Assessing EFL Speech: A Teacher-Focused Perspective

With the aim of better understanding the difficulties that non-native teachers of English as a foreign language (EFL) face when assessing oral skills, we conducted an educational training activity for in-service teachers, involving action research and reflective practice. In the first part, 27 non-native teachers were asked to use the scales of the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR) to assess a number of authentic EFL speech samples taken from a learner corpus. Their assessment was examined quantitatively as well as qualitatively and compared to that of two native professional raters. While the analyses highlighted a good degree of agreement between the teachers as well as between the teachers and the experts, they also confirmed the often-observed tendency for non-native raters to be more severe in their evaluation of L2 performance than native raters. The results also indicated that teachers and native experts do not base their overall assessment on the same aspects of the spoken performance. For the second part of the study, we designed group activities and discussions to help the teachers reflect on their own practices and learn from those adopted by others. The analyses showed that the teachers did not feel well-equipped to assess speech and that they would benefit from appropriate training in this area

Language for Specific Purposes and Corpus-based Pedagogy

This chapter describes how corpus-based pedagogies are used for teaching and learning language for specific purposes (LSP). Corpus linguistics (CL) refers to the study of large quantities of authentic language using computer-assisted methods, which form the basis for computer-assisted language learning (CALL) that uses corpora for reference, exploration, and interactive learning. The use of corpora as reference resources to create LSP materials is described. Direct student uses of corpora are illustrated by three approaches to data-driven learning (DDL) where students engage in hands-on explorations of texts. A combination of indirect and direct corpus applications is shown in an illustration of interactive CALL technologies, including an example of an inclusive corpus-based tool for genre-based writing pedagogy. The chapter concludes with potential prospects for future developments in LSP

Metatalk in American academic talk: The cases of "point" and "thing"

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/88138/1/swales-metatalk_american_academic.pd

A lexical bundle approach to comparing languages: Stems in English and French

Contrastive studies of phraseology have tended to focus on figurative units, such as idioms and metaphors, and paid comparatively less attention to less colourful types of units such as collocations and lexical bundles, which are equally, if not more, worthy of study. This article tries to fill this gap by exploring the potential contribution of a lexical bundle approach to language comparison. Some guidelines are presented to help solve some of the methodological challenges posed by a cross-linguistic comparison of lexical bundles. The approach is illustrated with a study of lexical bundles in English and French with a particular focus on units that have a metadiscursive function. Two different genres are compared - parliamentary debates and newspaper editorials - in an attempt to tease out systemic differences between languages and genre effects