Newspaper articles made simpler

The website "The Times in Plain English" has articles from the New York Times that have been rewritten in simpler language and format than the original articles. This is very useful for students who are not very advanced in reading skills, and it can also be useful for showing students the differences in writing for different audiences.

The website:http://www.thetimesinplainenglish.com/

The different topic sections are:

• check inside
• health & education
• immigration
• in brief
• law
• money & work
• New York
• news
• of interest
• opinion
• politics

Each article includes a link to the original article. Teachers can decide which article to introduce first. For example, they can have students first read the simpler article, then read the original for more information (since they already know what the article is about). Or - students can first read the original article to see how much they understand, then read the simpler article to check their comprehension.

This material is also good for making students aware of the concept of audience. Choosing an article in each version will help teachers illustrate to students the differences in writing for two different audiences. Students can focus on the information in each article - what has been included and what has been left out (and speculate why). They can also analyze the differences between the language in each article.

Of course, this website includes a wide range of articles - not only those of interest to engineering students. But considering how much news is focused on new technology and on updates in the companies that provide new innovations, there are certainly plenty of articles to choose from for teaching English to engineers.

For example, the article Using "Kill Switches to Kill Smartphone Theft (June 29, 2014), which is the simpler version of the New York Times article, Smartphones Embracing 'Kill Switches' as Theft Defense (June 19, 2014), and is about one-quarter as long as the original.

http://www.thetimesinplainenglish.com/wp/using-kill-switches-to-kill-smartphone-theft

In the original article, the "kill switch" is described this way:

"A kill switch is software that lets consumers lock down a phone after the device has been reported stolen; users can reactivate the phone only with the correct password or personal identification number. That makes it difficult to sell on the black market."

The "plain English" version is:

"A kill switch lets owners lock down a phone after it has been stolen. The phone can only work with the correct password or personal identification number. This makes the phone of no value to a thief who was going to resell it on the black market."

The sentences are not only grammatically simpler, but certain phrases have been simplified.

Another example refers to a quote from New York's attorney general (referred to only as a "government official" in the simplified version):

"'The introduction of kill switches has clearly had an effect on the conduct of smartphone thieves,' Eric T. Schneiderman, New York's attorney general, said in an interview. 'If these can be canceled like the equivalent of canceling a credit card, these are going to be the equivalent of stealing a paperweight.'"

The simpler version: "A government official said phones reported as stolen would be cancelled like credit cards."

Another useful feature is the "Translate this page" function, with more than 80 languages from Afrikaans to Zulu, including:

• Arabic
• Chinese
• French
• German
• Greek
• Japanese
• Russian
• Spanish
• Thai
• Turkish
• Ukrainian
• Urdu

In many ways, this is certainly a useful website for both teachers and students of English for engineering.

Using Kickstarter for teaching material

I learned about Kickstarter through finding information about innovations that would be interesting for my students to read about and discuss in English. In January 2014 I had two posts about innovations that were funded through Kickstarter (Device for home automation, January 5, 2014; Desktop wire bender, January 27, 2014).

Kickstarter is a global crowdfunding platform that describes itself as "a home for everything from films, games and music to art, design and technology."

Link: https://www.kickstarter.com/

The project areas (in the "Discover" section) are:

• arts
• comics
• crafts
• dance
• design
• fashion
• film & video
• food
• games
• journalism
• music
• photography
• publishing
• technology
• theater

For my students, the technology section is the one I focus on. Some examples of current projects: 

• The Dronekill ICeU Spectres: a carbon fiber, twin engine, tilt rotor, vertical takeoff and landing manned aerial vehicle. 
• Wireless Embedded Computer: coin-sized, powerful, affordable, open source wireless computer running Linux — created for professionals and enthusiasts. 
• The KaliPAK: an incredibly lightweight, portable energy generator that uses folding solar panels. 
• Goodnight Lad: augmented reality children's book. 
• Qmote: water-resistant internet remote for smartphones. 
• RoboCORE: a cloud-powered device and development platform that is the heart of your new DIY robots for professional or hobby use.

In the section "Start" there are guidelines to follow for submitting a project for funding.

Students - alone, with a partner, or in teams - could follow these guidelines for preparing a presentation on an idea (real or imaginary) that they have for something "people could use." If possible, they could instead make a video, as instructed on Kickstarter.

Other ideas for using material on the website is to have students choose an innovation that interests them, read the information written about it, and describe it to the class. Perhaps the class can do a ranking exercise to decide what they think are the most useful / most interesting / coolest projects - or which they would choose to fund, and why.

The descriptions themselves are good sources of model texts to use for description - in my case I've used them for technical descriptions.

To make the idea of innovation on a personal scale more realistic for students, a project proposed by someone in your own area can be focused on (if there is one). There was one project funded in 2013 from the city I teach in, and it was proposed by a student who was 23 years old at the time, and in a bachelor program for Business IT. So the idea that this student's project was successfully funded made my students realize that they, too, could be innovative and make their idea a reality.

This seems like a great way to motivate engineering students to believe in their creativity and ideas. And, who knows? Perhaps they'll develop an idea to propose as a project on Kickstarter!

Preview of Mobile World Congress

Each year the Mobile World Congress is held in Barcelona, Spain, for all who are involved in the mobile phone / cellular communications industry. So it is also, of course, of interest to engineering students, especially those studying communications technology. This year it will be held from 2-5 March 2015.

As a preview to the news from the congress (which I will write a post about), students can read an article from the Radio-Electronics.com website, described as "Resources and analysis for electronics engineers."

The article, Mobile World Congress 2015: trends, issues & predictions, provides an overview of what is expected at the congress.

Link to article: http://www.radio-electronics.com/articles/cellular-telecoms/mobile-world-congress-2015-trends-issues-135

Included on this page is a video (5:49 minutes) of news from the Mobile World Congress 2014. The narrator is very easy to understand, as he speaks slowly and clearly. There is also no background music, which can sometimes be distracting. Students can use this for listening comprehension and also as a basis for discussing which devices were new last year and how they developed over the year.

Before reading the article, students can first brainstorm what they consider will be the near-future trends in mobile communication, and then compare it with the ideas expressed in the article. The author, Ian Poole, focuses on 7 areas:

• Connected devices
• 5G
• LTE deployments and resulting issues
• NFC
• Radio access network
• Backhaul
• Mobiles, manufacturers and apps

Quite honestly, there were various terms and abbreviations that I didn't know, and had to look up before the lesson. These included: 5G, LTE, NFC and backhaul.

To make students more aware of issues involved in working with laypeople, or with other professionals who are not in their field, I chose 5 terms and had students work in 5 small groups, each group focusing on one term. They had to prepare an explanation of this term for a layperson - me - by describing it simply, and providing examples a layperson would be familiar with.

Although it wasn't so easy for them, it did help them understand that what is very clear to them because of their specialization knowledge, is not so clear to people outside of their field.

In addition to this work, they discussed which trends they though were most important, and further predictions of their own.

We plan to compare the work we did with news that will be available after this year's Mobile World Congress.

Website of Mobile World Congress 2015: http://www.mobileworldcongress.com/about/start-here/2015-preview/

The technology of New Horizons

The 7 instruments plus antenna

In my last post I wrote about New Horizons, the NASA space probe sent to fly past Pluto by this coming July. Articles written about the mission are interesting texts for all kinds of engineering students, and information about the instruments selected for the mission are particularly useful - not only for the specific technical information - but also for examples of technical description that students can focus on for their own writing.

A good source of material for technical descriptions is the New Horizons website, in the section on Spacecraft, Overview:

http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/spacecraft/overview.php

where there is a brief description of each of the 7 instruments chosen for the mission. In the sub-section Science Payload each instrument is described in more detail:

http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/spacecraft/sciencePay.php

Each description is fairly short, but clearly describes the instrument's objectives, what it looks like, and how it works. Therefore, there is a lot of useful language for technical description. In addition to the specific vocabulary of each instrument, there are useful verb-preposition and verb-noun collocations that indicate what something "does." These verbs can be used to describe other types of technology as well.

For example:

• meet a goal
• ejected from
• interact with
• provide backup to
• collect and focus the light
• operates at (visible) wavelengths
• produce color maps
• tailored to measure
• distribution over the surface
• pass from ... through
• focused onto
• acts like a
• emit / absorb light
• reveal new constituents
• probe the atmospheric composition
• separate light into
• produce an image of
• viewed through
• produce absorption by
• look back at
• point back at
• send radio signals to
• bend the radio waves
• record the radio waves
• send data back to
• measure the weak radio emissions from
• consists of
• derive a (very accurate) value for
• focus visible light onto
• take images of
• determine whether
• become charged by
• count and measure the sizes of
• collide with
• built by
• with supervision from

In writing a description, students will also need to use relative clauses - both restrictive and non-restrictive. This text provides examples of both, and these examples serve to illustrate the difference between them (or whether to use a comma or not).

Restrictive clauses:

• LEISA data may also reveal new constituents on the surfaces that have not yet been detected.
• Alice is an ultraviolet imaging spectrometer that will probe the atmospheric composition of Pluto.
• A "spectrometer" is an instrument that separates light into its constituent wavelengths, ...
• ... the atmosphere bends the radio waves by an amount that depends on ...
• The instrument that provides the highest spatial resolution on New Horizons is ...
• ... aperture that focuses visible light onto a charge-coupled device.
• ... will search for neutral atoms that escape Pluto's atmosphere ...

Non-restrictive clauses:

• MVIC also has two panchromatic filters, which pass essentially all visible light, ...
• Alice has two modes of operation: an "airglow" mode, which allows measurement of ...
• All communication ... takes place through the radio package, which makes it critical to mission success.
• REX also has a "radiometry" mode, which will measure the weak radio emissions from Pluto itself.
• ... LORRI, short for Long Range Reconnaissance Imager, which consists of ...
• The ... is counting and  measuring the sizes of dust particles along New Horizon's entire trajectory, which covers regions of interplanetary space never before sampled.

Finally, there are linking and transition words and phases - useful for all types of writing:

• for example
• not only ... but also
• while
• respectively
• also
• In all cases,
• acts like a
• so that
• since
• may also
• not yet
• both ... and
• either ... or
• just after
• including
• similar to that described above
• no (filters) or
• another
• subsequently
• such

There is a lot of material here for researching information, discussions, language work, presentations and follow-up work throughout the semester.