Shaoqun Wu

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.

Towards a digital library for language learning

Digital libraries have untapped potential for supporting language teaching and learning. Although the Internet at large is widely used for language education, it has critical disadvantages that can be overcome in a more controlled environment. This article describes a language learning digital library, and a new metadata set that characterizes linguistic features commonly taught in class as well as textual attributes used for selection of suitable exercise material. On the system is built a set of eight learning activities that together offer a classroom and self-study environment with a rich variety of interactive exercises, which are automatically generated from digital library content. The system has been evaluated by usability experts, language teachers, and students.

Second Language Learning in the Context of MOOCs

Massive Open Online Courses are becoming popular educational vehicles through which universities reach out to non-traditional audiences. Many enrolees hail from other countries and cultures, and struggle to cope with the English language in which these courses are invariably offered. Moreover, most such learners have a strong desire and motivation to extend their knowledge of academic English, particularly in the specific area addressed by the course. Online courses provide a compelling opportunity for domain-specific language learning. They supply a large corpus of interesting linguistic material relevant to a particular area, including supplementary images (slides), audio and video. We contend that this corpus can be automatically analysed, enriched, and transformed into a resource that learners can browse and query in order to extend their ability to understand the language used, and help them express themselves more fluently and eloquently in that domain. To illustrate this idea, an existing online corpus-based language learning tool (FLAX) is applied to a Coursera MOOC entitled Virology 1: How Viruses Work, offered by Columbia University.

Transcending Concordance: Augmenting Academic Text for L2 Writing

This paper describes an automated scheme that extracts salient linguistic features from academic text and presents them in an interface designed for L2 students who are learning academic writing. The system is guided by several common ways of utilizing corpus technology in L2 writing. The authors have developed and tested an extraction method that identifies typical lexico-grammatical features of any word or phrase in a corpus. Collocations and lexical bundles are automatically extracted; students can explore them by searching and browsing, and inspect them along with contextual information. They also present learners with common words, and academic words, hyperlinked to their usage and collocates in authentic contexts. This article uses a single running example, the British Academic Written English corpus, but the approach is fully automated and can be applied to any collection of English writing.

Constructing a Collocation Learning System from the Wikipedia Corpus

The importance of collocations for success in language learning is widely recognized. Concordancers, originally designed for linguists, are among the most popular tools for students to obtain, organize, and study collocations derived from corpora. This paper describes the design and development of a collocation learning system that is built from Wikipedia text and provides language learners with an easy-to-use interface for looking up collocations of any word that occurs in Wikipedia. The use of this corpus exposes learners to contemporary, content-related text, and enables them to search for semantically related words for a given topic. The system organizes collocations by syntactic pattern, sorts them by frequency, and links them to their original context. The paper includes a practical user guide to illustrate how to use the system as a language aid to facilitate academic writing.

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.