"Horizon your broadens" - Where narrow exam prep goes wrong

"...horizon your broadens..."

While scoring essays for an English exam, I came across the above phrase, and I couldn't help but chuckle. To be clear, I generally do not find it appropriate to laugh at the efforts of L2 speakers, especially those made in the midst of a high-stakes exam, but this attempt at broaden your horizons, with its nearly-Spoonerism form, caught me off-guard. After regrouping and scoring the essay after a careful read, and then scoring a couple dozen more essays, this multiword unit lexical error stuck with me. In part, I think, because I see broaden your horizons so often in writing on English exams.

Why does broaden your horizons show up so much? What was going through the mind of the horizon your broadens author? What experiences and practices led him to this unfortunately and unintentionally humorous, infelicitous production?

There's actually a lot to unpack and reflect on here! 

To answer the first question: I would bet quite a bit of money that broaden your horizons comes up quite frequently in exam prep materials and courses. Although it might sound cliche to many, it is nonetheless idiomatic (indicating potentially sophisticated lexical knowledge and control) and kind of has a broad functional usefulness, at least when it comes to largely opinion-based writing- you can shoehorn broaden your horizons into a list of advantages for whatever you might be arguing for across many topics (Should people travel? Should people participate in local government? Should students pick their own majors? Should teens work part time jobs? What is the value of learning languages? etc. - you can work it in almost anywhere).

There's a lot of exam prep out there that focuses on essay templates, including sets of generally useful transitions (e.g., on the other hand), and broadly useful and sophisticated-sounding vocabulary that can be used in a wide variety of contexts (e.g., broaden your horizons). While learning these things isn't necessarily a waste of time in the bigger picture (good writers can use common rhetorical patterns and idiomatic vocabulary well in many different situations), a narrow and exclusive focus on just the language needed to squeak past an essay exam cutscore on a good day is what both language testers and teachers should hope to avoid.

Answering the second and third questions is harder. Maybe the writer had been cramming vocabulary in preparation for their big exam and simply gotten the form of this chunk mixed up? I know from personal experience it can be very easy to get things flipped around in L2 vocabulary. I'd imagine that the time pressure and stress of the exam may have made it harder for the writer to catch their mistake. They could have received very poor instruction or little useful feedback on practice essays, where I am sure that they would have attempted this phrase at least once before.

Washback is hard to get right. I know the testers behind this exam put in efforts to promote broad test prep - working on developing broadly useful and robust language skills - over narrow prep. But so much that leads into the exam room and what happens after is beyond the influence, much less control, of testers.

Research Tools: Automatic Interview Transcription

Hi all, I'm writing this post to share some resources for automatic transcription - very handy for interview data (but probably not conversation analysis). I think this is a topic that has come up in the past, but some of the tools I found recently were new (to me), so I thought to share.

Context: I've done about 30 hours of interviews; interviews were done in either English (My L1, interviewee L2+) or Korean (my L2, interviewee L2). Transcribing the English interviews by hand wasn't terribly slow, but it was tedious. Transcribing the Korean interviews was rough (okay, brutal) - my proficiency and typing speed slowed me down a lot. So I got to searching for additional help.

Where things stand with speech-to-text, you can't expect perfect transcriptions, but you can get fairly decent accuracy when speaker proficiency is high and not strongly accented. These can form a basis for manual clean-up, which is proving to be a lot quicker for me than starting from scratch. Here are a few of the tools I tried:

temi.com - This site only does English, but the accuracy seems quite good (even for non-native speakers). Lots of bells and whistles- there is a very nice interactive transcription editor. The rates are quite cheap, too: 10 cents per minute.

happyscribe.co - This site handles many different languages and has a lot of bells and whistles - automatic punctuation, automatically splitting speaker turns, highlighting parts of transcriptions that the system was less sure of, and really nice integrated playback (you can click a part of the transcript and the audio plays from there). I found the speaker segmentation to be a little off, and the transcription accuracy for this one seems a bit low for Korean (could just be the speakers I fed it). Hourly rates are between 9 and 12 Euro per hour (depending on whether you have a monthly membership).

vocalmatic.com - Handles a fairly wide range of languages, and I found it was decently accurate for Korean. This is pretty no-frills compared to the other options- no automated speaker separation, no punctuation, limited editing tools - but it turns out transcripts with helpful timestamps. I was able to get a lot of mileage out of their free trial (they say you get 30 minutes free, but....). Otherwise, rates are similar to happyscribe.

Other tools to look into are Trint, Transcribe (wreally.transcribe.com). I was focused on tools that offered Korean transcription, but European languages are more common across other platforms.