Margaret Franken

Refining the Use of the Web (and Web Search) as a Language Teaching and Learning Resource

The web is a potentially useful corpus for language study because it provides examples of language that are contextualized and authentic, and is large and easily searchable. However, web contents are heterogeneous in the extreme, uncontrolled and hence ‘dirty,’ and exhibit features different from the written and spoken texts in other linguistic corpora. This article explores the use of the web and web search as a resource for language teaching and learning. We describe how a particular derived corpus containing a trillion word tokens in the form of n-grams has been filtered by word lists and syntactic constraints and used to create three digital library collections, linked with other corpora and the live web, that exploit the affordances of web text and mitigate some of its constraints.

Utilizing lexical data from a web-derived corpus to expand productive collocation knowledge

Collocations are of great importance for second language learners, and a learner’s knowledge of them plays a key role in producing language fluently (Nation, 2001 : 323). In this article we describe and evaluate an innovative system that uses a Web-derived corpus and digital library software to produce a vast concordance and present it in a way that helps students use collocations more effectively in their writing. Instead of live search we use an off-line corpus of short sequences of words, along with their frequencies. They are preprocessed, filtered, and organized into a searchable digital library collection containing 380 million five-word sequences drawn from a vocabulary of 145,000 words. Although the phrases are short, learners can browse more extended contexts because the system automatically locates sample sentences that contain them, either on the Web or in the British National Corpus. Two evaluations were conducted: an expert user tested the system to see if it could generate suitable alternatives for given text fragments, and students used it for a particular exercise. Both suggest that, even within the constraints of a limited study, the system could and did help students improve their writing.

Language use and the instructional strategies of Grade 3 teachers to support ‘bridging’ in Papua New Guinea

For over a decade, the Department of Education in Papua New Guinea (PNG) has adopted vernacular education as a way of ensuring that the educational experiences of children in schools draw on the cultural and linguistic knowledge they bring to the classroom. In PNG, there are many potential vernaculars – apart from the local languages, there are Tok Pisin and Hiri Motu. The policy advocates ‘bridging’ as an instructional strategy. While the term is used extensively by teachers, it is unclear what teachers think it entails and how they enact bridging. This small-scale exploratory study documents the views of a group of Grade 3 teachers in the East New Britain region and provides observations of their bridging strategies. While the teachers are not particularly supportive of vernacular education, they report on and use instructional strategies that include translation, metalinguistic comparison, contrast and elaboration. The teachers make much use of elicitation to encourage children to articulate their understanding of English, and they demonstrate flexible and dynamic use of languages in their classrooms. The fact that the study recorded no use of the local languages suggests that systematic follow-up of policy in practice is much needed, together with more in-depth research.

Collaborative second language writing: an activity analysis of Web conferencing

This article discusses an undergraduate second-language writing course that incorporated Web conferencing. The study was informed by a sociocultural research approach known as activity theory. Student reflective diary entries posted over ten weeks to the Web conference helped identify features that supported or detracted from collaboration, peer evaluation and the co-construction of academic text. Employing activity theory, we outline two course objectives (collaborative writing and peer evaluation) and discuss the use of student feedback to modify web conferencing support.

Collocation Games from a Language Corpus

The notion of language games gained prominence with communicative language teaching as course developers and teachers thought of ways to structure opportunities for meaning negotiation. They used split information activities to provide the impetus for learners to interact with each other. Task-based language teaching has more recently explored the parameters of interactive tasks to improve the nature of that interaction and to ensure better and more diverse learning outcomes (Skehan, 2003). The use of computers in the design and implementation of language games has added significant value to what teachers can now offer students in terms of challenging and productive interactive language games (Warschauer, 2004; Warschauer & Kern, 2000). Wright, Betteridge and Buckby (2006, p. 1), writing of games in general, define a game as ‘an activity which is entertaining and engaging, often challenging and an activity in which the learners play, and usually interact with others’, thereby focusing on interaction as a key feature of language games.

Chinese Postgraduates’ Explanation of the Sources of Sentence Initial Bundles in their Thesis Writing

Lexical bundles, recurrent multiword combinations in a register, are extremely common and important discourse building blocks in academic writing. An increasing number of studies have investigated lexical bundles in academic writing in recent years, but few studies have explored L2 learners’ interpretations of their own bundle production, particularly sentence initial bundle production. Investigating the sources that have appeared to influence learners’ choices and knowledge of bundles is important as it complements what we know about the structural and functional features of lexical bundles and provides useful first-hand information for second language writing pedagogy. The present study interviewed five Chinese postgraduate students to probe possible reasons for their use of the typical sentence initial bundles identified in the self-built Chinese Masters and PhD thesis corpora. The interviews revealed diverse explanations including interlingual transfer, classroom learning, noticing in reading, a lack of rhetorical confidence, and misunderstanding of rhetorical conventions. The results suggest the need for raising students’ awareness of the common sentence starters in postgraduate academic writing, increasing their confidence as student writers, familiarizing them with rhetorical conventions, and incorporating effective corpus-based tools into pedagogical practices.

A theory-to-practice leadership learning arrangement in a university context

Abstract Higher education institutions are increasingly recognizing the importance of organizational change as they face complex challenges. Leadership learning has been identified as an important way of supporting change management. We describe a leadership learning arrangement that arose in the context of two of the authors needing to learn how to become effective university chairpersons of departments. This involved the other author, an expert in educational leadership as a theory broker, who brought theory to the learning arrangement and mediated it. We wish to show how the learning arrangement supports the theory-to-practice connection and personal authoring of leadership for all involved.

Book review: Stephen Bax, Discourse and genre: Analysing language in context

Chapter 17), which are vital in understanding the contextualization of differences. Bearing differences in mind, chapters on intercultural communication (Corbett, Chapter 20), racism (Lin and Kubota, Chapter 18) and news ideology (Montgomery, Chapter 14) establish the strength of discourse analysis in teasing out the potential power of texts in disenfranchising representations of certain groups. As a whole, the volume meaningfully encapsulates the state-of-the-art of discourse analysis in different fields. For novice and expert readers, the book is a manageable resource since each chapter is strategically organized in terms of the history, methods and potential problems of discourse analysis applied in different fields. Likewise, each chapter provides sample investigations to contextualize the concepts earlier discussed, allowing readers to appreciate the potentials of different means of discourse analysis. For instance, possible extensions of discourse research in one context to another (e.g. school to professional or real to virtual) are touched upon. More importantly, the featured papers address the interdisciplinary nature of discourse research. Given the vast range of different approaches to the study of discourse, the volume may be considered as a simple introductory text for researchers wanting to employ a new tool in studying discourse. In this sense, experienced researchers should also refer to the suggested readings in the volume to consider the body of work done in a particular area of discourse analysis. A shortcoming of the volume is that it is silent in terms of current trends in discourse and youth. Given that language use is highly influenced by hybridized products of semiotic exchange through communication technology, an important area of research is how different populations such as youth position their discourses to fit their purposes. That oversight aside, for its organization and presentation of current thinking and practice in the field this volume is an exemplary work which holds value for beginning and experienced researchers alike.

Book Review: Eija Suomela-Salmi and Fred Dervin (eds), Cross-Linguistic and Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Academic Discourse

feature of the interactional context in which the difficulty arises. Similarly, Jack Sidnell (Chapter 6) considers how the demands of the specific interaction in which talk is located may play a larger role in shaping the nature of the talk than can be accounted for using an individualistic cognitive approach to child language. The first two parts of the book examine various interactive environments involving children with neurotypical development. In Part 3 the focus shifts to consider the insights that can be gained through the analysis of atypical children. These include children with autism spectrum disorders, specific language impairments, deaf children and children with little or no functional speech who use communication aids. The studies highlight the rich and diverse range of resources that can be drawn on in interaction. Such studies challenge traditional understandings of atypical children’s language usage that concentrate on verbal resources and tend to adopt a deficit-model perspective. For example, Penny Stribling and John Rae (Chapter 10) demonstrate the ability of an autistic child with learning difficulties to perform an action in a different modality to the one in which the instructions were given. Similarly, Julie Radford and Merle Mahon (Chapter 11) highlight the importance of considering the entire interactive experience (including nonverbal elements) in any analysis of children’s communication because of the extensive nonverbal interaction work being done by children who are deaf or have language difficulties. Part 3 also makes comparisons between typical and atypical interactions and considers the consequences of some of the differences. Tuula Tykkyläinan (Chapter 12) and Michael Clarke and Ray Wilkinson (Chapter 13) examine features peculiar to the interactions of atypical children and discuss how features like differences in repair practices and differences in turn taking when using a communication aid can impact on intersubjectivity and the progressivity of talk. Through the fine-grained sequential analysis of CA the authors can suggest ways atypical interactions could be adapted to overcome the condition-specific differences that threaten intersubjectivity. Each chapter in the book is a self-contained study that offers original and detailed insights into the conversational phenomena being investigated. However, beyond their technical contributions to the field, to varying degrees each study takes pains to present the work in such a manner as to address the concerns of related research areas like child language and developmental work, and to showcase the contribution CA can make to such endeavours. This is a particularly useful feature and elevates the book to become an invaluable tool for any researcher interested in childhood interactions. It is an extremely well-edited and well-balanced book with high quality contributions from the various authors. As such, it is well placed to achieve its aim of enhancing the impact of CA as a discipline by expanding into developmental and applied areas of research.