BNCaudio corpus and TOEIC listening

Those of you who teach the TOEIC or other exams will have wanted from time to time to be able to use “authentic” audio along with its hesitations, pauses, repetitions and so on.

There’s a need to expose learners to the jungle English out in the world compared to the garden English in the classroom, terms coined by Richard Cauldwell and Sheila Thorn, see the clip above.

John Hughes makes the case for materials to use such audio and video. He points out that using corpora data for this requires context. I agree though if you want to focus on decoding and building bottom-up listening skills requiring context is not so important.

I very recently used the Lancaster interface to the BNC audio data in my TOEIC exam class.

For details on getting access to this corpus see this post.

Once you get access make sure the spoken restrictions link is clicked so that it is greyed out as shown in the following screenshot:

Then after entering the search word – contract, I selected the domain as business:

I then looked through the results for some interesting snippets. Note not all audio can be accessed. Also as it is beta there is still some alignment issues between transcripts and audio but you can adjust that and give feedback so that it can be improved.

I told the students that they will listen to snippets of audio using the word contract. I asked them to listen for other words – nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs related to the use of contract in the audio.

The following is the transcript of the first audio I used:

All members of staff have standard conditions of service as set out here, with the exception of temporary staff or staff who are er [pause] on a short time contract or maternity leave cover who may have a short term er notice er [pause] erm for erm [pause] a period of notice.

After the first listen one of the students recognised the word notice; after the second listen two students recognised temporary, conditions and staff. A third listen produced recognition of standard conditions.

I then dictated the transcript to them (without the hesitations, pauses etc) for them to write down. And then went through other relevant lexis (short time/term contract, maternity leave cover) and checked for understanding.

I repeated the procedure for two more audio snippets containing the keyword contract.

The students did of course find the audio difficult but they liked that it was real audio and made a change from the coursebook audio. I plan to use this process in the remaining classes. Next time I will probably start off with a much shorter clip and move to longer ones.

Thanks for reading.

Update:

The SpokesBNC interface allows you to display just the concordances in the BNC that have audio recordings, very useful.

The Tinkerer – a corpus informed video activity

This post is a response to Vicki Holletts’ hosted ELT blog carnival on the theme of teaching and learning using videos. I had sent in a previous video activity but seeing as that was a bit old a new one was in order. The video is most suited for engineering/technical students.

This is a video activity that is also a little corpus informed. The lead-in is words taken from COCA using its synonym function. So in this case the search term was [=tinker]. I have included my transcription so that variations/extensions can be done such as gap-fills for detailed listening, or noticing spoken grammar. The jumbled text was made from Textivate.

1. Dictate the follow words to the class (the numbers are the rank order frequency from COCA):

tamper(7), fix(2), toy(4), fiddle(6), mend(8), play(1), interfere(5), repair(3).

2. These words are synonyms of this word T_ _K_R. //write gapped word on board, Tinker// What’s the word?

3. What do you call a person who does this? //Tinkerer; check that they understand the word, room here to personalise e.g. do you like tinkering?//

4. Re-arrange the text (that goes with the picture) into the correct order:

original text from Hackaday; scrambled text from Textivate

Original text from Hackaday.

5. Watch the video. //approx 8 mins//

6. What word from the list do you think is the best synonym for JJ, the tinkerer? //you could comment on the rank order frequency of the words if most students pick play as best synonym//

7. Why do you think JJ says things are too easy now?

8. Do you agree with him? Why/why not?

Transcript:

When I was growing up, we grew, uh we grew up in the country. I didn’t have a whole lot. Uhm, my dad is very mechanical, uhm he owned a motorcycle shop when I was growing up. So a lot of what I worked on was with engines. Yeah if a go-kart breaks I would have to fix it myself. And sometimes it was held together with bailing twine and stuff just so that I could ride it, but.

It was in West Virginia [laughs] and I picked up a runt bicycle, a bicycle with little tiny wheels. Monkey bikes or whatever they’re called. Picked one up at a yard sale for about five bucks. And I put an engine on it. And I left the bike the way it was. So it was still a pretty big size. And then I thought to myself I’m gonna make it smaller. And then I cut the frame it half. And then I welded a bunch of stuff on there, a little tiny swing arm and used the wheels off a go-ped, uh the sprocket and chains off a go-ped the engine’s off a wheat eater. It’s a micro-bike I like that. That one’s lingered I, I’ve had that a longtime now and it just keeps going.

Yeah, yeah I do a lot of just research on the internet, or uh random stuff. I’ll get on tangents on scientific topics or, or on something engine related or on some sort of hacking thing. I’ll just absorb knowledge I suppose. I normally, I’ll have some sort of inspiration or see a video or something that, I’m like I gotta do that. Or I’ll do something similar or  beat it or something like that. In fact I gotta an idea. You got, you got a rolly chair and there’s a leaf blower right there. Do we want to interrupt this interview, and? [laughs] See if it works. Nope. Oh well. [laughs] It was stupid. But now we know.

And sometimes I feel like tinkering with engines and sometimes it’s that and I keep focus all my attention on that. And sometimes it’s something electronic. And sometimes it’s sumthin else. It’s just that, it varies. Right now it’s the Tesla coil ’cause I’ve been working on it a while all week. That’s, that’s my top priority. That’s what I’ve been researching. I dunno I saw a Tesla coil video, I think, on the internet when I was a teenager. And I just thought I gotta build one of those. I got my son now, and slowed, slowed down my projects. But that’s okay. He is a project, he’s a good project. I’m forming him, in, into what I want [laughs]. Did he do it? Yeah he did.

I, I’ve always had a knack for finding really good deals and stuff, like I’m good at negotiations, I’m good at spotting things that are worth money at thrift stores. It started at thrift stores. Uhm, go there and I would just see stuff that other people wouldn’t recognize. And I clean them up makes sure they work. Go through it, just resell it on Ebay.

You heard that? They shake their body. And hiss like that to sound like a rattlesnake. But you see there’s no rattle. I’ve always, I, I’ve always been a really really curious person. Hafta explore things if I see sumthin I sometimes have to just pull over and hafta look. I’d be the guy you want in a zombie apocalypse that’s for sure. [laughs] Cause I’m very uh, I’m very resourceful. I can pretty much make anything happen with whatever I’ve got on hand.

It’s too easy now. Like back in the day when you wanted a radio. Like you wanted a transmitter or something, you build it. People don’t build them now, you just go out ‘an buy it. You don’t hafta learn how it works, you just use it. Same with computers, back in the eighties and stuff you hadta know how the computer worked before you could just use one. So, stuff’s too easy nowadays.

Thanks to the ELT blog carnival for the inspiration.

No time for corpora? No worries!

For the majority of the ELT world coursebooks and syllabi dominate, consequently teachers have little time for anything unrelated to what they teach from a book and from their set syllabus. This is arguably one of the reasons for the low take up of corpus based teaching.

Frankenberg-Garcia (2012) helpfully outlines several ways teachers can easily integrate corpus information into the classroom without having to outlay much time investment (she does though assume that the teacher knows about corpora, can access them easily and knows the principles of corpus queries, Frankenberg-Garcia, 2012, p.35).

She divides approaches based on production vs reception activities and whole-class vs individual activities.

I have written about reception (e.g. Just the word and TOEIC), whole-class (e.g. general English lexis and DIY corpus) and individual activities (e.g. GloWbE and will suit you; do also see a recent post by Chia Suan Chong/@chiasuan on encouraging learner autonomy via corpora), what caught my attention was the description of the use of corpora in production activities.

Note: I was initially alerted to the Frankenberg-Garcia paper by Wilson (2013), another recommended read for corpora based teaching.

Frankenberg-Garcia gives the example of using collocations of the word beach as a warm-up to speaking or writing about beach holidays.

Looking at Unit 1 Careers in the Cambridge Target Score book (Talcott & Tullis, 2007), Wordandphrase.info gives us the following for career: (click on image for larger resolution)

From the collocates (circled in red above) we can compile say the following list:

• professional career, successful career
• career choice, career path
• begin career, build career

and ask students to use the list to speak say about their current career path, if they know what professional career they want to follow, if so do they know how to build their career and so on. You could give fast finishers the list of synonyms:

• business
• profession
• occupation
• livelihood
• calling
• vocation

and ask them how they would use these when talking about careers.

More interestingly she describes using concordances for the bus that are given to students before they write about something happening on a bus. As the screenshot shows she also highlighted some potentially useful phrases with the bus: (Frankenberg-Garcia, 2012, p.40)

Adapting this for the TOEIC we can use the keyword contract negotiation(s) as appears in Unit 1 Exercise 1 page 9. An extension to this exercise would ask students to write a short news report of the contract negotiation using the picture from the exercise as a prompt:

(Talcott & Tullis, 2007, p.9)

COCA tells us contract negotiation(s) is most frequent in the news register which can guide us in selecting what examples to use. Wordandphrase.info gives concordances to use to help students before the writing task (note some sentences are adapted and not exact example given by Wordandphrase.info):

1. They were participating  as  mediators  in  contract negotiations and monitoring  growers’ compliance with labor contracts.
2. This is specifically  for  contract negotiations and  recruitment.
3. More than  two  weeks  of  contract negotiations between Air Canada and its pilots broke off this Friday.
4. The  contract negotiations had   been   confidential.
5. Trouble has arisen  over  his  fierce  contract negotiations with the management.
6. They averted a strike and completed the union’s  contract negotiations with the three major North American car makers.
7. The strike began last October after 10  months  of  stalled  contract negotiations.
8. During  contract negotiations a few years later, resentment ran high .
9. Randy  Mueller  handled  contract negotiations and   made   all   personnel  decisions.
10. They attempted to force a new round of contract negotiations.

Students can be asked to highlight words related to contract negotiations e.g. mediators in example 1 above. They can then proceed to the writing exercise.

It is worth looking up Frankenberg-Garcia in full as she makes a great case for teachers to integrate corpora into the classroom. Thanks for reading.

References:

Frankenberg-Garcia, A. (2012). Integrating corpora with everyday language teaching. In: Thomas, J. and Boulton, A. (Eds.) Input, Process and Product: developments in teaching and language corpora. Brno: Masaryk University Press. 33-50. Retrieved from http://www.academia.edu/3368339/Integrating_corpora_with_everyday_language_teaching

Talcott, C. & Tullis, G. (2007). Target Score: A communicative course for TOEIC Test preparation. (2nd ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Wilson, J. (2013). Technology, pedagogy and promotion: How can we make the most of corpora and Data-Driven Learning (DDL) in language learning and teaching? Higher Education Academy research report (July 2013). Retrieved from https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/sites/default/files/Corpus_Technology_pedagogy_promotion2.pdf

Affixes, IntelliText and corpus use literacy

If you follow social media education talk, you will have heard a lot about digital literacies, or 21st century skills. It is an open question as to how most of such literacies are relevant to language learners. However language teachers will recognize that being able to use a dictionary is a key skill, and I would argue that being able to use a corpus is another crucial skill.

This post looks at using the IntelliText corpora interface to extend an exercise from a TOEIC coursebook on prefixes and suffixes.

On page 22 of the Cambridge Target Score coursebook (Talcott & Tullis, 2007) there is an exercise on using prefixes and suffixes to construct a word family diagram of the root word form. Question A asks students to add a list of prefixes and suffixes to the root word grouped by part of speech, see figure below:

(Talcott & Tullis, 2007, p.22)

The last question D asks students to choose one of 6 listed words (draw, present, quest, sign, move, employ) and to use a dictionary to make a word family diagram. This is a major task as dictionaries do not list prefixes and suffixes in an easily accessed way.

The Macmillan Online dictionary is useful though to see which of the words presented are frequent, so all the words here except for quest are three star words meaning they are in the 2500 most common words. Quest is a one star word meaning that it appears in the 7500 most common words.

The IntelliText interface has a dedicated feature to look up affixes. To get to this page as shown below follow Home Page > Search the Standard Corpora > Choose Language > English > Choose Corpora > BNC > Choose Type of Search > Affixes :

(click on image to see full resolution)

The base word draw has been entered and the [with Prefixes] tick box checked, the results are shown in the next screenshot:

(click on image to see full resolution)

Students can do similar searches for suffixes, and both prefixes and suffixes. This feature is certainly much quicker than using just a dictionary to build a word family diagram. Also there is an option to search using part of speech which is handy.

There are many other features in IntelliText e.g. annotation of concordances with CEFR classification that make this interface worth exposing to students and which I may write about later. Do note that certain searches using IntelliText take some time compared to speed of say COCA (Corpus of Contemporary American English).

If you teach the TOEIC you may be interested in using Just the Word and an exercise from the Cambridge Target Score book; and using Wordandphrase.info with production activities.

Thanks for reading.

References:

Talcott, C. & Tullis, G. (2007). Target Score: A communicative course for TOEIC Test preparation. (2nd ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Just the Word – alternatives function or how to introduce concordances to your students.

This post may encourage those who have yet to try out concordances in class. Additionally if you teach the TOEIC using Cambridge Target Score book (Talcott & Tullis, 2007) you may find this post of interest. It takes advantage of the alternatives function in Just the Word which replaces each word entered with a similar word and shows their connection strength.

In the last unit 12 of the Cambridge Target Score book, on page 118 there is a collocations exercise focusing on adjective + noun and adverb + adjective patterns. A way to extend this exercise is to use the Just the word alternatives function.

This works best with the adjective + noun patterns. The first such pattern given in the book is valuable lessons.

Entering valuable lessons then pressing  the alternatives button we get this screen:

There are three options when replacing the adjective in valuable lessons:
valuable lesson (36)
important lesson (61)
salutary lesson (23)

Ask students to rank order the above in terms of their frequency.

The blue bars under each alternative shows how similar the replacement word is to the original.

An extract of the text in the exercise which illustrates the use of this collocation is shown below:

…as he gives valuable lessons in living and a fresh, first-hand view of American society…

(Talcott & Tullis, 2007, p.118)

Ask students what do they notice about this use, elicit the verb give, the preposition in. Note, when working with the text from the exercise for the first time, I usually try to get them to see any interesting chunks so in this case give lesson in; give first-hand view of.

Give students the concordance lines of valuable lessons (click on valuable lessons which is hyperlinked to the concordance lines) and ask them to note down any patterns, elicit the most common verb learn and the article a:

You can do something similar with the other patterns given in the book exercise or give it as a task for students to do for the following class.

Thanks for reading.

References:

Talcott, C. & Tullis, G. (2007). Target Score: A communicative course for TOEIC Test preparation. (2nd ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Dictionnaire Cobra – A striking corpus based tool

My twitter feed was particularly fecund recently when a nourishing morsel of a tweet by Antoine Besnehard/‏@Languages2_0 alerted me to the Dictionnaire Cobra. A corpus based dictionary for English/Dutch to French. I am not yet sure what parallel/comparative corpora it is based on but it has great potential.

This post reports on an initial trial with my TOEIC class and a lesson idea based on a reverse translation.

I trialled it with my TOEIC students as only 5 showed up, the others a no-show possibly because of the torrential downpour in Paris tonight. I divided the students into 2 groups and assigned them one word each to explain to the other group – bid, assembly line. I told them that after they spend a few minutes thinking of an explanation they should use the computer to look up the word in the Dictionnaire Cobra and make notes on what they find.

After the 2 groups presented their words, I asked them about their use of the online dictionary. Both groups seemed to find it very useful.

The lesson idea is based on a variation of a reverse translation as described by Phillip Kerr.

Use the Cobra dictionary to collect samples sentences of the words you are interested in. Use these examples in a gap fill exercise. So using the example of the word bid:

1. Higher bids are likely.
2. Canadians are having to guess when the call will go out for bids to replace our search and rescue helicopters.
3. Late bidding is a strategic response to the presence of bidders placing multiple bids.
4. young unemployed are encouraged to bid for work in other countries.
5. Because his contract was up, he had to bid on a new contract.

Next list the French translations as a handout for the students:

1. Des offres plus hautes sont probables.
2. Les Canadiens se perdent en conjectures sur la date à laquelle un appel d’offres sera lancé pour le remplacement de nos hélicoptères de recherche et de sauvetage.
3. La surenchère tardive est une réponse stratégique à la présence d’enchérisseurs soumettant des offres multiples.
4. les jeunes chômeurs sont encouragés à faire une offre pour du travail dans d’autres pays.
5. Lorsque son contrat a expiré, M. Cormier a dû soumissionner pour un nouveau contrat.

After the gap fill, and after telling students to put away their notes on the gap fill, tell them that you will now dictate the sentences. Their job is to match the translated French sentences to the English sentences that they hear. They can compare their matches with a partner.

After the matching they then have to translate the French sentences into English, they can work in pairs to do this.

Finally they check their translated sentences with the original English sentences.

As an extension one could highlight the different forms of bid in sentence 3 – bidding, bidders and its French equivalents.

Variations of this could include using a set of different words in the initial gap-fill exercise rather than the same word.

Thanks for reading.

More than a Thimbleful of learning

The Mozilla Thimble project is an innovative web application with a split screen interface to help people learn HTML and CSS. Of the many Thimble projects available the 6 Word Memoir caught my attention (HT Chad Sansing/@chadsansing). This post describes how I used this in class with some first year multi-media students. The task ticked the three boxes of reading skills, web design skills/lexis and a bit of imagination.

First I projected the title – 6 Word Memoir and the questions:

What is going on in YOUR life right now?
What has happened in your life that you’d like to express?
What is your hope or aspiration?
How do you see life?

I told the class that they will see a video of some teenagers who had answered the above questions in 6 words, and asked them note down any ones they liked (play video up to 2:05):

After time for reactions to video, I showed them a gapped text from the Mozilla Thimble 6 Word Memoir Task, a paragraph is shown below (click six word gap fill to get full file, odt format):

/*The following _______ make the background look like argyle. There is no image, it’s all CSS! Check out http://lea.verou.me/css3patterns/ for many more CSS patterns.*/

/*The container class makes the box blue and rounds the corners. Try giving it a different color by ______ the background-color property*/

/*This style _____ the text in the class “sponsor”, which appears outside of the blue box*/

/*_____ styling for links is blue and underlined. This style changes the blue to the National Writing Project’s purple*/

/*Below are the example styles for making beautiful CSS text. Play around with the styles and change your “madlib” _____ to have different ______. If you search the web for “cool CSS text effects” you’ll find lots more examples of great text effects!*/

spans/properties/classes/controls/changing/default

After students finish the gapfill I sent them to the Mozilla Thimble 6 Word Memoir site and instructed them to complete their own memoir.

For some in the class the video was too fast so you may need to replay it depending on class level. They enjoyed the class though some felt a bit puzzled at just having to write just 6 words. Next time I would focus on getting them to really think about their words, I was too eager to get them onto the Thimble task.

Six examples of 6 word memoirs:

https://thimble.webmaker.org/p/lf69/
https://thimble.webmaker.org/p/fibk/
https://thimble.webmaker.org/p/fi8g/
https://thimble.webmaker.org/p/lf6y/
https://thimble.webmaker.org/p/lf6e/
https://thimble.webmaker.org/p/lf6c/

Thanks for reading, do check out a related post using Mozilla Popcorn Maker and do let me know if you have used any of the Mozilla web projects in class.

Update:

Kevin Stein/‏@kevchanwow has a great post on using 6 word memoir with a nice idea to grammaticalise the 6 words, will try that when I next do this lesson.

Isn’t just knowing English enough? – raising awareness of cultural English

In the first class of Intercultural Communication Skills, one of my French students asked me “Isn’t just knowing English enough?”. A great question, how can I raise awareness of the importance of culture on language use? Luckily a recent talk by David Crystal (need to register to view video) gave me some useful material to try to do just this.

Note the following is a lesson idea I have not yet used but hope to do so next class.

First* tell students in small groups: Read the following sentences, can you understand them?

1. It’s just not cricket, treating her like that.
2.The job isn’t all beer and skittles, you know.
3. [after a very bad joke] You’re not a writer for Xmas crackers, by any chance?
4. [after leaving a hotel] That made Fawlty Towers seem like paradise.
5. [after someone has complained about something] Oh, come on, disgusted of Tunbridge Wells!
6. His book refreshed the parts other books couldn’t reach.
7. It was like Clapham Junction in Oxford Street today.
8. His watch was more Petticoat lane than Bond Street.**
9. To drive or not to drive-that’s the question.

(Crystal, 2012; **Crystal, 2011)

Depending on student reactions one can spend as much or as little time as you want in going through the sentences.

Next show them the cartoon below, saying: The following is a conversation between a famous English language expert and their colleague from the Czech Republic. What has caused the breakdown in communication?

– adapted from Crystal (2011).

The explanation is that houses in that part of the Czech Republic are numbered differently than houses in the UK. They are numbered when they are built and registered. That is why the Czech person is surprised at the coincidence.

Be sure to check a related post on international communication.

* An alternative start could be to use the figures quoted by Crystal in his talk – 2000 million English speakers, 400 million of whom are ‘native’ speakers. That is every 4 out of 5 speakers of English will be ‘non-native’. That significant number is another point of awareness to raise regarding intercultural communication.

References:

Crystal, D. (2011). The future of Englishes: going local, in Roberta Facchinetti, David Crystal and Barbara Seidlhofer (eds), From International to Local English – And Back Again (Bern: Lang), 17-25

Crystal, D. (2012). Plurilingualism, pluridialectism, pluriformity, plenary paper for the annual conference of TESOL Spain, Bilbao, 10 March 2012

Update:

Chia Suan Chong ‏@chiasuan has a fab post with a great example of the service industry’s custom of not saying no, do check it out. Looking forward to part 2.

Mike Griffin ‏@michaelegriffin has some very intriguing examples of Korean use of English.

The Pirate Bay AFK – web related lexis

The documentary The Pirate Bay Away from Keyboard was released recently. I used some of the text from the English subtitles in a gapped sentences exercise (most of the film is in Swedish):

1: Half of all BitTorrent tr_____ is coordinated by the Pirate Bay. It’s extreme amounts of tr_____.

2: There are 22-25 million us____ at this very moment.

3: A user is defined as one ongoing up_____ or download.

4: This is the web s____. Data base and search fu____n.

5: The _______ are over there. This little piece is the ______. It’s the world’s biggest ______.

6: Not so many computers,but powerful and well-con_____.

7: How the hell can prosecutor Roswall mix up mega___ and megabyte?

8: Generally speaking, for st_____ you use byte and when you measure speed you use bit.

9: I had a spare l___ which I let him use for the site. It was from British Telecom.

10: So the US government ordered us to re_____ the site. We fought them for a long time before we re_____ed it.

11: After a while we cl____ it d____, when it became too much of a fuss.

12: Two months later Gottfrid needed more ba_____ for the Pirate Bay. I still had that line available.

Unsurprisingly sentence 5 caused the most difficulty, sentence 9 was also tricky. I then showed the film up to the 19 minute 29 seconds mark.

I asked the class to watch the rest of the film and think about two things – Was it a good documentary? and What issues were raised in the film? They should be prepared to discuss this for the next class.

You may be wondering why I chose to use a film that was mainly spoken in Swedish? The average listening comprehension level of my multi-media classes is at A2/B1 and from previous experience asking them to listen to a 1h 22m film in English would be asking too much. The translated titles are simple enough for them to read.

I intend to work with the gapped sentences again in the next class, possibly in the form of a dictogloss.

Key to gapped sentences:

1: traffic

2: users

3: upload

4: server; function

5: tracker

6: configured

7: megabit

8: storage

9: link

10: remove

11: close down

12: bandwidth

Hope you found this activity useful.

CPU Wars – Numbers and CPU lexis practice

The #EAPchat gaming blog challenge is an opportune time to write about CPU Wars, a Top Trumps modelled card game that I use with first year engineering students to practice numbers and CPU related vocabulary.

In the deck, there are 30 cards of desktop CPUs from the last 40 years. I use a blown up A3 photocopy of one of the cards to show the class. I point out the various characteristics and clarify any questions. A common question is about the unit for the max bus speed, GT/s, which stands for giga transfers per second. Although I have yet to do this a possible extension is to get them to read up on this and explain it to the class.

Click to enlarge

As there are 30 cards in a pack, you need to make groups into a number that divides into 30. My typical engineering class is 12 so I usually make 3 groups of 4 students or 6 groups of 2 students depending on how much time I want to devote to the game, i.e. 6 groups for longer game play sessions.

I deviate from the usual rules by allowing each group to nominate their category in turn rather than the winner of the previous round. I also make sure that each person in the group has a go at saying a category and its value.

Click to enlarge

The game is great to practice pronuncuation of numbers and CPU related vocabulary. One could also use the short descriptions under each CPU photo, for example, in a scan reading/multiple matching type task though I have yet to do this. In addition one could make use of this document explaining the various categories.

There are plans for a deck based on mobile phone cpus, exciting stuff!

Hope you pick up a pack after reading this post.