Principles of effective literacy practice for EAL students in New Zealand classrooms.

The New Zealand Ministry of Education has recently identified the need for teachers to be prepared to meet the needs of English as an additional language (EAL)² students in New Zealand schools more effectively. This paper offers a number of principles to guide policy, practice and teacher development. The paper draws on Alton-Lee's (2003) best evidence synthesis of quality teaching for diverse students, and Franken and McComish's (2003a, 2003b) observations and analysis of provisions for EAL students in New Zealand schools. The principles, grounded in second language and literacy acquisition research, point to the need to provide particular enabling conditions for the literacy development of EAL students if they are to achieve as well as their English-speaking peers

Characteristics of quality teaching for students in New Zealand schools whose first language is not English

The current paper draws on the findings of two recent research reports commissioned by the New Zealand Ministry of Education (Alton-Lee, 2003; Franken & McComish, 2003) in order to generate a synthesised statement of characteristics of quality teaching for students for whom English is not the first language (referred to from here as NESB students1) in New Zealand schools. Alton-Lee (2003, see Ministry of Education website, www.minedu.govt.nz) provides a synthesis of research-based evidence addressing the nature of quality teaching in schooling for the full range of diverse students. In this work, diversity encompasses “many characteristics including ethnicity, socio-economic background, home language, gender, special needs, disability, and giftedness” (Alton-Lee, 2003, p. v). Because her synthesis addresses diversity in the student population, she focusses on what is common to diverse students and thus does not specify particular conditions that pertain to any one sub-group of diverse students. Franken and McComish (2003) on the other hand, is a research report into the English language support for NESB (Non English Speaking Background) students in New Zealand schools. It includes a literature review of evidence-based research into second language teaching and learning, particularly classroom based research. It also reports on observations and analysis of practices in New Zealand schools, and discusses how these documented practices relate to the research findings from the literature

Enabling conditions for professional development of te reo Māori teachers

The paper outlines a professional development programme for secondary school teachers of te reo Māori (under the auspices of Te Hiringa i te Mahara) conducted by a language teacher educator and an expert in Māori bilingualism and biliteracy. While the principles underpinning the programme reflect a strong task-based orientation, the programme approached development needs for the teachers from the point of view of understanding “enabling conditions” (Franken, Rau, Ngata & Parata, n.d.) for effective language learning and teaching (see also Ellis, 2005), rather than understanding task based learning and teaching per se. The programme drew on the current practices of the teachers and made use of epistemology of Māori language and Māori language learning. The paper presents observations from monitoring data collected during the programme supporting the claim that such an approach to the professional development of language teachers promotes a strong knowledge base and pedagogical reasoning skills (Richards, 1998), and in particular for te reo Māori teachers, fosters a sense of their own professional identity

Supporting collocation learning with a digital library

Extensive knowledge of collocations is a key factor that distinguishes learners from fluent native speakers. Such knowledge is difficult to acquire simply because there is so much of it. This paper describes a system that exploits the facilities offered by digital libraries to provide a rich collocation-learning environment. The design is based on three processes that have been identified as leading to lexical acquisition: noticing, retrieval and generation. Collocations are automatically identified in input documents using natural language processing techniques and used to enhance the presentation of the documents and also as the basis of exercises, produced under teacher control, that amplify students' collocation knowledge. The system uses a corpus of 1.3 B short phrases drawn from the web, from which 29 M collocations have been automatically identified. It also connects to examples garnered from the live web and the British National Corpus

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

Middle learners' learning in a university context

This paper focuses on the phenomenon of middle leadership as experienced in a university context and specifically, directs attention to the significance of learning as a central facet of leadership development. Drawing on the reflections of two of the authors as new middle leaders (chairpersons of departments), the paper critically examines how middle leaders learn or come to know aspects of their role, and the learning opportunities and challenges associated with their middle leadership position. Two tenets underpin our analysis: learning is fundamentally a social process – we learn with and from others; and learning is relational – what, and how we learn is determined to some extent by others and affects others. As middle leaders, learning involves those above us (our leaders/line managers), those alongside us (our colleagues/middle leaders of other departments), and those below us (those whom we lead/line manage). The paper arises from a research project that has facilitated professional learning conversations between the three authors and supported us in adopting a relational perspective in our exploration of our experiences as middle leaders. This perspective has allowed us to examine the learning constraints and affordances arising as a result of others above us organising events, creating practices and constructing artefacts for us. It has helped us to consider how we can work collectively with our colleagues to renegotiate events, practices and artefacts; and it has suggested ways in which we can create better learning opportunities for those we lead. Finally, it has led us to identify ways in which the learning opportunities for middle leaders may be enhanced within the university sector

Negotiating identity : An Asian migrant language learner imagining the future

Asian migrants¹ that settle in countries like NZ learn English in the hope of accessing mainstream society. However, this process presents many challenges to their identities and their sense of self worth. This paper explores one migrant’s journey. The case study of "Jessica" used a narrative approach to investigate her identity construction in trying to get entry to a degree programme. The study focuses on significant events collected from eight in-depth interviews over a period of eleven months. In the process of being originally denied entry to university, then later accepted, Jessica negotiated the negative and limited identity imposed on her, re-constructing her identity as a university student and successful language learner with increased self-value. The findings indicate the significance of imposed identities on self-value, the importance of identity negotiation and the close link to a sense of belonging in mainstream society. Journeys such as Jessica’s hopefully make policy makers and language education providers aware of the importance of the sense of self when supporting migrants who are language learners

The Effect of Talk in Argument Text Construction

Research on second language teaching and learning has to date focused primarily on the major skills of reading, writing, listening, and speaking but has treated them as relatively separate areas of investigation. By contrast this research investigates the role of one skill, speaking, in the performance of another, writing. The study investigates the effect of an instructional sequence that aimed to prepare upper high school students (Form 6/Grade 12) to write better argument essays. The sequence was experienced by the students in two ways. One way was for students to engage in talk with a peer before and during writing. The other way was for students to work in a solitary way. Qualitative data analysis compared the writing scores gained by students on two sets of variables: one to indicate the quality of text in general terms (Hamp-Lyons, 1986) and the other to indicate quality of text in terms of specific features of argument: claims, elaboration of claims, grounds and elaboration of grounds (Toulmin, 1958; Toulmin, Rieke and Janki, 1984). The results of the qualitative analysis indicate that opportunity to work with a peer before and during writing had a limited and specific effect on the texts that students wrote. Positive effects for opportunity to talk were seen in the quantity of grounds-related material, but only when students wrote texts that appeared to require more content and domain-specific knowledge (Alexander, Schallert and Hare, 1991). It appeared that talk could operate to help students access relevant prior knowledge (Alexander, Schallert and. Hare, 1991) to support the claims made in their argument texts. Working in a solitary way resulted in significantly better mean scores for linguistic accuracy and complexity. This finding is not consistent with claims made in the output hypothesis (Swain, 1985; Swain, 1995; Swain and Lapkin, 1995). One explanation is that students working together may not have been 'pushed' to consider aspects of language form in attempts to communicate meaning. Another is that this did occur but consideration of form did not transfer to subsequent writing. Another variable that appeared to influence writing quality was the level of resourcing provided for the writing task. Access to textual resources (input in the form of cohesive and linear text) appeared significantly to affect all three of the general measures of text quality, suggesting that textual input is a valuable linguistic and rhetorical resource for writers. When students' texts were analysed specifically for frequency of features of argument, different effects were found for levels of resourcing. Claims and elaboration of claims were most affected by the semi-resourced form of input represented by fact sheets (lists of propositions). Students appeared to make use of input in the form of fact sheets for meeting claim-like requirements in their texts. This might have been because the fact sheets represented information in a way that required the least amount of transformation to be accessible and useful. Analysis of transcript data was carried out on three selected pairs of students to explore the nature of the talk which produced significant and positive results. The type of talk associated with the pair that showed the greatest scores was qualitatively different in terms of the amount and topic of substantive talk and the frequency of responses to initiations. The talk also operated to push each participant, particularly the weaker of the two, to respond, explain and elaborate. The fact that the weaker student in the most productive pair made use of what he articulated suggested that, for him, the talk appeared to set the discourse parameters of the writing task. In addition, the results of the study pointed to the fact that speaking with a partner, particularly a more expert partner, before and during writing can bring positive effects particularly for drawing on relevant prior knowledge thereby enhancing content and domain-specific knowledge. A proficient and interactionally expert partner can promote discussion of relevant prior knowledge useful for supporting claims made in argument texts. The analysis of transcript data indicates that few students show interactional proficiency and that this may prove a worthwhile focus for pedagogy. The present study supports the line of research in collaborative learning (Cohen, 1994) as it has explored the conditions under which positive effects on writing are likely to occur. Research may profitably continue to explore the features of successful interaction and the conditions that successful interaction creates, particularly as it enables better writing. Not only are conditions worthy of further research, so too are effects, as they are likely to operate on different aspects of writing and in different genres. Constraints operating particularly in the area of argument need to continue to be explored empirically. The present study has concluded with the belief that there is still much to know in the relationship between speaking and writing. For this reason, teachers may do well to pay careful consideration to the way in which pair and group tasks are managed in the classroom. This entails the provision of guidance and support for the participants so that purposeful interaction occurs

Editors’ introduction: A collaborative exploration of reflexivity as a pedagogic bridge towards publication for international postgraduate students

Research conducted by postgraduate students is a significant source of new knowledge in universities. While it is increasingly available in digital databases, it is not frequently published, and thus accessible, in the form of academic journal articles (Kamler, 2008; Kwan, 2010; Lassig, Dillon, & Diezmann, 2013). In this article we explore the notion of an academic writing group as a pedagogical arrangement to scaffold international postgraduate students into writing for publication. We draw from our experiences of facilitating collaborative writing workshops with five international postgraduate students from The University of Waikato. These workshops provided a pedagogic space for international students and academic mentors to collectively bridge the often obscured path between thesis writing and writing for academic publication. We explain how a focus on reflexivity offered a way of foregrounding the ‘backstories’ of each student’s research experiences and established a platform from which scholars could discuss and write. We also give consideration to the linguistic and discoursal resources that supported emerging writers to foreground reflexivity in their published text. Each of the articles in this special section celebrate the outcome of this academic writing group by showcasing the published articles that have been written by the international postgraduate students involved in this collaborative writing project. We conclude this article by offering our experiences of a collaborative writing group as one way to facilitate a pedagogic bridge between thesis writing and writing for publication

Bundle-driven move analysis: Sentence initial lexical bundles in PhD abstracts

Rhetorical moves are discoursal units that perform communicative functions in a given genre. They have been manually identified in many previous studies taking a corpus-based approach, and these studies have provided important contributions to discourse structure theories. However, manual analysis has restricted the scale and quantity of texts under investigation and the identification of moves is likely to be influenced by researchers' prior knowledge. In contrast, a corpus-driven approach, by applying automatic computational technology to process a large number of texts, possibly results in a better representation of the moves in a genre and minimises researcher bias in move identification. This study applies one typical corpus-driven approach, a bundle-driven approach, to analyse rhetorical moves of PhD abstracts, a move-intensive genre. The study focused on 5-word sentence initial bundles. Almost all the generated bundles could be identified as move indicators. The majority of the indicated moves aligned with the moves proposed for research article abstracts in previous studies, and one new move, Structure, was identified. This study indicates the potential of a bundle-driven approach in exploring rhetorical moves and in examining the linguistic features of moves by means of lexical bundles. Pedagogical implications for EAP writing are also suggested