Investigating an open methodology for designing domain-specific language collections

With this research and design paper, we are proposing that Open Educational Resources (OERs) and Open Access (OA) publications give increasing access to high quality online educational and research content for the development of powerful domain-specific language collections that can be further enhanced linguistically with the Flexible Language Acquisition System (FLAX, http://flax.nzdl.org). FLAX uses the Greenstone digital library system, which is a widely used open-source software that enables end users to build collections of documents and metadata directly onto the Web (Witten, Bainbridge, & Nichols, 2010). FLAX offers a powerful suite of interactive text-mining tools, using Natural Language Processing and Artificial Intelligence designs, to enable novice collections builders to link selected language content to large pre-processed linguistic databases. An open methodology trialed at Queen Mary University of London in collaboration with the OER Research Hub at the UK Open University demonstrates how applying open corpus-based designs and technologies can enhance open educational practices among language teachers and subject academics for the preparation and delivery of courses in English for Specific Academic Purposes (ESAP)

Second language learning in the context of MOOCs

Massive Open Online Courses are becoming popular educational vehicles through which universities reach out to non-traditional audiences. Many enrolees hail from other countries and cultures, and struggle to cope with the English language in which these courses are invariably offered. Moreover, most such learners have a strong desire and motivation to extend their knowledge of academic English, particularly in the specific area addressed by the course. Online courses provide a compelling opportunity for domain-specific language learning. They supply a large corpus of interesting linguistic material relevant to a particular area, including supplementary images (slides), audio and video. We contend that this corpus can be automatically analysed, enriched, and transformed into a resource that learners can browse and query in order to extend their ability to understand the language used, and help them express themselves more fluently and eloquently in that domain. To illustrate this idea, an existing online corpus-based language learning tool (FLAX) is applied to a Coursera MOOC entitled Virology 1: How Viruses Work, offered by Columbia University

TOETOE International: FLAX Weaving with Oxford Open Education Resources. Open Educational Resources International Case Study.

This case study has been assembled into an ethnographic account (LeCompte & Schensul 1999:17; Clifford 1990:51-52) to stop the clock as it were and to reorder the recent past that has been observed and jotted down; to systematize, contextualize and assemble the activity of the TOETOE International project (tɔɪtɔɪ: Technology for Open English – Toying with Open E-resources) with the University of Oxford across seven different countries over a period of four months. It is part narrative and part design dialectic, drawing on stories and evaluations made by international stakeholders concerning the re-use of Oxford content: Oxford-managed corpora (large text and audio-visual resource collections) and Oxford-created open educational resources (OER). Moreover, these evaluation narratives continue to inform the design of open-source digital library software for developing flexible open English language learning and teaching collections with the FLAX project (Flexible Language Acquisition flax.nzdl.org) at the University of Waikato in New Zealand

Openness in English for Academic Purposes. Open Educational Resources Case Study: Pedagogical development from OER practice.

Commissioned by the Higher Education Academy (HEA) in the United Kingdom, this case study has been written as an introductory guide for teachers and researchers working with international and home students for whom it would be beneficial to develop competencies with academic English as it is used across the disciplines. In particular, as per the HEA directives handed down in commissioning this case study, Open Educational Resources (OER) and teaching quality are the theme to be addressed in this report with respects to the open web-based tools, resources and practices in English for Academic Purposes (EAP) that will be introduced here. A range of open corpus-based tools, resources and techniques will be demonstrated and discussed in section four, looking at different language projects from around the world that provide free access to valuable English language resources which are relevant for use both within and beyond traditional higher education. Because these tools and resources are openly available they can be used and shared by learners and teachers across a variety of contexts. For example, in language schools and in university language support centres, in open and distance education, and in independent or informal learning. They range from tools and resources that can provide diagnostic help for improving vocabulary, reading and writing to resources that can assist with identifying, retrieving, storing and managing useful words and phrases as they occur across a variety of authentic academic and general English language contexts. Findings and resources will also be shared in section three, based on an OER cascade study that was carried out with EAP teachers and students at Durham University English Language Centre (DUELC). As part of the TOETOE project (ˈtɔɪtɔɪ: Technology for Open English – Toying with Open E-resources), three corpus-based projects - FLAX , the Lextutor , and AntConc - were trialed for their efficacy in mainstream EAP teaching and learning practice. A fourth corpus-based project, WordandPhrase , was introduced at one of the project dissemination events and will also be introduced here in this case study. None of the participants in the study had received any prior training with corpus-based resources for Data-Driven Learning (DDL) in language education. Initial findings from this study at Durham University on the design and usability of corpus-based resources have informed on-going research and development work with the TOETOE project in collaboration with the open-source FLAX project at the University of Waikato in New Zealand

A new paradigm for open data-driven language learning systems design in higher education

This doctoral thesis presents three studies in collaboration with the open source FLAX project (Flexible Language Acquisition flax.nzdl.org). This research makes an original contribution to the fields of language education and educational technology by mobilising knowledge from computer science, corpus linguistics and open education, and proposes a new paradigm for open data-driven language learning systems design in higher education. Furthermore, the research presented in this thesis uncovers and engages with an infrastructure of open educational practices (OEP) that push at the parameters of policy for the reuse of open access research and pedagogic content in the design, development, distribution, adoption and evaluation of data-driven language learning systems. Study 1 employs automated content analysis to mine the concept of open educational systems and practices from qualitative reflections spanning 2012-2019 with stakeholders from an on-going multi-site design-based research study with the FLAX project. Design considerations are presented for remixing domain-specific open access content for academic English language provision across formal and non-formal higher education contexts. Primary stakeholders in this ongoing research collaboration include the following: knowledge organisations – libraries and archives including the British Library and the Oxford Text Archive, universities in collaboration with Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) providers; an interdisciplinary team of researchers; and knowledge users in formal higher education – English for Academic Purposes (EAP) practitioners. Themes arising from the qualitative dataset point to affordances as well as barriers with the adoption of open policies and practices for remixing open access content for data-driven language learning applications in higher education against the backdrop of different business models and cultural practices present within participating knowledge organisations. Study 2 presents a data-driven experiment in non-formal higher education by triangulating user query system log data with learner participant data from surveys (N=174) on the interface designs and usability of an automated open source digital library scheme, FLAX. Text and data mining approaches (TDM) common to natural language processing (NLP) were applied to pedagogical English language corpora, derived from the content of two MOOCs, (Harvard University with edX, and the University of London with Coursera), and one networked course (Harvard Law School with the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society), which were then linked to external open resources (e.g. Wikipedia, the FLAX Learning Collocations system, WordNet), so that learners could employ the information discovery techniques (e.g. searching and browsing) that they have become accustomed to using through search engines (e.g. Google, Bing) for discovering and learning the domain-specific language features of their interests. Findings indicate a positive user experience with interfaces that include advanced affordances for course content browse, search and retrieval that transcend the MOOC platform and Learning Management System (LMS) standard. Further survey questions derived from an open education research bank from the Hewlett Foundation are reused in this study and presented against a larger dataset from the Hewlett Foundation (N=1921) on motivations for the uptake of open educational resources. Study 3 presents a data-driven experiment in formal higher education from the legal English field to measure quantitatively the usefulness and effectiveness of employing the open Law Collections in FLAX in the teaching of legal English at the University of Murcia in Spain. Informants were divided into an experimental and a control group and were asked to write an essay on a given set of legal English topics, defined by the subject instructor as part of their final assessment. The experimental group only consulted the FLAX English Common Law MOOC collection as the single source of information to draft their essays, and the control group used any information source available from the Internet to draft their essays. Findings from an analysis of the two learner corpora of essays indicate that members of the experimental group appear to have acquired the specialised terminology of the area better than those in the control group, as attested by the higher term average obtained by the texts in the FLAX-based corpus (56.5) as opposed to the non-FLAX-based text collection, at 13.73 points below

A data-driven learning experiment in the legal English classroom using the FLAX platform

This research presents a data-driven experiment in the legal English field where the FLAX, an open-source self-learning online platform, is assessed as regards its efficacy in aiding a group of legal English non-native undergraduates (divided into an experimental and a control group) to use legal terminology more consistently, amongst other language items. The experimental group were instructed to only resort to the FLAX and to exploit all the functionalities offered by it. Conversely, the control group could access any information source at hand except for the learning platform for the completion of the same task.  Two learner corpora were gathered and analysed on a lexical and pragmatic level for the evaluation of term usage and distribution, lexical diversity, lexical fundamentality and the use of discourse markers. The results display a tendency on the part of the experimental group towards a more consistent usage of legal terminology, which also appears to be better distributed than the terms in the non-FLAX corpus. In contrast and on average, the lexicon in the FLAX-based corpus tends to be slightly more basic. Concerning the use of MD markers, the experimental group appears to use, though marginally, a greater number of evidentials, endophoric and interactional markers.En este artículo se presenta un experimento basado en corpus para la enseñanza del inglés jurídico donde se evalúa la plataforma FLAX, un sistema online de aprendizaje de lenguas, como apoyo a la enseñanza de esta variedad del inglés. Los informantes fueron divididos en un grupo experimental y otro de control. Al grupo experimental se le pidió que utilizara únicamente FLAX para la realización de la tarea haciendo uso de todas las opciones que facilita dicha plataforma. Por el contrario, el grupo de control podría utilizar cualquier fuente de información para la realización del trabajo a excepción de FLAX. Se compilaron dos corpus con el material elaborado por los informantes y se analizaron a nivel léxico y pragmático para la evaluación del uso y la distribución de la terminología especializada, la diversidad léxica y el uso de los marcadores del discurso. Los resultados muestran una tendencia por parte del grupo experimental hacia un uso más consistente de la terminología jurídica, que además parece estar mejor distribuida que lo está en el corpus del grupo de control. En lo que respecta al uso de los marcadores del discurso, el grupo experimental emplea un mayor número de marcadores endofóricos, interaccionales y evidenciales

Making use of and adapting MOOCs text resources for language learning

Massive Open Online Courses are becoming popular educational vehicles through which universities reach out to non-traditional audiences. Many enrollees hail from other countries and cultures, and struggle to cope with the English language in which these courses are invariably offered. Moreover, most such learners have a strong desire and motivation to extend their knowledge of academic English, particularly in the specific area addressed by the course. Online courses provide a compelling opportunity for domain-specific language learning, a growing trend in language teaching and learning. Typical MOOCs supply a large corpus of interesting linguistic material relevant to a particular area, including supplementary images (slides), audio and video. Such corpus provides an excellent context to study domain-specific lexico-grammatical features of any word or phrase, a challenging aspect of English productive use even for quite advanced learners. We contend that this corpus can be automatically analysed, enriched, and transformed into a resource that learners can browse and query in order to extend their ability to understand the language used, and help them express themselves more fluently and eloquently in that domain. To illustrate this idea, an existing online corpus-based language learning tool (FLAX) is applied to a Coursera MOOC entitled English Common Law offered by University of London. We will illustrate how this resource has been augmented for language learning, and then review how learners can use it to explore language usage. This article uses a single running example, a Coursera MOOC course, but the approach is fully automated and can be applied to any collection of English writing

Automatically augmenting academic text for language learning: PhD abstract corpora with the British Library

This chapter describes the automated FLAX language system (flax.nzdl.org) that extracts salient linguistic features from academic text and presents them in an interface designed for L2 students who are learning academic writing. Typical lexico-grammatical features of any word or phrase, collocations and lexical bundles are automatically identified and extracted in a corpus; learners can explore them by searching and browsing, and inspect them along with contextual information. This chapter uses a single running example, the PhD abstracts corpus of 9.8 million words, derived from the open access Electronic Theses Online Service (EThOS) at the British Library, but the approach is fully automated and can be applied to any collection of English writing. Implications for reusing open access publications for non-commercial educational and research purposes are presented for discussion. Design considerations for developing teaching and learning applications that focus on the rhetorical and lexico-grammatical patterns found in the abstract genre are also discussed

F-Lingo: Integrating lexical feature identification into MOOC platforms for learning professional and academic English

F-Lingo is a chrome extension that works on top of the FutureLearn MOOC platform to support content-based language learning of domain-specific terminology for professional and academic purposes

Evaluating the efficacy of the digital commons for scaling data-driven learning

This chapter presents the open-source FLAX project (Flexible Language Acquisition, flax.nzdl.org), an automated digital library scheme, which has developed and tested an extraction method that identifies typical lexico-grammatical features of any word or phrase in a corpus for data-driven learning. Here in this study, FLAX will be described and discussed in relation to the reuse of openly licensed content available in the digital commons. Typically, the digital commons involves the creation and distribution of informational resources and technologies that have been designed to stay in the digital commons using various open licenses, including the GNU Public License and the Creative Commons suite of licenses (Wikipedia, 2016; see also the chapter by Stranger-Johannessen, this volume). One of the most widely used informational resources developed by and for the digital commons is Wikipedia. In response to the growing digital commons, we will provide insights into design considerations for the reuse of transcribed video lectures from Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) that have been licensed with Creative Commons as Open Educational Resources (OERs). We will demonstrate how OERs can be remixed with open corpora and tools in the FLAX system to support English for Specific Academic Purposes (ESAP) in classroom-based language education contexts