Words, words, words

I updated the ESL libguide today with a link both to the “Australian Word Map” and the Macquarie Dictionary “Aussie word of the week.” Both of these were mentioned in a recent post in the education.au blog. I have also added the Word Map to the tag cloud of curriculum resources for teacher education.

The Australian Word Map allows users from different regions to add their comments on word variations in different areas. I was confused recently when a friend referred to being “dinked” on a bicycle. Since I can only recall using the much more prosaic “double” we decided that it must have been a regional thing.

The word this week from Aussie word of the week is “bloody”.

The Library has subscription access to quite a few online dictionaries including the Macquarie and the big “multi-volume”  Oxford English Dictionary. After logging in the easiest thing to do is bookmark the site and then each time you return it should prompt you for your RMIT University login details.

Recent library sessions for the School’s TAFE students

I gave some classes to ESL groups recently in the city. I mentioned last year that I really enjoy these classes, mainly because I find the students so interested and engaged. I find much the same thing with the Foundation studies students and Diploma of Further Education students.

Such students come into the Library (at Carlton and Swanston) for tours, catalogue sessions, database sessions and sessions on evaluating internet sites. Along the way they learn to analyse their research topics, develop key words for searching, become familiar with some key resources (such as Factiva for newspaper articles and Australian Public Affairs full text for local magazine and journal articles), and learn how to access the material. These are a terrific group of programs and teachers, and the research topics are often interesting and stimulating for students.

Here are the guides and tutorials for these areas (I’ve already mentioned that we will be putting together a further guide for VCE soon).

• Foundation studies resources
• Library skills for foundation students
• ESL (English as a Second Language)

ESL libguide

Since going ahead with the purchase of “libguides” we have begun transferring more of the existing guides into the new format. The first is the ESL guide. We have updated this guide and included a page of TESOL resources.

Recent TAFE library sessions

I have recently given research skills sessions to students studying both the Diploma of Further Education and the ESL program at the Carlton campus. I enjoy these sessions, mainly because the students are usually sharp and engaged. We focus in these sessions on the idea of analysing a topic and developing keywords, on the types of resources that are available to them, on a couple of different resources such as Factiva and Australian Public Affairs Full Text (APAFT), and on how to reference material found in the Harvard style.

In the ESL session yesterday students were researching cultural and architectural landmarks in Melbourne — a great topic for students new to our city. Factiva is useful here as it allows us to search major Australian newspapers across about 10 years. APAFT is one of the best, largest and well-established Australian social science databases that also gives us some good information about architectural landarks, the use of public space, historic buildings and so on in Melbourne.

There is lots to learn in such a session: it can be a challenge sometimes just navigating your way around the different lists of resources and knowing which to choose, typing in your keywords as structured search expressions, reading citations and referencing, using find it links to get the full text or to check the catalogue, being able to save PDF files. These were just some of the issues I covered with this lively and interested group. It was also great to have two of their teachers attend to help and advise as we went along.