Coaching and mentoring are old professions. Soldiers, artists and athletes have traditionally used teachers to learn skills, coaches to apply those skills and mentors to keep life progressing in balance with history and experience.
Modern teachers, coaches and mentors synthesize the best skills and practices for use in business, leadership training, academics, life styles, exercise, health and nutrition and finance to benefit students, individuals, executives, entrepreneurs and professionals.
Team work between the student and teacher, coach or mentor usually starts with a skills and ability review, progresses into a plan and results in a goal achieved.
Modern teachers, coaches and mentors can help their students improve their skills, save time, avoid mistakes, live more satisfying lives and achieve goals.
ESL in Canada will be expanding the list of skill sets for tutors, teachers, coaches and mentors. We will be featuring these professionals in the new networking lists.
For additional information:
http://www.eslincanada.com/agency.html
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This blog uses original and reprintable articles in whole or part. Posts can be edited for spelling, grammar, accuracy, fairness or to meet ever changing legal publishing standards. We post one link to indicate the original post or source. We rely on the accuracy of the sources. This blog is not responsible for errors or omissions or any liability for any posts or any real, imagined, fabricated, current, past or subsequent damages. For additional info: eslincanada (at) gmail (dot) -com-
Thursday, June 22, 2006
Saturday, June 10, 2006
How to determine if your Agent can honestly help you!
In Canada and many other countries anyone can use the title education agent, counselor or consultant without any prior training, education, certification or registration. This is a completely un-regulated industry with no standards and no policing associations. The internet is full of "agent complaints" from students, teachers, schools, homestay and service industries.
Many students and their parents will sit across the desk from a convicted criminal in a fancy suit, expensive looking office, who is using a false name, a new business agency name which sounds like an established agency, and is falsely representing his agency contracts and licenses from schools, universities and institutes.
Eliminating the obvious frauds is not that difficult. Prospective customers should ask to see personal ID, business registrations, business licenses and references from the schools they represent and references from previous students.
Prospective customers should ask to see what education or training or experience qualifications the agent has. Did they finish high school? college? university? Did they study abroad? Have they ever traveled overseas? to that school? been to that homestay? Why are they recommending that school?
Local discount agents describe all schools as the same and then try to place students based on discounts. Any school advantages of professional programs, curricula, teachers, or systems are completely lost using price only discount agents. I have seen many agent whiteboards with the "price du jour" - just like the fish market. Some of these prices were falsely high then "discounted" to make the price appear better.
Students are also increasingly aware that most of the larger agencies are promoting their own schools located in Canada, USA, Australia, and New Zealand. Many Canadian ESL schools do not know that they are competing with "foreign agency owned" ESL schools. The foreign agencies have the market presence in the local markets and simply place the students into schools where they have an ownership interest. The MBA's call this vertical integration. The mega agencies would rather make 40 to 50% than the regular commission of 10 to 25%. When the 50% is transferred internationally the "Canadian Schools" run at a loss and do not pay taxes. The "Mega Agencies" located internationally pay from 3.5% to 25% income taxes.
Prospective students should investigate the agent and agency before giving them any money.
There are honest, hard working and professional agents who have visited the schools they represent, post actual student testimonials and continue to offer good advice based on years of experience. Students who work with professional agents and consultants actually save the most money and time going to the right school the first time.
Original Post: ESL in Canada directory
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ESL in Canada Blog URL
http://eslincanada.blogspot.com/
Many students and their parents will sit across the desk from a convicted criminal in a fancy suit, expensive looking office, who is using a false name, a new business agency name which sounds like an established agency, and is falsely representing his agency contracts and licenses from schools, universities and institutes.
Eliminating the obvious frauds is not that difficult. Prospective customers should ask to see personal ID, business registrations, business licenses and references from the schools they represent and references from previous students.
Prospective customers should ask to see what education or training or experience qualifications the agent has. Did they finish high school? college? university? Did they study abroad? Have they ever traveled overseas? to that school? been to that homestay? Why are they recommending that school?
Local discount agents describe all schools as the same and then try to place students based on discounts. Any school advantages of professional programs, curricula, teachers, or systems are completely lost using price only discount agents. I have seen many agent whiteboards with the "price du jour" - just like the fish market. Some of these prices were falsely high then "discounted" to make the price appear better.
Students are also increasingly aware that most of the larger agencies are promoting their own schools located in Canada, USA, Australia, and New Zealand. Many Canadian ESL schools do not know that they are competing with "foreign agency owned" ESL schools. The foreign agencies have the market presence in the local markets and simply place the students into schools where they have an ownership interest. The MBA's call this vertical integration. The mega agencies would rather make 40 to 50% than the regular commission of 10 to 25%. When the 50% is transferred internationally the "Canadian Schools" run at a loss and do not pay taxes. The "Mega Agencies" located internationally pay from 3.5% to 25% income taxes.
Prospective students should investigate the agent and agency before giving them any money.
There are honest, hard working and professional agents who have visited the schools they represent, post actual student testimonials and continue to offer good advice based on years of experience. Students who work with professional agents and consultants actually save the most money and time going to the right school the first time.
Original Post: ESL in Canada directory
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ESL in Canada Blog URL
http://eslincanada.blogspot.com/
Wednesday, May 10, 2006
Collocations and Machine Language Translations
The tendency for words to occur together is called collocation.
The mathematicians that study language and have lots of computing power are forming English language databases. These databases can be used for machine language translation, formulas to rank collocation, most used priority word lists, word grouping tendencies and other linguistics research. Using simple research the text is analyzed for collocations by counting the occurrences of a word and then all of the preceding or accompanying words.
If we take a simple formula approach it is easy to understand collocations. Unique collocations occur with only one set of words in combination. An example of a unique collocation is shrug shoulders. It does not appear in any other combinations.
Strong word collocations occur in use at over 70 percent of the total uses. Example: “Comment on” is considered a strong collocation at 75 percent and "comment about" would be considered a weak collocation at less than 20 percent of the combinations. Other examples of strong collocations: a vivid imagination, problem child, bosom buddy, or dead serious.
Fixed phrases are sometimes considered an extended collocation.
Examples: at the time of writing, it is interesting to note that, to be taken into a account, rather you than me, not on your life, all's well that ends well, under the weather, not for love or money, as far as I'm concerned.
Collocations and Connotation
Not all co-occurring items can be counted as collocations. The following are not considered as collocations: phrasal verbs, idioms and compound nouns.
One factor in the difference between collocation meaning is connotation. Polysemy is a term for words with more than one meaning. Sometimes a word may collocate with one of the word's meanings but not with the other meanings.
With some exceptions collocations are usually a more literate interpretation of the words used together. Phrasal verbs, idioms and compound nouns will have totally different, partial or variable meanings within context to the literate interpretation of the actual words.
Example Collocation Combinations
adjective + noun (light drizzle)
adjective + preposition (big of)
adverb + adjective (very pretty)
adverb + verb (boldly go)
noun + noun (designer collection)
verb + noun (cover ground)
verb + preposition (apply to)
Altavista's Babelfish or Google by Systran allows for so-called gist translation with an error rate of 20 to 30 percent. The large error rate is due to how a word's meaning varies with context. One example: "The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak" translated from English to Russian and back again only to yield "The vodka is good but the meat is rotten." So far Babelfish has only 19 language pairs available and it has taken decades to develop language-pair rules for each of the 9,900 language word pairs.
Newer statistics machine translation systems eliminate the old rule-based gap-filling solutions and depends entirely on a statistical solution by looking for overlaps between sentence fragments and collocation tendencies.
With this new statistics machine translation system it knows what it doesn't know, however the core database may prove to be unwieldy consisting of hundreds of gigabytes and using huge computing power.
Some observations for language students and language teachers is the translation pool for just average translations is 9900 words. The big variable is context, which means that a word can be used in various formats: "formal, industry specific jargon, slang, idioms, act a different part of speech performing a different function within that particular meaning. If every word has an average of five context variables then the student really has to learn 50,000 items.
As final conclusions: second language learning takes time and effort and there should be plenty of translation jobs for the next 20 years if you are willing to invest the seven to nine years to be proficient.
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ESL in Canada Blog URL
http://eslincanada.blogspot.com/
The mathematicians that study language and have lots of computing power are forming English language databases. These databases can be used for machine language translation, formulas to rank collocation, most used priority word lists, word grouping tendencies and other linguistics research. Using simple research the text is analyzed for collocations by counting the occurrences of a word and then all of the preceding or accompanying words.
If we take a simple formula approach it is easy to understand collocations. Unique collocations occur with only one set of words in combination. An example of a unique collocation is shrug shoulders. It does not appear in any other combinations.
Strong word collocations occur in use at over 70 percent of the total uses. Example: “Comment on” is considered a strong collocation at 75 percent and "comment about" would be considered a weak collocation at less than 20 percent of the combinations. Other examples of strong collocations: a vivid imagination, problem child, bosom buddy, or dead serious.
Fixed phrases are sometimes considered an extended collocation.
Examples: at the time of writing, it is interesting to note that, to be taken into a account, rather you than me, not on your life, all's well that ends well, under the weather, not for love or money, as far as I'm concerned.
Collocations and Connotation
Not all co-occurring items can be counted as collocations. The following are not considered as collocations: phrasal verbs, idioms and compound nouns.
One factor in the difference between collocation meaning is connotation. Polysemy is a term for words with more than one meaning. Sometimes a word may collocate with one of the word's meanings but not with the other meanings.
With some exceptions collocations are usually a more literate interpretation of the words used together. Phrasal verbs, idioms and compound nouns will have totally different, partial or variable meanings within context to the literate interpretation of the actual words.
Example Collocation Combinations
adjective + noun (light drizzle)
adjective + preposition (big of)
adverb + adjective (very pretty)
adverb + verb (boldly go)
noun + noun (designer collection)
verb + noun (cover ground)
verb + preposition (apply to)
Altavista's Babelfish or Google by Systran allows for so-called gist translation with an error rate of 20 to 30 percent. The large error rate is due to how a word's meaning varies with context. One example: "The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak" translated from English to Russian and back again only to yield "The vodka is good but the meat is rotten." So far Babelfish has only 19 language pairs available and it has taken decades to develop language-pair rules for each of the 9,900 language word pairs.
Newer statistics machine translation systems eliminate the old rule-based gap-filling solutions and depends entirely on a statistical solution by looking for overlaps between sentence fragments and collocation tendencies.
With this new statistics machine translation system it knows what it doesn't know, however the core database may prove to be unwieldy consisting of hundreds of gigabytes and using huge computing power.
Some observations for language students and language teachers is the translation pool for just average translations is 9900 words. The big variable is context, which means that a word can be used in various formats: "formal, industry specific jargon, slang, idioms, act a different part of speech performing a different function within that particular meaning. If every word has an average of five context variables then the student really has to learn 50,000 items.
As final conclusions: second language learning takes time and effort and there should be plenty of translation jobs for the next 20 years if you are willing to invest the seven to nine years to be proficient.
***********
ESL in Canada Blog URL
http://eslincanada.blogspot.com/
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