Presenting a united front : assessed reflective writing on group experience

Assessed reflective writing is increasingly common in UK higher education. Students writing in this mode are typically required to narrate their experiences, evaluate their performance, investigate associated emotions, and comment on what has been learned. In this paper I focus on assessed reflective writing by students on an MA TESOL course who are required to write individual reflections on a process of working in a group to produce teaching materials. This task places particular demands on the writer. Like other students writing reflectively, they need to manage complex self presentation: to appear honest about relative successes and failures, to show evidence of appropriate reflection, and to indicate desirable learning. Because they are reflecting on a group experience, they also need to differentiate themselves from their work group in their account, and to reflect critically on others as well as on themselves. My focus in this paper is on the ways they manage these additional demands. I first examine the relative frequency with which writers refer to themselves and their work group, and then examine the content of self-referential and group-referential statements. Finally, I examine semantic patterns in the data and draw conclusions regarding possible reasons behind student writers’ choices about how to represent themselves and others

Are you an effective teacher of reading?

Reading occurs in our lives on a constant basis. Nevertheless, defining reading is not easy. Different people use the term reading for different purposes, which can cause much confusion. For the context of the language classroom this article will concern itself with the notion of reading as the extraction of meaning from a written text . In other words, the text is viewed as a vehicle of communication from the writer to the reader; Aebersold and Field (1997) acknowledge this by stating that it is the interaction between the text and reader that constitutes actual reading. However, simply stating that this is what constitutes reading is to risk forgetting that, in the reading class, the most important thing is that both the teacher and the student should understand the reading process

A global approach for a dictionary of Lingála: from the localization of software to a lemmatization strategy

Lingála is the national language spoken in Kinshasa, the capital of the country. Even if this language is going through a straightforward empowering process, its progress is still hindered by the lack of terminological and lexicographic tools; hence the need of providing monolingual or plurilingual dictionaries for this language, according to what is a demand of society. This is why we have undertaken this research on lexicography. It consists in producing lexicons as teaching aids and in making them available to primary users, i.e. teachers and students. In this communication, firstly, we will observe the approach followed by authors of existing Lingála dictionaries (monolingual and bilingual). This review aims to improve, if necessary, the presentation of entries, so as to help readers find the words they are looking for. The variations in the current spoken language (the so-called Kinshasa Lingála) and in the so-called standard language (Makanza Lingála) will be important in the choice we will make for recording occurrences in the dictionary. This concerns the orthography of words, as well as lemmatized forms and register. Secondly, we will describe the process of localization of software we will use to process the corpus. Finally, we will also very briefly describe the corpus we are processing

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

Stance-taking and public discussion in blogs.

Blogs, which can be written and read by anyone with a computer and an internet connection, would seem to expand the possibilities for engagement in public sphere debates. Indeed, blogs are full of the kind of vocabulary that suggests intense discussion. However, a closer look at the way this vocabulary is used in context suggests that the main concern of writers is selfpresentation, positioning themselves in a crowded forum, in what has been called stancetaking. When writers mark their stances, for instance by saying I think, they enact different ways of signalling a relation to others, marking disagreement, enacting surprise, andironicising previous contributions. All these moves are ways of presenting one’s own contribution as distinctive, showing one’s entitlement to a position. In this paper, I use concordance tools to identify strings that are very frequent in a corpus of blogs, relative to a general corpus of written texts, focus on those relatively frequent words that mark stance and analyse these markers in context. I argue that the prominence of stance-taking indicates the priority of individual positioning over collective and deliberative discussion

Effects of corpus-based instruction on phraseology in learner English

This study analyses the effects of data-driven learning (DDL) on the phraseology used by 223 English students at an Italian university. The students studied the genre of opinion survey reports through paper-based and hands-on exploration of a reference corpus. They then wrote their own report and a learner corpus of these texts was compiled. A contrastive interlanguage analysis approach (Granger, 2002) was adopted to compare the phraseology of key items in the learner corpus with that found in the reference corpus. Comparison is also made with a learner corpus of reports produced by a previous cohort of students who had not used the reference corpus. Students who had done DDL tasks used a wider range of genre-appropriate phraseology and produced a lower number of stock phrases than those who had not. The study also finds evidence that students use more phrases encountered in paper-based concordancing tasks than in hands-on tasks.Unlike in previous DDL studies, observations of the learning of a specific text-type through DDL in the present study are based on the comparison with both a control learner corpus and an expert corpus.The study also considers the use of DDL with a large class size

Corpus approaches to language in the media

The main aim of this chapter is to offer an overview of research that has adopted the methodology of Corpus Linguistics to study aspects of language use in the media. The overview begins by introducing the key principles and analytical tools adopted in corpus research. To demonstrate the contribution of corpus approaches to media linguistics, a selection of recent corpus studies is subsequently discussed. The final section summarises the strengths and limitations of corpus approaches and discusses avenues for further research

The logic and linguistic model for automatic extraction of collocation similarity

The article discusses the process of automatic identification of collocation similarity. The semantic analysis is one of the most advanced as well as the most difficult NLP task. The main problem of semantic processing is the determination of polysemy and synonymy of linguistic units. In addition, the task becomes complicated in case of word collocations. The paper suggests a logical and linguistic model for automatic determining semantic similarity between colocations in Ukraine and English languages. The proposed model formalizes semantic equivalence of collocations by means of semantic and grammatical characteristics of collocates. The basic idea of this approach is that morphological, syntactic and semantic characteristics of lexical units are to be taken into account for the identification of collocation similarity. Basic mathematical means of our model are logical-algebraic equations of the finite predicates algebra. Verb-noun and noun-adjective collocations in Ukrainian and English languages consist of words belonged to main parts of speech. These collocations are examined in the model. The model allows extracting semantically equivalent collocations from semi-structured and non-structured texts. Implementations of the model will allow to automatically recognize semantically equivalent collocations. Usage of the model allows increasing the effectiveness of natural language processing tasks such as information extraction, ontology generation, sentiment analysis and some others

“Do I speak better?” A longitudinal study of lexical chunking in the spoken language of two Japanese students

The prominence of lexical chunks or prefabricated language has grown over recent years, however there have been few longitudinal case studies exploring changes in non-native speaker (NNS) speech and little work done involving NNSs in identifying chunks in their own speech. This study attempts to track changes in two intermediate-level Japanese students' spoken usage of lexical chunks over a period of five months in the UK. Each NNS was recorded three times in conversational long turns at two-month intervals. Twelve native speakers (NSs) were asked to order transcripts of each student's speech by perceived fluency level and three also underlined the lexical chunks; however there was little coherence amongst NSs in these tasks. Identification of chunks using Wordsmith software suggests an overall rise in the percentage of talk within chunks and a reduction in ill-formed chunks over the five months. Following some awareness-raising training on identifying lexical chunks, the Japanese students themselves were asked to identify chunks within their own transcripts. Despite the difficulty of the task, they were able to do this and additionally offered insights into which chunks were common for them. These insights included an awareness of typical Japanese phrases and how they felt their speech had changed overall. A further recording and transcribing cycle suggests that this training resulted in some short-term uptake as the percentage of chunks used increased after the lessons. Both students found it highly motivating to record and analyse transcripts of their talk as they could see progress in their own spoken language development