. You know, there are six thousand languages in the world today, so we need lots more. That's why the archive work will never be finished."

And that's the VOA Special English Education Report. You can find a link to the Speech Accent Archive at voaspecialenglish.com. I'm Christopher Cruise.

Sacramento County Office of Education’s website earns national honor

http://www.lodinews.com/news/article_5934f57d-5833-5741-91d1-afcfc2275e53.html

 - Lodi News-Sentinel: News

By News-Sentinel Staff | Posted: Thursday, August 4, 2011 12:00 am

The Sacramento County Office of Education's website, an online interactive English language learning website, has earned a 2011 Literacy Leadership Award from the National Coalition for Literacy.

The Literacy Leadership Award recognize individuals and/or organizations that have made extraordinary national contributions to improving adult literacy and English language learning in the United States.

SCOE assisted the U.S. Department of Education in the development of the U.S.A. Learns website. The site is an easily accessible Internet learning tool with simple directions, and offers free instructional materials to teach basic English skills, according to a press release.

The site, which receives more than 11,000 visitors each day, was developed primarily for immigrant adults with limited English language skills who cannot attend traditional classroom programs because of difficulty with schedules, transportation or other barriers.

Students are able to work from home or a public library. Learners do not need advanced computer skills to use U.S.A. Learns.

"We are very pleased to present these awards to such deserving individuals and organizations this year," John Segota, interim president of the National Coalition for Literacy, said in announcing the winners. "Each has made a unique contribution to advancing the cause of adult education and literacy through programmatic innovation or by raising public awareness of the issue."

The National Coalition for Literacy aims to advance family literacy, adult education and English language skills in the country.

谷歌英文写作助手

http://www.google.com/intl/zh-CN/ime/english/
 - Google

即开即用，全面好用的英文建议

谷歌英文写作助手提供拼写纠错，单词及短语的补全，同义词推荐，中英翻译等。并即时提供权威海量的词义、词性、例句等信息。让您写英文更快更好。

Top 25 world languages blogs

http://www.onlinedegrees.org/top-25-world-languages-blogs/

1. Vamonos!

Lisa Stevens, a primary language educator and consultant, offers her thoughts on teaching and learning primary languages. There are many thoughtful discussions on best practices and connecting with students. She shares some of her personal experiences, as well, and offers some suggestions and resources.

2. Teaching and Learning Spanish

This resource-rich blog includes tools, videos, publications and other relevant information for those who are either teaching or learning Spanish. Each post includes relevant links and information. There are also lists of resources on the Web. This is a great site for anyone involved in Spanish education!

3. Foreign Language Fun

French and Spanish are the focus of this blog, but the activities could easily be modified to fit your classroom needs. There are numerous suggestions for games, crafts, activities, and study aides that you can use in the class. There are also links to Web resources for apps, videos, puppets, and more.

4. Spanglish Baby

In addition to all the great posts you'll find here with commentary and ideas for language learning, there are also categories that include Must Reads, The Culture of Food, Daily Learning, Your Story, Ask an Expert, and more. Still can't find the information you need or the inspiration you're looking for? The site even offers user forums.

5. Babelhut

French, Spanish and Japanese are just some of the languages covered on this resource-rich blog. Posts include tips, highlights on particular language lessons, and more. There are links to resources in every posts, and some even include videos and other supporting materials. There is a lot here to help those learning or teaching a foreign language.

6. Marginalia

A high-school Latin teacher writes this blog, which include "notes, observances, and commentary." He shares his personal experiences and trials in the classroom, noting what went well and resources that have proven useful along the way.

7. Sans Problemes!

This is a classroom blog that is presented entirely in French, very helpful for practicing your language skills! There are many useful assignments that can be used in your own classroom, or can be modified for another language. Links and resources are included.

8. Souffler – A breath of fresh air

Here's another blog that focuses on French — though you'll find that it's easier to read in English:) The focus is on how you can use music to teach French in the classroom, and there are suggestions for activities and online resources to help you do it.

9. The Languages Resources Blog

This UK blog is written by a teacher of French and Spanish. The focus is on Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) and Modern Foreign Languages (MFL).

10. Lgb06's Blog

The person behind this blog is a Spanish teacher, and the blog serves as a forum for sharing classroom experiences and tips, as well as offering thoughtful commentary about teaching practices. Posts cover technology in the classroom, as well as more specific lessons such as gender in language.

11. 123 Teach Me

There are a lot of great resources here for learning Spanish — which can also be used in the Spanish classroom. In addition to the free lessons, there are also games, level tests, a Spanish-English dictionary, and a Spanish text translator. The many links and resources also include a search for Spanish schools or programs, online tutors, a word of the day, and more.

12. Languages and Learning

This blog is written by the Head of Spanish at Grosvenor Grammar School. There is much thoughtful discussion here about best teaching practices. Some notable and interesting recent posts include Teaching Literature, Learning from Others, and Speed Dating in the MFL Classroom.

13. Los Bloguitos

This Spanish blog is written entirely in Spanish — perfect for new learners who want to push themselves. It includes riddles, stories, poetry, drawings, and more. There is a lot of great material here that would be especially useful in a Spanish classroom — especially for young learners.

14. Wanna Jugar with Migo?

This fun blog promises "adventures in Spanish teaching ideas, links and giveaways." And it offers just that. There are a lot of great ideas here, and the author shares some personal experiences with them.

15. ICT for Language Teachers

Teachers who are interested in ICT can follow this blog for updates and new developments in the use of ICT in the language classroom. There is also information about conferences and other professional development opportunities.

16. Langwitches Blog

Silvia Tolisano, a Technology Integration Facilitator and 21st Century Learning Specialist, writes this thorough and thoughtful blog with her ideas and projects. The blog also includes a podcast and links to relevant articles and videos. Each posts includes a number of useful and interesting links.

17. More Spanish

This blog offers "lesson plans and technology for the classroom." There are reviews of useful products and tools, as well as anecdotes about how certain lessons or activities have fared in the author's classroom. There is a lot of great information here that is sure to help any language teacher find new inspiration or figure out how to improve in the classroom.

18. Bilingual Fun

Maestra Jen is a Spanish teacher who also teaches Spanish to her own children. Her blog is full of great ideas for the classroom, as well as links to other useful resources, such as videos, Web sites, and more. Readers are sure to find ideas here for how to make learning languages fun!

19. Montessori Spanish

Gigi is a mother to three children and and a full-time online college professor. Her blog shares her experiences from teaching Spanish using Montessori training, and now teaching her own children through homeschooling. She shares lesson plans, activities, and other inspiration.

20. My Languages

This UK blog is written by IC Jones is a Head of Modern Languages and has training in teaching French, Spanish and German. There are thoughtful discussions here about pedagogy and developments in the teaching of modern languages.

21. Lingualicious

This blog for Belle Vue Girls School offers fun games, activities and lessons that can be used for your own classroom or home practice. There are some posts that are targeted specifically to students in the BVGS class, but there is more than enough here for your own personal use.

22. Maternelle to Moliere

French is the focus of this blog, and the author shares personal experiences, reflections, and — of course — tips and ideas to use in the classroom. The author even shares some primary materials, such as slideshow lessons.

23. All Saints Languages Blog

Here's another classroom blog that includes lots of great lessons and activities that you can easily co-opt for your own use. French is the focus, but it would be easy enough to adapt the activities to any language classroom.

24. Spanish: Just Another TCPS Site

Elementary and middle-school Spanish are the focus of this blog, and posts share the experiences of the author's classrooms. It's another blog with great ideas for your own use!

25. French Teacher

Here's another blog written entirely in French. The blog author offers up very thoughtful posts about the state of education and French education, in particular. Films and popular culture are also part of the discussion.

Posted on 11/10/10 | by maria magher | in Education | 2 Comments »