More marketing garbage, now from the tobacco industry!

I recently received an email from "Alexa Gunn" (alexa.gunn@student-email.org; not her real name, I'm sure), telling me that I had broken links on my pages (which is true; between migrating the site and organizing my Google Drive, almost every link for my own materials is broken right now). When I asked which links she was interested in, she gave me the link to this blog, which happens to be working just fine. And then she asked me to post links to two organizations that she had volunteered with.

A few things to note. 

1) Email address domain is https://student-email.org/.  It says it was created in partnerships with Hofstra University and appears to let students sign up for a Google Apps for Education email address. But I strongly suspect that Hofstra U's name is being used without permission, and when I tried to sign up for an email address using a .edu email address, nothing happened. (I've tweeted all parties involved with this marketing scheme to inform that I suspect their names are being used without permission.)

2) Once again, I'm not including links to the site in question, because I don't want to generate traffic for it. But in this case, the suggested resources had nothing to do with language learning, and were ostensibly focused on tobacco cessation.  "Alexa" asked me to link to the American Lung Association (which I would happily do on my resources page if my site were dedicated to tobacco cessation, but instead I'll do it here), and to another site which purportedly was about smoking cessation. But upon clicking around, it became obvious that the site was a marketing tool for the e-cigarette industry. Although "Alexa" indicated in her email that the American Lung Association supports the site in question, in reality, the ALA has issued a statement questioning the unproven claims of success for tobacco cessation by using e-cigs. Excerpt: 

The American Lung Association is concerned about the potential health consequences of electronic cigarettes (e-cigarettes), as well as the unproven claims that they can be used to help smokers quit. Presently there is no government oversight of these products. Absent Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regulation, there is no way for the public health and medical community or consumers to know what chemicals are contained in e-cigarettes (also known as electronic nicotine delivery systems or ENDS) or what the short- and long-term health implications might be.

[...]

The American Lung Association is troubled about unproven claims that e-cigarettes can be used to help smokers quit. The FDA's Center for Drug Evaluation and Research has not approved any e-cigarette as a safe and effective method to help smokers quit. When smokers are ready to quit, they should call 1-800-QUIT-NOW or talk with their doctors about using one of the seven FDA-approved medications proven to be safe and effective in helping smokers quit.

The takeaway: this marketing tactic asked me to link to both a legitimate site, and a fake smoking cessation site, probably hoping that I would assume that the unknown one was legitimate since they asked me to link to a reputable site (and apparently hoping that I wouldn't notice that neither one had anything to do with learning languages). 

So, "Alexa", marketing firm, and e-cig industry, here's my own message: If you want to quit smoking, find resources at the American Lung Association. Changing one bad habit for a different one doesn't benefit you AT ALL, and the e-cig industry right now is entirely unregulated, meaning that there are no controls over what goes in e-cigs, or oversight to ensure that the actual ingredients match the description you've been given.

UPDATE 6/13/2017:

Thanks to all that are updating the comments with names & email addresses!  That makes it easier for others to find in a Google search when they're trying to find out more info about the junk marketers.

I received another one this week from Amy Creighton (a.creighton@scholaremail.org) from the domain scholaremail.org.  I replied to see what the product was, and sure enough, it is also e-cigarettes.  As always, all links have been deleted to avoid generating traffic for these sites.

Study abroad scholarships

As an undergraduate student, one of the biggest obstacles for my dream of studying abroad was money.  I was managing to fund my studies via a full tuition scholarship, various smaller scholarships, Pell grants, and work study. I didn't think I could manage to cough up enough money to finance a semester-long study abroad program, but my boyfriend (now my husband) encouraged me to at least check it out, so I did. As it turned out, I was able to apply the dollar value of my full tuition scholarship towards the total cost of the program, and fund the remaining portion with a study abroad scholarship and student loans (which were worth every penny that I'm repaying!).  But if I hadn't had the full tuition scholarship, I never would have had the opportunity, because I couldn't have managed to come up with the money on my own.

That's why I love these two scholarship programs.

1. http://www.borenawards.org/   This program has scholarships for undergraduates and fellowships for graduate students.  These awards are extremely competitive, because they fully fund the study abroad program, and it funds study in areas that are of interest to national security (Western Europe is off the list, in other words).  This scholarship does come with some strings attached, as recipients have to agree to work for the federal government. 
2. http://www.iie.org/programs/gilman-scholarship-program  This program is for undergraduates who receive Pell grants. Participants can study anywhere except Cuba and countries on the State Department's Travel Warning List.  The award can be up to $5,000, with $4,000 listed as the current average. In addition, if you're studying a critical language, you can apply for an additional award of $8,000 to support your study abroad program.  If I were an undergraduate now, I would be learning Mandarin.  (I'm still going to keep trying, but my old brain doesn't retain the characters.)

If you're interested in study abroad, speak Spanish, and would like to know more about my study abroad experience, I've written about it here.

Kelly Graves and the Morrow Community Center, and Sarah Cooper and the Compton Community Center

I'm doing a terrible job at updating my blog, and I apologize. But once again, I have a good excuse.  His name is Staffan (pronounced /stə.'fan/), and he was born in January!

We're in Nebraska, so of course we're football fans. 

We're also big baseball fans, and we love the College World Series!

This post actually isn't about language learning, but it is about technology. I've started to get emails from various people telling me that my resources page is helpful, and they've found a site they think should be added. In general, they claim that either children have found said site, or that they found it while looking for resources for children. Here are two recent messages I've received:

Anita,
How are you? My name's Kelly and I'm a mentor at the local community center. The kids that I mentor wanted me to email you and let you know that they think your page, http://www.anitasaalfeld.com/resources, has great spanish resources.

As the kids were looking for some more resources online, they had a wonderful idea to send you a resource they found, [link deleted to avoid generating traffic for the site]. What a fabulous idea. 

I wanted to surprise the kids with a field trip to one of the local restaurants that serve Spanish cuisine, my treat, if their resource is added. (Also, for their efforts as well of course.) 

So, if it's something you add, let me know! The kids would love to make a contribution.
Kelly Graves

*******

Hi!
My name is Sarah Cooper and I work at Compton Community Center in Compton, California. We are beginning to introduce a series of summer camps for children in our area.

I'm developing activities for students from first through 12th grade, and one of the most important topics I've been searching for is foreign language. I wanted to let you know that your page (http://www.anitasaalfeld.com/resources) was extremely helpful to me. I really appreciate it!


I also found this article:[article titled and link deleted to avoid generating traffic for the site]
It's educational and would be a great resource to include on your page. What do you think? I would love to hear any thoughts you have to share. 

Thanks again!
Sarah Cooper
Assistant Director of Educational ActivitiesCompton Community Center

So what's going on with these requests?  The sites listed in all the requests do have a Spanish resources page, but usually the information is basic, sometimes it's just plain incorrect, and frequently it's just a list of random sites somehow related to learning Spanish (not usually a good list, either).  What's really going on is that the sites in question get a higher page ranking (they show up higher in the list in Google searches) the more sites that link to them. And they're not really about learning Spanish or any other subject; they have a paid product (trip insurance, for example) that is the main purpose of their site, but they have a bunch of subpages that they use to try to generate more hits and get higher in the search rankings, thereby gaining visibility and enhancing profitability. (That's my deduction, in any case; there's probably a better technical explanation, but the bottom line is that links to the page improve their search ranking, and an improved search ranking means that it's more likely that people will find them and purchase their product.)

So what's the problem? They know that most people don't really care whether their site gets higher in the search rankings, so if you just email someone and ask them to link to your page when they have no good reason to do so, they're going to say no. So they create these crappy resource pages, and then to "sell" them, they say that children have found the site, and they will get a reward if their site gets added to your resource list (as in "Kelly Graves'" email). And it works. Google "Kelly Graves Morrow Community Center" (not in quotes), and you'll see that "Kelly Graves" has gotten a ton of people to add .com links to their resource pages with the fake children scam.

Things to note: All of these requests come from someone who appears to be affiliated with an educational organization, such as a school or community center. They've all gone to the trouble of creating real websites (even .org websites) to appear like a legitimate organization, but if you peruse the websites, you'll notice that there's no physical address or contact information for the supposed community center or school.

Fake sites (I've included links here because these are the dummy sites that these sites/companies have set up to trick people into believing that the suggestion is coming from an educator, child, tutor, etc.; these are not the links to the for-profit sites):

1. Morrow Community Center (Notice how there's never any mention of where this community center is located, either in terms of a physical address or even a city and state): http://morrowcommunitycenter.org/
2. Compton Community Center (At least has a city and state, but still no contact information or physical address): http://www.comptoncommunitycenter.org/

So what's the point?  Usually when I get a resource suggestion, I look over it and decide if it's any good or not. If it adds something to my resources list, I'll add it, and if it doesn't contribute anything new or worthwhile, I don't add it. When I got the request from "Madeline", supposedly a 4th grader, I also looked over the site, saw that it wasn't a worthwhile site, but because the request came from a supposed 4th grader who was going to get credit if I posted the link, I posted the link anyway.  It's worth noting that the class really exists; I was able to find the school and teacher in the town and state mentioned. But that doesn't mean that the person that emailed me was really a fourth grader in that class. The takeaway: If a site isn't valuable, don't include it anyway because it came from a child, because a group of children came up with it, or because of any other manipulative tactic designed to get you to link to a site with no real value to your educational resources list.

Just for fun:  Feel free to email "Kelly Graves" and "Sarah Cooper" to tell them you read about them here.

Kelly Graves: k.graves@morrowcommunitycenter.org
Sarah Cooper: sarah@comptoncommunitycenter.org

EDITED TO ADD: I emailed "Kelly Graves" and "Sarah Cooper" the link to this post, and today I see that I have a hit on my blog from Internet Marketing Ninjas.  So now I know who's been hired to promote at least one of the .com pages, and how they use unethical business practices in order to improve page rankings for their clients.  So if I were going to use a marketing service, I'd avoid using that one. 

Another great resource in technology for language teaching

I was scrolling through my Twitter feed today and discovered a great new resource!  FLTMAG is a new online magazine dedicated to language teaching and technology, with a focus on practical suggestions for using technology in language teaching. Check it out!

World's best dictionary, now available online for free!

Confession: My least favorite class to teach is composition. I think it's critically important for any major, especially a language major, and I worked really hard to develop a good class after it flopped the first time I taught it, but I'm much happier teaching writing as a component of other Spanish courses rather than in a course focused entirely on writing.

Before I taught composition the first time, I reviewed lots of composition textbooks. There were some that were OK, some that were fairly good, and some that weren't so great. But there were none that I felt were worth the ridiculously high prices that textbook companies were charging. Students need models to write well, but in the internet age, there are plenty of models available online for free. It did take more work on my part, because I had to build the course from scratch, but in the end, I had exactly the course I wanted (notwithstanding the fact that I didn't want to teach composition at all). 

So I thought about what students really needed, and realized that most students want and need to build their vocabulary. And I had this fantastic, amazing dictionary that I randomly found at the U of Illinois bookstore (because I used to troll language dictionary sections in bookstores, before I found this dictionary) that was perfect for the advanced second language learner (beginners, too, but beginners can get by with the one that doesn't weight 10 lbs). This beautiful dictionary was the Collins Spanish-English unabridged dictionary, and it's perfect because it's the only dictionary I've found that includes word usages with the possible translations of a word. This is essential for second language learners, because if they're using a dictionary (or online translator/dictionary) that just gives them a list with no clues as to what the differences are between the different words, they will just pick one, and invariably, it will be wrong. The Collins dictionary gives examples, in phrases and sentences, in both languages, so that learners can tell if that's really the word they're looking for or not. For words with multiple meanings or parts of speech, this is crucial. So I made the dictionary the required textbook for my composition classes. The last time I taught composition, in spring of 2012, my entire class was online except the required dictionary, which students found odd, but at the time, there still wasn't an online dictionary that came close to the breadth and depth of the Collins dictionary. But thanks to my friend and colleague Gwyneth Cliver, a German professor at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, I learned today that the Collins dictionaries are now available online for free! I compared an entry for the word 'can' from my paper dictionary to the online entry, and I'm happy to report that the online version contains all of the same information as the paper version. So while I'm thankful that I don't have to teach composition again, if I did, there would now be no textbook requirement, since the world's best dictionary is available free online. 

(I love this dictionary so much that I have multiple copies of the unabridged version. I justify this compulsion by saying that it's too heavy to cart back and forth between home and school, so I need a copy in both places.)

I'm a terrible artist

In the days before I had consistently accessible technology in my classroom and could project images, either with an overhead projector or a computer projector, I attempted to draw things on the board. With practice, I've gotten better, but mostly it just resulted in students erupting in laughter and asking me what I was trying to draw. So it didn't work very well as a strategy for avoiding L1 use and getting students to make direct connections between the L2 and an image.

With current technology, this has gotten a lot easier, but you still can't always find every image you want for teaching, so if you're a skilled artist like me, you're just out of luck.

Looks like her, yes? And this is after lots of practice playing Draw Something.
Or maybe it looks more like this: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-19349921

Which is what makes this library of images for foreign language teaching so amazing:

http://digital.library.pitt.edu/v/visuals/

It's a repository of almost 500 illustrations created specifically for language teachers.

With many thanks to Lori Czerwionka for passing this great resource along!

Applied linguistics conferences + tech tips for traveling

As the post title indicates, this post isn't really related to teaching, but I thought it was still useful information for language teachers and academics in general.

Fact about me: I love going to applied linguistics conferences, which is what I'm doing right now.  (I'm currently at the Second Language Research Forum in Provo, Utah.) I have three conferences that I try to go to every year: PSLLT (Pronunciation in Second Language Learning and Teaching), SLRF (Second Language Research Forum) and AAAL (American Association for Applied Linguistics). If our state language teaching conference (NILA - Nebraska International Languages Association) doesn't conflict with SLRF, I go to that, too.

There are lots of reasons that I love going to conferences in general, and these conferences in particular, but I'll limit myself to describing a few:

• Going to conferences is great for meeting people, both professionally and personally. It's a fantastic opportunity to meet other people interested in the same types of research as you who maybe haven't happened to have published much yet. Because you're both the same type of nerd, you will probably become friends. :) For early career academics especially, this is a great opportunity to meet people that you can collaborate with, and get your name out to established people in the field (useful if you're on the tenure track and you need outside reviewers for your research).
• A lot of great research is never published. This happens for lots of reasons; in my case, my studies never end up how I expect, and there are no statistically significant results. Even though these studies still tell us a lot about the field, they are less likely to be published because there are no statistically significant results. Conference presentations showcase a lot of that research, which is particularly useful for research about instructional effects. I get a lot of my best ideas for teaching from attending research presentations on different instructional techniques. Sometimes I just directly adopt a strategy from a conference presentation, and other times it provides the creative spark I need to come up with my own ideas on how to modify my teaching so that it's more effective.  
• I think I mentioned that I was in school forever. :) This is because I love learning, and there's always a lot to learn at these conferences. I've learned to think about things in new ways by having regular exposure to people researching in lots of different subdisciplines of applied linguistics. These amazing people bring up ideas that would never occur to me in a million years, and I love it. It energizes me and reminds me why I wanted to study applied linguistics in the first place.

Because I love these conferences, I try to go to as many as I can every year, which can get expensive. One of the most annoying but necessary costs is internet access; for some reason, conference hotels never have free wifi, although they cost substantially more than other hotels that do have free wifi. (I'm sure there's some business logic in there somewhere, but to me it's mystifying: hotels that are already reasonably priced offer free wifi, and hotels that cost a lot more want you to pay extra for internet service.) Usually these hotels charge $12-15/day for internet access, which means that your real per-night cost ends up being substantially higher than advertised (I consider in-room internet access a necessity, not a luxury).

So when companies started coming out with prepaid mobile broadband plans, I was all in. I first had a little USB modem that let me connect to mobile broadband, but when mifi devices became available with a prepaid option, I upgraded. So now when I go to conferences, I always have my trusty mifi with me. I use Virgin Mobile*, and for my current trip, for example, I paid $25 for 1.5 GB of data that lasts for a month.  So how does it work? You do have to put down money up front to get the mifi device; mine was $100. But once you have it, you're set up. Then, when you're traveling, you just buy the amount of access you need, from $5 for one day and 100 MB to $75ish for a month and several GB of data. For my current conference, I would have spent $60 to have internet in my room over four days, but instead I spent $25, *and* I'm sharing with friends at the conference, since the mifi will let you connect up to five devices. It's not as fast as hotel wifi, since it's 3G, but I've always been impressed with how well it works. It stutters occasionally when streaming video, but I've uploaded and downloaded lots of sound files with no problems. [UPDATE: When I tried to publish this blog post the first time, my device had been kicked off the 3G network, and I had to restart it to reconnect. So it's not perfect, but it's portable and affordable.]

Mifi

If you're an Android user, there's another option that's even cheaper. There's a wonderful app called PdaNet* that you can purchase that turns your phone into an internet hotspot. [CAVEAT: Installing and using this app almost certainly violates your terms of service with your mobile provider, particularly if your service includes an unlimited data package. But since Android is open market, this is a viable and cheap option, and it works wonderfully well.] This app is also available for iPhone, but you have to have an unlocked iPhone in order to install and use it. This app has both a paid version and a free version, so you can check it out and see how well it works. In my experience, the free version is one of the best free apps I've ever used, so it's definitely worth checking out.

The other gadget that goes everywhere with me now (not just to conferences) is my portable battery charger*. This particular charger comes with adapters to various mobile devices, so it would work to charge my mifi, for example. But I mainly use it for my phone. When I'm at a conference, my phone is main internet access point, so I tend to drain the battery pretty quickly. Now when my battery gets low, I just plug it in to this, wherever I'm at, and charge my phone. (It has come in really handy at baseball games, for the record.) If the charger is fully charged, it will charge my phone completely about three times.

Portable battery charger

This isn't a tech tip, but I attended Robert DeKeyser's plenary talk on age effects in second language acquisition today, which was fascinating. One of the main ideas of the talk was to point out the fallacy that younger is better for language learners in terms of classroom exposure. He pointed out that while young learners in an immersion context achieve high levels of second language proficiency regardless of how much language learning aptitude they have, this does *not* mean that instructed SLA is beneficial for young learners, since an immersion context is nothing like a foreign language context. It's far more efficient in terms of number of hours to instruct adolescent or adult learners, because they have the cognitive capacity to acquire things much more quickly. So while it's true that in an immersion context, a young age of acquisition is crucial for achieving high proficiency in the target language, we need research looking at instructed SLA in a non-immersion context to see if there is really an advantage to starting children in second language courses in kindergarten, rather than fifth grade, for example.  (There's some research on this in the context of Canadian dual-language programs that supports the idea that learners who start acquiring the L2 in the classroom from the beginning of their education don't perform any better at the end of their K-12 education than learners who start acquiring the L2 in, say, 5th grade. Sometime when I'm not so tired, I will track down references and post them.)

His concluding point was that we shouldn't be asking the question of when to teach a second language, but rather how to teach a second language to learners of various ages. Since children learn best by repetition and exposure to lots of input, and not by explicit instruction about forms, it's a waste of time trying to teach them grammar rules. It's far better to maximize their exposure to the target language. Conversely, it's non-sensical to claim, as certain language-learning software products do, that the best way for adults to learn a language is as if they were children, with exposure to lots of input and no explicit instruction. Given that adolescents and adults have much higher cognitive capabilities, and actually will fail to acquire many target-language features in the absence of instruction, instruction is enormously beneficial to language learners at these ages. As Prof. DeKeyser stated in his address, "Don't tell adult [language] learners that they can't learn explicitly, because you're taking away the only advantage these people have [compared with young learners]!"


*Note: I do not receive any benefits or compensation for mentioning these products. They're just things that I've found useful in my conference travels, and they've helped me save money.