Hilary Nesi

Patterns of misinterpretation in the productive use

Abstract This paper describes some of the errors produced by non-native speakers of English when they are asked to use dictionaries to help them write sentences containing unfamiliar words. The data have a close resemblance to similar data collected from L1 speakers by Miller and Gildea [ Scientific American September, 86–91 (1987)], and strongly suggest that many adult language learners systematically misinterpret dictionary entries.

Issues in the development of the British Academic Written English (BAWE) corpus

The British Academic Written English (BAWE) corpus is a collection of texts produced by undergraduate and Masters students in a wide range of disciplines, for assessment as part of taught degree programmes undertaken in the UK. The majority of the contributors to the corpus are mother tongue speakers of English, but, in order to be included in the corpus, each assignment had to be judged proficient by assessors in the contributors discipline, regardless of the writers mother tongue. The corpus contains, therefore, only texts that have met departmental requirements for the given level of study. University writing programmes are typically aimed at undergraduate and Masters students, and it would be useful for writing tutors to know more about student assignment genres and the linguistic features of successful writing at undergraduate and Masters level. However, most large-scale descriptive studies of academic writing focus on published or publicly accessible texts, or learner essays on general academic...

Teaching vocabulary in two Chinese classrooms: schoolchildren’s exposure to English words in Hong Kong and Guangzhou:

In this paper the lexical environment of secondary school English language classrooms in Hong Kong and Guangzhou are compared. Teacher output for one week of first-form lessons was recorded in two representative schools. Lexical richness in terms of type-token ratio and word-type frequency was measured, the words that were explicitly taught were identified and categorized according to whether the teaching was planned or unplanned, and the teaching treatments accorded to these words were examined. The lexical richness of teacher output was found to be greater in the Hong Kong classroom than in the Guangzhou classroom. In the Guangzhou classroom more words were explicitly taught, but learners were exposed to far fewer word types for incidental acquisition. In both classrooms, more unplanned than planned words were explicitly taught. Teachers tended to teach planned words through multiple treatments, with various kinds of input, both modified and unmodified, in different stages of the lesson. They provided almost no opportunities, however, for modified (negotiated) output on the part of the learners, despite the fact that the syllabuses in both Hong Kong and Guangzhou are described as ‘communicative’.

Computer-Mediated Communication in English for Specific Purposes: A Case Study with Computer Science Students at Universiti Teknologi Malaysia

This paper will describe an ESP approach to the design and implementation of computer-mediated communication (CMC) tasks for computer science students at Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, and discuss the effectiveness of the chat feature of Windows NetMeeting as a tool for developing specified language skills. CMC tasks were set within a programme of sustained-content language instruction (SCLI), a variation on the content-based instruction approach. Various studies have confirmed the potential of SCLI as a means of familiarising language learners with academic genres and the language skills expected of them in the content classroom. To date, however, there has been little or no research into the use of CMC within SCLI. We found that students who followed a programme of SCLI using CMC ESP tasks made significant improvements in their oral communication skills, and also achieved higher scores than their peers in a computer science project undertaken in the semester following the treatment.

The British Academic Spoken English (BASE) Corpus Project

Paul Thompson p.a.thompson@reading.ac.ukSLALS, Language Resource Centre, PO Box 241, TheUniversity of Reading, Reading RG6 6WBHilary Nesih.nesi@warwick.ac.ukCELTE, University of Warwick, Coventry CV4 7ALRunning time of project: Spring 1999–December 2003The primary aim of the project is to create a freely accessibleresource for research into spoken academic discourse. The EnglishLanguage Institute, Michigan University, has established an on-linecorpus (MICASE) representative of academic speech events in aNorth American university, and the present project (BASE) willconstitute a British counterpart to the Michigan corpus. A varietyof university speech events (lectures and seminars, in a range ofdisciplines, at both undergraduate and postgraduate level) arebeing recorded at two UK universities, then transcribed andencoded to form a searchable corpus. As of spring 2001, we haveover 130 lecture recordings, of which about 70 have beentranscribed. We also have about 20 video-recorded seminars, sevenof which have been transcribed.The corpus should provide a major resource for research intothe linguistic and rhetorical features of spoken academic discourse.One line of research that we will follow is an exploration of thelexis of academic lectures across the disciplines and we intend tocompile a Spoken Academic Word List to complement theAcademic Wordlist of Coxhead (1998), which was based on acorpus of written academic discourse.

Dictionary use by English language learners

Research into dictionary use does not have a long history. Although publishers recognised in the 1960s that ‘dictionaries should be designed with a special set of users in mind’ (Householder 1967: 279) there were extremely few empirical user studies before the 1980s – Welkers most recent survey (2010) lists only six. The subsequent surge of interest in this field was fuelled by big changes to dictionary content and design in the 1980s and 1990s, changes that were particularly evident in dictionaries for learners of English as a foreign language, conventionally known as ‘learners’ dictionaries’. In the space of a few years the Oxford advanced learners dictionary , generally considered to be the earliest advanced learners’ dictionary (first published under a different title in 1942, with subsequent editions in 1948, 1963, 1974 and 1989) was joined by two new competitors: the Longman dictionary of contemporary English (first edition 1978, second edition 1987) and the COBUILD English dictionary (1987). In 1995 all three of these advanced learners’ dictionaries brought out new editions, and a fourth, the Cambridge international dictionary of English , was launched. These dictionaries, sometimes referred to as ‘the big four’ (Bogaards 1996, De Schryver 2012 and others), drew on Eastern European traditions of lexical description, the illustrative practices of American childrens dictionaries, and insights from English language teaching pedagogies. Each had its own distinctive layout and defining style, prompting a spate of comparative studies intended to help users make appropriate purchasing choices, and to help publishers improve their design still further, for example by changes to the entry microstructure. A fifth such dictionary, the Macmillan English dictionary for advanced learners, appeared in 2002.

The Corpora of China English: Implications for an EFL Dictionary for Chinese Learners of English

The localization of the English language in China has brought about a distinctive English variety which has come to be known as China English. Recently, several corpora of China English have been or are being built; these will help us to identify the established linguistic features of this variety, and should greatly facilitate the compilation of an English dictionary for Chinese learners of English who operate in Chinese cultural contexts and need to refer to China-specific concepts and phenomena. This paper briefly introduces China English corpora in terms of their principles, components and current status, and explores their potential application to lexicographical projects in terms of lemma selection and inclusion, definition extraction, and glossing and labeling systems.

Commentary on Part II: Exploring Materials for the Study of L2 Collocations

These three chapters are all concerned with the design of materials to help learners recognize and reproduce appropriate collocations. All identify problems with existing materials, all tentatively suggest improvements, and, in support of their conclusions, all report on findings from a variety of sources, such as corpus analysis, materials analysis, test scores, and learner feedback. The chapters are multi-faceted, and bring to bear both knowledge of collocational theory and a practical understanding of learners’ wants and needs. Of particular interest is the attention paid to current constraints on publishers and classroom teachers, which make it difficult to provide students with the full range of collocational information that corpus evidence reveals. In the case of dictionaries, the greatest limitation seems to be that of space. Print dictionaries have to be small enough to carry around, but restricted entry length can lead to the loss of useful information, or the condensing of information to such an extent that it is difficult for the user to interpret. In the classroom lack of time is the biggest problem; teachers have to focus on the syllabus and prepare students for achievement tests, and tertiary English course materials such as those Jiang describes provide little opportunity to examine vocabulary in context. This commentary chapter will reflect on the three researchers’ responses to these constraints, as revealed through their choices of corpora, their presentation of corpus data, and their suggestions for materials design.