links for EAP teachers
We’ve started a Twitter account for BAWE Quicklinks, @BQuicklinks to spread the word about Quicklinks and about DDL in general.
The account will feature regular tweets on specific links and how they were created. Please follow if you want to be kept up to date on developments in BAWE Quicklinks.
Quicklinks users may well be already aware of Tom Cobb’s fantastic Lextutor site with its wide range of tools aimed at helping teachers and learners of English (with some features for other languages too. I’m a frequent user of the excellent Vocab profilers there and there are loads of other useful functions to discover.
One of these is ‘Corpus Grammar‘ which shows the approach outlined in Gaskell and Cobb (2004), a paper that was an inspiration for this project. As with Quicklinks, the idea is to provide learners with access to concordances to help them address issues in their writing – mostly these are grammatical issues such as the one shown below. In the screenshot you can see how the concordances listed below might help a learner who has written ask one of the girl if she can go with you to work out what is wrong and correct it (in the ‘Correction space’.
Tom has been good enough to provide a link to our 2018 open access paper there and a Quicklinks demo should be up soon. Hopefully this will help spread the word about DDL further.
This week we are at the BALEAP 2021 Conference hosted by the University of Glasgow. We are talking about our ongoing study to investigate how students engage with Quicklinks when they are inserted into their work.
The recording of our presentation is available to view and download here. If you want to try out this approach, see here for some ideas.
We’re pleased to announce our latest output, ‘Exploiting corpora to provide guidance for academic writing’. This forms Chapter 1 of Corpora in ESP/EAP Writing Instruction: Preparation, Exploitation, Analysis, ably edited by Maggie Charles and Ana Frankenberg-Garcia, which includes write-ups of a number of papers given at the TALC 2018 Conference.
Our chapter explores examples of corpus outputs other than concordances which can be used to make Quicklinks, including word sketches and collocation lists. The abstract can be downloaded here.
There is little or no mention of corpora in much of the guidance for EAP teacher and learner training. For example, neither BALEAP’s TEAP Accreditation Scheme Handbook (2014) or Competency Framework for Teachers of EAP (2008) make explicit reference to corpora or corpus linguistic approaches, and BALEAP’s Can Do Framework for EAP Syllabus Design and Assessment (2013) treats corpora as text repositories only. Such omissions are surprising because corpus-based work can greatly inform our understanding of discourse, particularly in terms of disciplinary difference.
The aim of this one-day event, held on January 14 2021, was to discuss the role corpora play in EAP teaching (morning session), and to plug the current gap in documentation relating to core corpus skills for academic purposes (afternoon session). The full details with slides and recordings of some very interesting talks can be found here: http://clac.coventry.domains/baal-events/core-corpus-skills-for-academic-english-event-14-jan-2021/
Users of this site may be aware that Sketch Engine, which we have used to create the links, launched a new interface some time ago. This has resulted in a change (at least for concordances) from something like this:
To this (see here for the quicklink entry):
We are now in the process of changing all the links in the directory to the new interface. This is why you may still see some links to the old Sketch Engine interface. This process takes a while but also gives us the opportunity to update the entries and add more different types of output (including frequency distribution and word sketch data). Hopefully these will be complete before too long…
This event was held at the Coventry University London Campus on the afternoon of Friday 7th June and all day Saturday 8th June 2019 and the programme was as follows:
Friday 7th June
14.15- 15.00 Tom Cobb, Université du Québec à Montréal: ‘What do learners actually do with a corpus?’
15.00 – 15.45 Short talks on the use of BAWE in lessons and materials: Sian Alsop, Coventry University, Maria Leedham, Open University and Paul Wickens: Oxford Brookes University.
15.45- 16.15 Break
16.15 – 17.00 Mick O’Donnell, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid: ‘The automatic annotation of BAWE’
17.00 – 17.45 Roy Cross, British Council: ‘Writing for a Purpose, developments and use’
Saturday 8th June
10.15 – 11.00 Peter Crosthwaite, University of Queensland: ‘Taking DDL online: Student engagement with the BAWE through short private online courses’
11.00- 11.30 Michelle Evans, University of Leeds: ‘Using the BAWE genre family classification to explore university genres in Vietnam’
11.30 -12.00 Karin Whiteside, University of Reading: ‘Utilising the BAWE Genre Family Framework to redesign a discipline-specific in-sessional provision: An analysis of core module PGT Business School genres’
12.00 – 13.00 lunch
13.00 – 13.45 Shari Dureshahwar Lughmani, English Language Centre, Hong Kong Polytechnic University: ‘The influence of BAWE on teaching academic writing at universities in Hong Kong’
13.45 – 14.15 Ursula Wingate & Andrew Drummond, Kings College London: ‘Applying the BAWE genre families’
14.15 – 14.45 Benet Vincent & Hilary Nesi, Coventry University: ‘BAWE Quicklinks for DDL’
14.45 – 15.00 tea
15.00– 15.30 panel roundup
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New Directions in DDL (BAAL CL SIG event)
Friday 8 June 2018, 10:00am to 5:00pm
Centre for Academic Writing, Coventry University
Schedule – Click on links to access recordings or abstracts/slides
10.00
Introduction to CLARIN Martin Wynne, OTA (Oxford University)
Reminiscences of Tim Johns John Higgins – video / script and bibliography
10:30-11:00
Scaling up DDL: Challenges of bringing DDL to an online SPOC format Peter Crosthwaite (University of Queensland) – video
11:00-11:30
New directions in DDL for EAP writers Ana Frankenberg-Garcia (University of Surrey), Robert Lew (Adam Mickiewicz University), Geraint Paul Rees (Surrey), Jonathan C. Roberts & Nirwan Sharma (Bangor University) – video / slides
11:45-12:15
Using DDL to support students writing in unfamiliar genres Megan Bruce (Durham University) – video / slides
12:15-12:45
Enhancing Self-Directed Language Learning through Corpus Linguistics: The Proactive Engagement of the Learner Antonio Verolino (University of Pavia) – video / slides
12:45-13:15
Affordable Language Gain? Data-Driven Learning for lower-level ESL Learners: A Mixed-Method Study in Southern China Xin Xu (Cambridge University) – video / slides
14:15-15.00
Starting out with DDL: How do students use their own do-it-yourself corpus? Maggie Charles (Oxford University) – slides
15:00-15.30
The BAWE Quicklinks Project Hilary Nesi and Benet Vincent (Coventry University) – video / slides
15.45-16.45
Quicklinks workshop
Write up in BAAL News (Summer 2018)