albarillo cuny conference on best practices
DESCRIPTION
Academic librarians have a long tradition of working with non-native speakers of English in the library. This presentation will explore recent developments in search technology that benefit non-native speakers of English, focusing on library database resources available at CUNY.TRANSCRIPT
Helping ESL Students in the Library: A Look at Language Features in Library Databases
Frans AlbarilloLibrarian for Business and SociologyBrooklyn College
Background
Applied Linguistics & ESL, French, LinguisticsBusiness students in Hawaii Immigrant (Heritage speaker of Tagalog, French 3rd language)Language technologies in education
Not computational linguist
Library Vocabulary
Vendors: EBSCO, ProQuest, Gale, JSTOR, Elsevier These are companies that sell libraries digital content like journals, e-books, audio, and images
Outline
CUNY Library Databaseshttp://www.cuny.edu/libraries.html
Google Translate(brief) http://translate.google.com/
i2Type(brief) http://www.sciweavers.org/i2type
• language personalization• subject terms (thesaurus)• machine translation• machine reading
You can find at least one, but usually two of these features in most databases:
EBSCO
Supports 30 Languages
French Example EBSCO
Non-English contentSearch in EnglishThen filter by languageArticles with non-roman scripts are difficult to find
Scope notes help with search vocabulary
Gale
French Example Gale (supports 34 languages)
No scope notes or definition, clicking on the subject term takes you to articles
Gale item record
Newer Gale Platform
Not all databases have the same features, and features are always being added, so look around
ProQuest
French Interface
Suggest using Google Translatehttp://translate.google.com/
Suggest using i2Typehttp://www.sciweavers.org/i2type
Non-English Journals and Magazines
Data from Ulrichs Web August 2012
Summary
• Look for language/features options, ask your librarian• Machine translation is not perfect, but will help the
student do better searches and understand their results• Machine reading builds listening and speaking skills• Google Translate and i2Type are good tools to use when
there is no machine translation or subject term lookup• Internet searches in their first language to build
concept comprehension (Wikipedia in their language)• More non-English scholarly material will be available
Thank you [email protected]
CUNY Library Databaseshttp://www.cuny.edu/libraries.html
Google Translatehttp://translate.google.com/
i2Typehttp://www.sciweavers.org/i2type