Brett Reynolds
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Teaching Prepositions in a Modern Grammatical Context more
Fri, Apr 29, 09:00-Tue, May 31, 23:55 Asia/Seoul
Many mistaken ideas still plague our grammar books and lessons today. Here, we present the case of prepositions. As early as the 1700s, a few grammarians had realized a deep flaw in the way we think about these words. The fundamental flaw, applying across most frameworks, is in the idea that a preposition must have an object NP as its complement. Our reanalysis, based on that of the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, vastly reduces the number of subordinators and also significantly cuts the number of words like "before" which have wrongly been said to be adverbs here, prepositions, there and subordinators elsewhere. This understanding allows teachers and students to leverage strong commonalities that apply across all PPs, commonalities that we set out. We acknowledge that this shift in thinking can be tricky for teachers who may expect it to be confusing for students too. We clearly show that this system is in fact much simpler, both to teach and to understand.
AI-Generated Voices for Diversity in ESL Materials more
Fri, Apr 29, 09:00-Tue, May 31, 23:55 Asia/Seoul
ESL materials are often improved with the inclusion of high-quality recordings. Unfortunately, producing such recordings can be expensive, time-consuming, and complicated. Moreover, when recordings are included, they have typically been limited to Standard accents, even though non-Standard English is a natural part of ESL listening. Not only does this limit the students’ familiarity with non-Standard accents, but it also promotes accent discrimination. AI speech models have improved dramatically and now have many expressive and naturalistic features. Moreover, these are available in a wide range of voices and languages with fine grained control over speed. Interestingly they can produce English speech in typical foreign accents. Finally, all of this is generally available to anyone producing language materials. In this presentation, I introduce a set of these models, demonstrating what they can do and what we can do with them in ways that promote equity, diversity, inclusion and good language learning.