Natural Language Processing at the School of Information Studies for Africa

The lack of persons trained in computational linguistic methods is a severe obstacle to making the Internet and computers accessible to people all over the world in their own languages. The paper discusses the experiences of designing and teaching an introductory course in Natural Language Processing to graduate computer science students at Addis Ababa University, Ethiopia, in order to initiate the education of computational linguists in the Horn of Africa region

A role for genre-based pedagogy in academic writing instruction?: an EAP perspective

In this paper I discuss the use of genre as a theoretical construct in academic writing instruction in the context of English for Academic Purposes (EAP) courses. I begin by considering the notion of discourse competence as a concept that accounts for the knowledge elements and skills employed by expert academic writers, and then consider genre as a way of operationalizing the different elements of discourse competence knowledge for the purpose of writing instruction. I review briefly the diversity of approaches to theorizing genre knowledge, and then present the dual social genre/cognitive genre approach that I have used as a basis for research and course design in an EAP context. I exemplify this model by summarizing the key elements of two studies of research genres in which I have used this model. I conclude with a brief theoretical discussion of the issue of construct validity in relation to using the concept of genre in research that relates to writing instruction

A conceptual architecture for interactive educational multimedia

Learning is more than knowledge acquisition; it often involves the active participation of the learner in a variety of knowledge- and skills-based learning and training activities. Interactive multimedia technology can support the variety of interaction channels and languages required to facilitate interactive learning and teaching. A conceptual architecture for interactive educational multimedia can support the development of such multimedia systems. Such an architecture needs to embed multimedia technology into a coherent educational context. A framework based on an integrated interaction model is needed to capture learning and training activities in an online setting from an educational perspective, to describe them in the human-computer context, and to integrate them with mechanisms and principles of multimedia interaction

Research questions and approaches for computational thinking curricula design

Teaching computational thinking (CT) is argued to be necessary but also admitted to be a very challenging task. The reasons for this, are: i) no general agreement on what computational thinking is; ii) no clear idea nor evidential support on how to teach CT in an effective way. Hence, there is a need to develop a common approach and a shared understanding of the scope of computational thinking and of effective means of teaching CT. Thus, the consequent ambition is to utilize the preliminary and further research outcomes on CT for the education of the prospective teachers of secondary, further and higher/adult education curricula

THE LEXICON OF SCIENCE: EXTRACTING THE SCIENTIFIC VOCABULARY FROM WRITTEN AND SPOKEN CORPORA

This study examined the nature and frequency of scientific vocabulary encountered in Science classrooms. The corpora that were analyzed include a Science textbook used at the 10th-grade level as well as transcripts of teacher-fronted lectures on three occasions. Interviews with one Science teacher were also conducted in order to understand the context of a secondary Science classroom in Ontario. Approximately 15% of the lexicon from the total corpora was scientific in nature. From the analysis of the scientific vocabulary, six lexical classes emerged with varying proportions between the written and the spoken corpora. Complexities of the scientific lexicon as realized from this study reveal that scientific vocabulary forms an extensive portion of the total corpus which makes explicit vocabulary instruction extremely important for all students, especially ELLs

Improvable objects and attached dialogue: new literacy practices employed by learners to build knowledge together in asynchronous settings

Asynchronous online dialogue offers advantages to learners, but has appeared to involve only limited use of new literacy practices. To investigate this, a multimodal approach was applied to asynchronous dialogue. The study analysed the online discussions of small groups of university students as they developed collaboratively authored documents. Sociocultural discourse analysis of the dialogue was combined with visual analysis of its structural elements. The groups were found to employ new literacies that supported the joint construction of knowledge. The documents on which they worked together functioned as ‘improvable objects’ and the development of these was associated with engagement in ‘attached dialogue’. By investigating a wider range of conference dialogue than has previously been explored, it was found that engaging in attached dialogue associated with collaborative authorship of improvable objects prompts groups of online learners to share knowledge, challenge ideas, justify opinions, evaluate evidence and consider options