Abstract:
This project aims to develop a corpus-based online learning system to help English majors at HKIEd improve their academic writing by enhancing their ability to better understand the appropriate use of academic lexico-grammatical items. The project involved compiling three distinctive corpora:
An English for Academic Purposes (EAP) Learner Corpus,
An EAP Corpus (collected from professional academic authors),
A Chinese for Academic Purposes (CAP) Corpus.
Data were collected respectively from undergraduate students’ English essays at HKIEd, published international journal articles (Social Science Citation Index (SSCI)) concerning language and education and similar articles in Chinese core journals. The three corpora were analysed both individually and in combination in order to (a) identify students’ recurrent difficulties in using English lexico-grammatical items accurately and appropriately in the EAP Learner Corpus, (b) identify the possible sources of such difficulties by studying the differences and similarities of the relevant lexico-grammatical features in the three corpora, and (c) suggest possible remedies that may serve to reduce or eliminate such problems.
The main finished product of this project was a corpus-based online learning system that can enable students to study academic lexico-grammatical items in the three corpora and practice using such items through exercises designed by the team based on the corpus data collected in this study
Code:
3320
Principal Project Supervisors:
Subjects:
- English language -- Study and teching -- Chinese speaker
- English language -- Grammar
- Academic writing
- Corpora (Linguistics) -- Data processing
- Lexical grammar
Start Date:
01 Jun 2009
End Date:
30 Nov 2011
Status:
Completed
Result:
Both the one million-word EAP learner corpus and the one-million-word professional EAP corpus were successfully complied, and the two corpora were built based on 6 main subject areas identified. The complied corpus provided rich data for the team members’ comparative analysis between students’ lexical use and that of the professional academics at the word, sentence, and contextual levels. Clear goals were set for each team member for their analysis; each member designed a number of useful learning activities based on their expertise. The initial trials of these activities among students proved to be successful.
Impact:
The two academic English corpora complied (learner vs. expert) provided teachers with abundant authentic examples to demonstrate how language should be used in academic writing and how learner language use varies from that of the expert. Learners can search in both corpora and identify their problems in lexico-grammatical use in academic writing; in this way they are encouraged to discover use patterns in language, reflect on their own language use and rectify their language in academic writing. In short, the project and its deliverables have benefited both teachers and students: rich resources for teaching academic English for teachers and learning cite for encouraging learning autonomy for students.
Deliverables:
A 1-million-word “English for Academic Purposes (EAP)” Learner Corpus on course essays written by students.
A 1-million-word “English for Academic Purposes (EAP)” Corpus on SSCI journal articles in the domain of language and education.
Corpus-based learning website: http://engres.ied.edu.hk/corpusBasedLearning/
Financial Year:
2008-09
Type:
TDG