63,275 research outputs found
Trialing project-based learning in a new EAP ESP course: A collaborative reflective practice of three college English teachers
Currently in many Chinese universities, the traditional College English course is facing the risk of being ‘marginalized’, replaced or even removed, and many hours previously allocated to the course are now being taken by EAP or ESP. At X University in northern China, a curriculum reform as such is taking place, as a result of which a new course has been created called ‘xue ke’ English. Despite the fact that ‘xue ke’ means subject literally, the course designer has made it clear that subject content is not the target, nor is the course the same as EAP or ESP. This curriculum initiative, while possibly having been justified with a rationale of some kind (e.g. to meet with changing social and/or academic needs of students and/or institutions), this is posing a great challenge for, as well as considerable pressure on, a number of College English teachers who have taught this single course for almost their entire teaching career. In such a context, three teachers formed a peer support group in Semester One this year, to work collaboratively co-tackling the challenge, and they chose Project-Based Learning (PBL) for the new course. This presentation will report on the implementation of this project, including the overall designing, operational procedure, and the teachers’ reflections.
Based on discussion, pre-agreement was reached on the purpose and manner of collaboration as offering peer support for more effective teaching and learning and fulfilling and pleasant professional development. A WeChat group was set up as the chief platform for messaging, idea-sharing, and resource-exchanging. Physical meetings were supplementary, with sound agenda but flexible time, and venues. Mosoteach cloud class (lan mo yun ban ke) was established as a tool for virtual learning, employed both in and after class. Discussions were held at the beginning of the semester which determined only brief outlines for PBL implementation and allowed space for everyone to autonomously explore in their own way. Constant further discussions followed, which generated a great deal of opportunities for peer learning and lesson plan modifications. A reflective journal, in a greater or lesser detailed manner, was also kept by each teacher to record the journey of the collaboration. At the end of the semester, it was commonly recognized that, although challenges existed, the collaboration was overall a success and they were all willing to continue with it and endeavor to refine it to be a more professional and productive approach
Characteristics of Vietnamese lexis of Vietnamese Australian immigrants
The Vietnamese of Australian communities (VAC) still maintains many obsolete expressions originating from and related to the Southern Vietnamese political institutions of the pre-1975 Southern government. In addition, VAC has adopted English loanwords (ELs) through close contact with Australian English and uses them extensively to fill gaps in vocabulary. English loanwords have not only been borrowed in their original forms but were also nativized through the mechanism of loanwords and loan translation. Moreover, hybridised expressions have been coined by Vietnamese Australian émigrés through the compounding of one English or Vietnamese item with a Vietnamese or English item through loan blending
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From traditional essay to 'Ready Steady Cook' presentation: Reasons for innovative changes in assignments
The prose essay, case study and laboratory report, composed by individual students in isolation from their peers, used to be the mainstay of undergraduate writing. However, in recent years an array of alternative assignment types such as blogs, letters and e-posters have widened the repertoire of texts expected. This article attempts to describe the reasoning behind changes in assignment types at undergraduate and master’s level at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Data from 58 semi-structured interviews with lecturers in three UK universities is used together with course handbooks and some clarifications with lecturers via email. Suggested reasons for new assignment types are grouped into three categories: external, lecturer-driven and student-driven. The article surmises that, because of these pressures, students are now expected to produce a wide variety of text types, and greater attention should be paid to guidance in new assignments for both native and non-native speaker students
A Quantitative Corpus-based Analysis of Linking Adverbials in Students’ Academic Writing
Udostępnienie publikacji Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego finansowane w ramach projektu „Doskonałość naukowa kluczem do doskonałości kształcenia”. Projekt realizowany jest ze środków Europejskiego Funduszu Społecznego w ramach Programu Operacyjnego Wiedza Edukacja Rozwój; nr umowy: POWER.03.05.00-00-Z092/17-00
The REVERE project:Experiments with the application of probabilistic NLP to systems engineering
Despite natural language’s well-documented shortcomings as a medium for precise technical description, its use in software-intensive systems engineering remains inescapable. This poses many problems for engineers who must derive problem understanding and synthesise precise solution descriptions from free text. This is true both for the largely unstructured textual descriptions from which system requirements are derived, and for more formal documents, such as standards, which impose requirements on system development processes. This paper describes experiments that we have carried out in the REVERE1 project to investigate the use of probabilistic natural language processing techniques to provide systems engineering support
Exploring Male and Female Voices through Epistemic Modality and Evidentiality in Some Modern English Travel Texts on the Canaries
This article describes authorial voice through evidential and epistemic sentential devices in a corpus of 19th and early 20th century travel texts. The corpus contains four works written by female travellers and the other four by men. Therefore, apart from providing a catalogue of the strategies deployed by the authors in order to mark modality and evidentiality, we also report on expected differences in their frequencies of use in relation to the writer’s gender. In addition, the interest of this study lies in the fact that, to the best of our knowledge, no research on writer stance has previously been carried out in texts belonging to the genre of travel writing
Detecting Singleton Review Spammers Using Semantic Similarity
Online reviews have increasingly become a very important resource for
consumers when making purchases. Though it is becoming more and more difficult
for people to make well-informed buying decisions without being deceived by
fake reviews. Prior works on the opinion spam problem mostly considered
classifying fake reviews using behavioral user patterns. They focused on
prolific users who write more than a couple of reviews, discarding one-time
reviewers. The number of singleton reviewers however is expected to be high for
many review websites. While behavioral patterns are effective when dealing with
elite users, for one-time reviewers, the review text needs to be exploited. In
this paper we tackle the problem of detecting fake reviews written by the same
person using multiple names, posting each review under a different name. We
propose two methods to detect similar reviews and show the results generally
outperform the vectorial similarity measures used in prior works. The first
method extends the semantic similarity between words to the reviews level. The
second method is based on topic modeling and exploits the similarity of the
reviews topic distributions using two models: bag-of-words and
bag-of-opinion-phrases. The experiments were conducted on reviews from three
different datasets: Yelp (57K reviews), Trustpilot (9K reviews) and Ott dataset
(800 reviews).Comment: 6 pages, WWW 201
The Discourse of Digital Deceptions and ‘419’ Emails
This study applies a computer-mediated discourse analysis
(CMDA) to the study of discourse structures and functions of ‘419’ emails – the Nigerian term for online/financial fraud. The hoax mails are in the form of online lottery winning announcements, and email ‘business proposals’
involving money transfers/claims of dormant bank accounts overseas. Data comprise 68 email samples collected from the researcher’s inboxes and colleagues’ and students’ mail boxes between January 2008 and March 2009 in Ota, Nigeria. The study reveals that the writers of the mails apply
discourse/pragmatic strategies such as socio-cultural greeting formulas,self-identification, reassurance/confidence building, narrativity and action
prompting strategies to sustain the interest of the receivers. The study also shows that this genre of computer-mediated communication (CMC) has become a regular part of our Internet experience, and is not likely to be extinct in the near future as previous studies of email hoaxes have predicted. It is believed that as the global economy witnesses a recession, chances are that more creative and complex ways of combating the situation will arise.
Economic hardship has been blamed for fraud/online scams, inadvertently prompting youths to engage in various anti-social activities. K E Y W O R D S : computer-media communication, deceptions, discourse,
email, ‘419’, fraud, hoax
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