This file's 3 sections:
-- EXAMPLE OF ONE STUDENT'S SUBMISSION FOR THIS HW
-- HW
-- HOW TO SEARCH FOR LINKS AT ITESLJ
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If you remember everything that you were taught in today's class about how to do Keyword Searches at <iteslj.org>, you don't need to read the longest section of this file, which is the "How to Search for Links at ITESLJ" section.
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EXAMPLE OF ONE STUDENT'S SUBMISSION FOR THIS HW
(The numbers of hits in this example submission aren't real. But the numbers that you write in your submission must be real.
For what you want to find in your search [which you describe after the words "What I want to find"], don't copy the topic [about songs' lyrics] that the imaginary student Carlo Lee Brahms described in this example submission.)
Carlo Lee Brahms
Keyword Search of <ITESLJ.ORG>
What I want to find: songs that include several English conversation-closing expressions
1st Search
What I typed: songs that include English conversation-closing expressions
Two search-criteria: all words, as a phrase
# of hits: 0
2nd Search
What I typed: songs that include English expressions that are closings of conversation
Two search-criteria: all words, as a phrase
# of hits: 1
3rd Search
What I typed: song expression closing conversation
Two search-criteria: all words, as keywords
# of hits: 4
4th Search
What I typed: song goodbye bye-bye cheerio farewell ciao
Two search-criteria: all words, as keywords
# of hits: 14
5th Search
What I typed: song goodbye bye-bye cheerio farewell ciao
Two search-criteria: any word, as keywords
# of hits: 1,901
(Almost all of those 1,901 hits are unwanted by Carlo Lee Brahms, i.e., they don't contain songs that include several English conversation-closing expressions.)
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HW
To prepare for this assignment, practice doing the kinds of Keyword Searches that are described below, under the heading "How to Search for Links at ITESLJ." To do this practice, go to the Internet TESL Journal <http://iteslj.org/links>, select one of the following 3 pairs of search-criteria under the Search box, type some words in the Search box, press the Search button, and look at the resulting list of links. Then select another one of the following 3 combinations (pairs) and do those steps. Then select the other one of the following 3 combinations and do those steps.
If your search finds fewer than three links that match your request or if it finds more than fifty of them, search again by making a change in what you typed or by changing one or both of the search-criteria that you selected. Make a change that you hope will find between three and fifty links.
ALL WORDS, AS KEYWORDS
ALL WORDS, AS A PHRASE
ANY WORD, AS KEYWORDS
The fourth combination (ANY WORD, AS A PHRASE) isn't available because it doesn't make sense.
Hand in a report of each of your searches. Your report tells what you want to find, what word(s) you typed in the Search box, which combination of the four search-criteria you selected, and how many links appeared in the resulting list. That number of hits (i.e., resulting links) is shown in your computer's window at the top of the list, at the end of the heading whose text is:
"Found:
Categories: #
Links: #"
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HOW TO SEARCH FOR LINKS AT ITESLJ
At <http://iteslj.org/links> you can quickly find every ESL webpage in the whole world--or almost every one in almost the whole world--that involves the topic that you are interested in.
There are two ways to find what you want:
1) Browsing
2) Keyword Searching
1) Become familiar with the 27 categories (Games, Grammar, Idioms, Internet, Listening, etc.) that are listed under the heading "Browse Links for Students." Spend a few weeks or months becoming familiar with the sub-categories of those 27 categories. Browsing (i.e., wandering) through links can find you pages (that fit your interest) that a keyword-search wouldn't (because your keyword search might be too specific).
2) In the SEARCH box you can type keywords that involve the topic that interests you. The computer will search ITESLJ's 13,000 ESL-related webpages for the words you typed.
The computer won't search the ENTIRE text (i.e., the whole text) of those webpages; it will search only each webpage's title and each webpage's short description. The short description is around 25 words long. So, if your keyword search finds you a webpage, the word(s) you typed will be CENTRAL to what that webpage is about. For example, if you are interested in finding a webpage that teaches how to convert Fahrenheit and Celsius temperatures to each other, your keyword search won't waste your time by finding you Nestle's Chocolate ESL Webpage, which includes the sentence "Chocolate tastes best at 92 degrees Fahrenheit" among the 5,000 words of its entire text but not among the 25 words of its description of itself.
Under the SEARCH box there are four choices; you need to choose two of them. If you don't choose the two that fit your keyword, your search will be wasted.
The four choices are:
ALL WORDS AS KEYWORDS
ANY WORD AS A PHRASE
**To see more than two of those four choices, you need to click the mouse on the visible ones.**
Selecting ALL WORDS means saying "and" (instead of saying "or") before each word you type.
Selecting ANY WORD means saying "or" (instead of saying "and") before each word you type.
You can understand that difference if you understand the difference between "We should invite Arnold Schwarzenegger or Osama bin Laden to our party" and "We should invite Arnold Schwarzenegger and Osama bin Laden to our party"
If you select ALL WORDS, the computer will find any webpage (among the 13,000 ESL-related webpages that can be found at <iteslj.org/links>) whose title or description includes EVERY word that you type. If there is a webpage whose description includes three of the four words you type (or 99 of the 100 words you type), your search won't find that page. For example, if you type PIZZA, PASTA and RECIPE, the search won't waste your time by showing you a list of links to pages (that you don't want to see) that are about the price of pizza or the history of pasta that don't include also recipes for cooking them. So, you don't need to click on each link in a long results-list (or read the descriptions of all those links) to find out which ones have recipes.
Selecting ANY WORD means saying "or" (instead of saying "and") before each word you type.
If you select ANY WORD, the computer will find every webpage (among the 13,000 ESL webpages that can be found at the Internet Teaching ESL Journal) whose title or description includes even only one of the words that you type. So, if you're worried that typing MEDICAL will lead you to only a small minority of the links you seek (because most of the webpages that are about medical problems and diseases don't include the word MEDICAL) and you're worried that typing DISEASE will lead you to only a small minority of the links you seek (because most of the webpages that are about medical problems and diseases don't include the word DISEASE) and you have the same worry about typing DOCTOR, typing HOSPITAL and typing MEDICINE, you should type all five of those words and you should select ANY WORD. If a webpage's title or short description includes even only one of those five words, that webpage will probably be about the topic that interests you. If instead you select ALL WORDS, the resulting list of links will be too short because it will not include any webpages that include only one, two, three or four of those five keywords. The search will miss most of the webpages that would interest you.
Select AS A PHRASE if you want to eliminate (i.e., exclude, i.e., skip) all the hundreds of webpages whose descriptions include your keywords but don't include them right next to each other and in the exact order in which you typed them. For example: If you want webpages that involve Christmas presents (such as webpages that send you Christmas presents for free, sell you Christmas presents, wrap your Christmas presents or recommend Christmas presents to buy for college students, parents or ice-skaters), you should type CHRISTMAS PRESENTS and select AS A PHRASE. If you select AS KEYWORDS, the list of results will include links to many pages whose descriptions say something such as "Every December 15, a band of ESL students from Asia, Europe and South America presents an unforgettable Christmas drama in Copley Square. Tickets: $45."
You can understand the difference between AS A PHRASE and AS KEYWORDS if you understand the difference between "There's a distance of 3,022 miles between the city of Davis, California and the town of Consecutive, Connecticut" and "the 20th-century musician, Miles Davis" (if what you want to find is webpages about Miles Davis).
Select AS KEYWORDS if the words you type don't need to appear (in the webpage's title or description) immediately next to each other. If you type AUDIO VIOLIN CLARINET WOMAN and select AS KEYWORDS, you will find more pages than would be found if you typed those same four keywords and selected AS A PHRASE because selecting AS A PHRASE finds only the pages that include those four words one immediately after another, in the order in which you typed them, and there is probably not even one such page in the world (because "audio violin clarinet woman" isn't a series of words that anyone would normally put together, each one immediately after another, in a sentence); but there might be some pages where a woman can listen to a violin and clarinet (or where a man can listen to a violin and clarinet that are played by a woman, or where either a man or a woman can listen to a violin and clarinet playing music that was written by a woman).
If your keywords can fit together (each one immediately after another) in some order in an English sentence, selecting AS A PHRASE might still be a mistake. For example, if you want to find a webpage that offers free advice, you shouldn't select AS A PHRASE and type FREE ADVICE because then your search would miss all the webpages whose title or description includes language such as "Our advice is free" or "Get advice here for free." Selecting AS KEYWORDS and typing FREE ADVICE would find those webpages, even though "advice" doesn't come immediately after "free" there.
The above example about Arnold Schwarzenegger vs. Osama bin Laden can cause you to misunderstand the ANY WORD choice because the meaning of "or" in the sentence "We should invite Arnold Schwarzenegger or Osama bin Laden to our party" isn't exactly the same meaning of "or" that the ANY WORD choice understands. If we invite one of those two men to the party, then we don't want to invite the other (if the man who is the first one that we invite responds to the invitation by telling us that he will come) because if both of them come, the party will be too crowded and noisy. But the ANY WORD choice understands that we should invite AT LEAST one of those men (i.e., either this one or that one OR BOTH of them: any of those three possibilities is considered a success by the ANY WORD search criterion). The "or" that is used by the ANY WORD criterion is called "the inclusive OR" and the "or" that is used by the sentence about those two men is called "the mutually exclusive OR."
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