OED ( Oxford English Dictionary) Text Visualizer (Beta)

As a member of the OED (Oxford English Dictionary)Researchers Advisory Group,  I have the honor to submit my contribution to the project of the OED (Oxford English Dictionary) Text Visualizer.

The OED Text Visualizer processes the annotated text output of the OED Text Annotator and shows the etymologies and first usages, two core components of the OED’s data, in a visual format to reveal how annotation paired with visualization can be a key to new domains of questioning and ways of innovation.

Here is an article that I have written for the British Council in June 2019. That article has been used as content to feed the OED (Oxford English Dictionary) Text Visualizer with the purpose of inputting linguistic components.

The Factors Leading to Unfair Academic Assessment

 

Academic assessment in any educational institution at any educational stage should yield to accurate and fair assessment. But the cultural background of students has always been a core factor that could perplex teachers when they accurately and fairly assess the students’ performance, especially in the linguistic domain. This means that teachers are to be aware of encompassing all the thorny issues that could impede the accurate assessment assisting students in making academic progression.

 

 

My academic and professional experiences with the Chinese students have incited me to plunge into the Chinese culture to facilitate addressing their mentalities. So, that would eventually lead to accurate assessment of their performance by the end of the courses. Out of the cultural components that formulate the success of the process of learning, other factors emerge to contribute to the credibility of the assessment. First, the case of “social embarrassment” that the Chinese students suffer from definitely hinders any efforts exerted by teachers to know how students are academically progressing. The problem of committing any errors in classes does not indicate to teachers the volume of knowledge that has been fully assimilated by the students. Any advice on behalf of teachers to instigate the Chinese students to participate in in-class activities regardless of the erroneous outcomes is in vain. Second, the gap between teachers and the Chinese students plays a negative role in finding a concrete bridge where both parties ensure the process of teaching and learning are successful. Teachers in the Chinese classes are usually the “kings” where the students are the recipient of knowledge without sharing any comments or feedback on their. Therefore, teachers could not clearly perceive the comprehensibility of the knowledge that should be grasped at by the students. So, any tests to assess the success of the learned content are not genuine.

 

 

Moreover, the administration of the educational institutions curbs teachers from juicing a final crystallized assessments about the students’ performance when quotas of success and failure are imposed upon the academic results by the end of courses. Undoubtedly, some students, according to this system, would be victimized, since these results would not demonstrate a gauge for students to treat their academic weaknesses and enhance their strengths.

 

 

Academic assessment should conform to transparency and credibility, so that the acquisition of knowledge is processed properly. The administration procedures at educational institutions should strongly get interconnected to the academic procession with the purpose of gaining grounds of academic ranks or promoting commercial purposes. For the sake of adjusting the assessment to meet the needs of students, I have to set individual meetings with the students seeking academic advice to discuss any problems they envisage. Online communication via using WeChat, Skype, Facebook, etc… is an ideal solution when the students and I cannot fix appointments during the week. This kind of communication helps students pinpoint all their problems, and at the same time, they realize that their final assessment is not the genuine indicator demonstrating their scaffold of  academic progression.Teachers should always communicate with students in classes to break the ice, so assessments destined to students could reflect the students graphical successes and pits.

Here is an image of the chart of the historical linguistic input of the vocabulary used in the above-mentioned article:

Each bubble represents a word (OED lemma) found in the text. Mouse over a bubble for more information about the word, or click to open the dictionary entry in oed.com (subscription required). The size of each bubble indicates how often the word occurs in the text. The color of the bubble indicates the ‘Language of immediate origin’ (see key), which is the language from which the word has been either directly inherited or borrowed or within which it has been formed*, and the ‘Language of ulterior origin’, which is the language from which the word is more remotely derived. The bubble may contain up to two colors, representing two languages. The position of a bubble on the x-axis marks the first recorded use (based on the first quotation listed in the OED). Position on the y-axis shows the word's frequency in modern English, on a logarithmic scale.

*this will be Germanic for inherited words, a variety of foreign languages for borrowings, and English for all internal formations (e.g. compounds, derivatives, shortenings, etc.) including those formed during the Old English period

**Words from the Old English period (pre-1150 - the shaded area on the chart) cannot be accurately dated in the same way as words from later periods. For Old English words, relative positions on the x-axis are largely arbitrary, and should not be taken to indicate any actual order of first use.

To access the details of the full results, click on the following link:

file:///C:/Users/Tamer%20Osman/Downloads/OED%20Text%20Visualizer%20(beta).html