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

Teaching Google search techniques in an L2 academic writing context

This mixed-method study examines the effectiveness of teaching Google search techniques (GSTs) to Korean EFL college students in an intermediate-level academic English writing course. 18 students participated in a 4-day GST workshop consisting of an overview session of the web as corpus and Google as a concordancer, and three training sessions targeting the use of quotation marks (“”) and a wildcard (*). Each session contained a pre-test, a 30-minute training, and a post-test, and each training session focused on one of the three key writing points: articles, collocations, and paraphrasing. Two questionnaires for demographic information and GST learning experiences were conducted. The results showed a statistically significant effect for the overall gain score. In particular, participants’ use of articles greatly improved after the training—in contrast to their use of collocations and paraphrasing. Lack of grammar and vocabulary knowledge seemed to hinder their data-driven learning, especially for collocation use and paraphrasing. The questionnaire data showed that all students found the GSTs beneficial, mostly because they were easy to use for confirmation and correction. Overall, both quantitative and qualitative data suggest that teachers’ meticulous guidance and vigilant individualized feedback are necessary to facilitate L2 self-directed Google-informed writing

Survey of the State of the Art in Natural Language Generation: Core tasks, applications and evaluation

This paper surveys the current state of the art in Natural Language Generation (NLG), defined as the task of generating text or speech from non-linguistic input. A survey of NLG is timely in view of the changes that the field has undergone over the past decade or so, especially in relation to new (usually data-driven) methods, as well as new applications of NLG technology. This survey therefore aims to (a) give an up-to-date synthesis of research on the core tasks in NLG and the architectures adopted in which such tasks are organised; (b) highlight a number of relatively recent research topics that have arisen partly as a result of growing synergies between NLG and other areas of artificial intelligence; (c) draw attention to the challenges in NLG evaluation, relating them to similar challenges faced in other areas of Natural Language Processing, with an emphasis on different evaluation methods and the relationships between them.Comment: Published in Journal of AI Research (JAIR), volume 61, pp 75-170. 118 pages, 8 figures, 1 tabl

More than a linguistic reference: The influence of corpus technology on L2 academic writing

This paper reports on a qualitative study that investigated the changes in students’ writing process associated with corpus use over an extended period of time. The primary purpose of this study was to examine how corpus technology affects students’ development of competence as second language (L2) writers. The research was mainly based on case studies with six L2 writers in an English for Academic Purposes writing course. The findings revealed that corpus use not only had an immediate effect by helping the students solve immediate writing/language problems, but also promoted their perceptions of lexico-grammar and language awareness. Once the corpus approach was introduced to the writing process, the students assumed more responsibility for their writing and became more independent writers, and their confidence in writing increased. This studyidentified a wide variety of individual experiences and learning contexts that were involved in deciding the levels of the students’ willingness and success in using corpora. This paper also discusses the distinctive contributions of general corpora to English for Academic Purposes and the importance of lexical and grammatical aspects in L2 writing pedagogy

Revisiting materials for teaching languages for specific purposes

Teaching materials in languages for specific purposes have evolved in the last few years dramatically. The Internet currently plays a significant role in such development and has permitted both a wider range of resources and its free availability almost anywhere in the World. This paper presents a selection of different types of recent materials for English for Specific Purposes. The paper begins by defining ESP. Then it approaches how materials should shape the student’s own learning, how materials should be selected according to the different skills and then emphasizes the importance of the Internet as a source of materials. The paper concludes with a set of ideas for the future development of ESP materials. The final goal of this paper is to provide the readers with valuable tools that can enhance their teaching through accessible mean

Integración de ABD en diferentes escenarios de escritura académica en IFA

In EAP (English for Academic Purposes) contexts, a holistic view is desirable for research and pedagogy. This mixed-methods approach usually includes quantitative data from language learning situations. For example, pretests, post-tests, and delayed post-tests may be exploited for concrete linguistic aspects so that the learners’ performance evolvement with them is measured and contrasted. Other instruments of qualitative observation such as surveys, questionnaires, interviews, and classroom discussion also tend to refine the depiction of the learning profiles and outcomes. In this paper, the goal is to compare different EAP contexts over an 8-year period so that some corpus-related pedagogy issues in EAP may be explored. In particular, the study sets out to compare three different academic scenarios where DDL (Data-Driven Learning) techniques were developed with and for students during the academic writing sessions of the courses. The students were university faculty members (N=20, most with a B1 level), 15 other (graduate) students (mostly B2), and 15 other faculty and graduate students (B2). The DDL method was explored with all three groups, and salient linguistic-discursive features were compared (use of first-person pronouns / awareness of authorship, and importance of active / passive voice in the texts). Furthermore, by using some questionnaires and interviews with the students, additional feedback via their reflections on academic written English was collected. Overall, most students responded positively to the recognition of the learning opportunities offered with DDL for written academic language improvement across and within their fields, although some variations exist within and across groups in terms of learning opportunities and outcomes.En contextos de IFA (Inglés para fines académicos), es deseable aplicar una visión holística a la hora de investigar temas pedagógicos. Este enfoque de métodos múltiples generalmente incluye datos cuantitativos sobre los ítems específicos que se exploren en la situación de aprendizaje. El uso de pre- y post-tests / post-tests posteriores en torno a aspectos lingüísticos concretos puede proporcionar información detallada sobre la adquisición lingüística del alumnado. Otros instrumentos de observación cualitativa tales como encuestas, cuestionarios, entrevistas y debates pueden refinar el dibujo de los perfiles de aprendizaje y resultados del mismo. En este trabajo, el objetivo es comparar diferentes contextos de LFE a lo largo de un periodo de ocho años para que se exploren diferentes temas importantes en relación con la pedagogía de corpus en clases de Inglés para fines académicos (IFA). En concreto, este estudio tiene como base comparar tres escenarios distintos de escritura en IFA donde se desarrollaron técnicas de ABD (Aprendizaje basado en datos) con los alumnos. Los discentes eran miembros del profesorado universitario (N=20, con nivel B1 de idioma en su mayoría), otros 15 alumnos provenientes de posgrado (con B2 la mayor parte), y otros 15 profesores y alumnos de posgrado (con B2). Se exploró el método de ABD con los tres grupos, y se contrastaron aspectos lingüístico-discursivos concretos (uso de primera persona, concienciación de autoría en el escrito e importancia de la voz activa / pasiva en los textos). Además, con el uso de cuestionarios y entrevistas con los estudiantes, se recogieron diferentes reflexiones en torno a la escritura académica en Inglés. En general, la mayoría de los discentes respondieron de forma positiva al reconocer las oportunidades de aprendizaje ofrecidas para la mejora del Inglés académico escrito en sus respectivas áreas, aunque se registraron variaciones dentro de y entre los grupos en cuanto a esas posibilidades y sus resultados de aprendizaje