the creation of texture

The creation of texture | Gerry Munzing | April 10th, 2005

Hello to everyone on a rather rainy day in Fukuoka, Japan!

For anyone who has the time and inclination, I'd like to conduct a survey of your answers to the activity below.   FYI, I'm thinking about using this information as part of my TDA project (or should I say AWD now?).    

If you respond, I ask you to REPLY TO MY PERSONAL EMAIL ADDRESS.   PLEASE DO NOT POST YOUR ANSWER TO THE DISCUSSION LIST. Apologies if that sounds heavy handed, but the reason for doing this is simply that I don't want others to be influenced by your answer.  

Next Sunday, the 17th , I'll compile the info I've received and report the results to all who have responded.   If I end up getting thousands and thousands of emails (tee hee), I'll just report the results to the DL.

Many, many, many thanks in advance for your help!!!

Gerry Munzing

Here's the activity:    

1. Put the following sentences into what you think is the appropriate order.

Hint, © is the first sentence.

(a) So I really put forth a lot of effort to lose weight.

(b) After I reach my goal, I plan to keep exercising a lot.

(c) About two months ago, I decided to start jogging and lifting weights.

(d) I was tired of being overweight.   I weighed about 200 pounds!

(e) Now I weigh about 184 pounds, but I want to lose 20 more pounds.

Re: survey results | Gerry Munzing | April 17th, 2005

Hi everyone,

A huge "THANK YOU" to everyone who sent me an answer to the little activity which I sent out last Sunday.   I thought I'd post a quick msg to the list to let you know the results.

Out of 16 responses, 15 people answered - c, d, a, e, b and 1 person answered - c, d, a, b, e.

A little contextualization:   I work at an English Conversation school in Japan and the activity I asked people to complete came from an in-house textbook.   In this particular unit students are supposed to practice giving a short speech on "talking about self-improvement".   This activity was the first of several Example Speeches in the unit.   For this particular activity, students put the sentences in order and in class they listen to the speech on a CD to see if their order of sentences is the same as the CD's.

I actually taught this class a few weeks ago.   Here's the order that the students chose.

Two students answered:

c, d, a, b, e

And another answered:

c, d, e, a, b

I was curious if others might find the order of the text ambiguous, but it appears that most people's answers are the same as the answer in the textbook (c, d, a, e, b).   In my assignment I think I'm going to examine why these sentences flow in this particular order and compare this to the other variations which people came up with.   I also collected the speeches that the students wrote and I'd like to look at the similarities and differences between what the students wrote and the Example Speeches in the unit.  

There's another interesting point that I want to investigate further.   Two people who responded to my survey questioned the phrase "put forth a lot of effort".   Somehow I need to check this on a concordancer.   If anyone has any suggestions of how to do this, I'd love to hear from you.  

Again, I'd really like to thank everyone who took a couple of minute to get back to me.   Your comments and insights have helped me to see things that I hadn't noticed and to give me some ideas of where I might take my project.

All the very best,

Gerry Munzing
Fukuoka, Japan         

Re: Survey results | David Anderson | April 17th, 2005

You can find a list of online concordancers on my website under GLE resources here.

I used the British National Corpus (100 million word collection)  and searched for "put forth" which returned a random and limited selection of 50 hits from the corpus.  The only one where "put forth" appears near "effort" is:

GOU 545 He must be coerced, controlled, directed, offered reward or threatened with punishment to get him to put forth adequate effort towards the achievement of organisation objectives.

Note:  I tried "puts forth" but there were only three examples returned!

You might like to try out some of the other concordancers and let us know what turns up.

Best regards,

David Anderson
Abu Dhabi