1. The Open-Source FLAX Language System
Alannah Fitzgerald
Shaoqun Wu
Ian H. Witten
Xiaofeng Yu

2. The eBook of FLAX
“FLAX (Flexible Language Acquisition) is both a vision and a tool that you can use for language learning. The Web contains innumerable language activities, quizzes, and games, but they are fixed: the activities are cast in stone and the material is chosen by others. Our vision is to put the control back where it belongs, in the hands of teachers and learners.”

3. Who are we in this flax research & Development collaboration?

4. FLAX Language at Waikato University
FLAX image by permission of non-commercial reuse by Jane Galloway

5. FLAX Language Project at the Greenstone Digital Library Lab, Waikato University NZ
Dr Shaoqun Wu
FLAX Project Lead Researcher & Developer
Professor Ian Witten
FLAX Project Lead

6. Research on Open FLAX Collections
Alannah Fitzgerald
Open Fellow with OERRH
FLAX Language & Open
Education Researcher

7. Open Source language TOOLS development

8. FLAX Digital Library Collections
Collocations
database
FLAX Digital Library Collections
Open Educational Resources
Teachers can construct collections of different types: for different purposes and for different types of students.
The collections can be:
item specific
domain and/or topic specific
graded for levels of difficulty
representative of a particular source or of a particular genre
subsets of a larger corpus e.g. BAWE.
Potentially students can also construct collections (see Charles, 2012)
Glossary

9. Google-esque Interface Designs
Designed for the non-expert corpus user, namely:
learners, teachers, subject academics, instructional designers and language resource developers.

10. Introducing the Wikipedia Miner Toolkit (Milne & Witten, 2013)

11. Building Interactivity into FLAX Language Collections

12. FLAX Activities Continued

13. Free Android Apps

14. FLAX Across Platforms
FLAX Website flax.nzdl.org for hosting open online language collections
Building directly onto the Web with OER
FLAX multilingual open-source software for download
Set up your own FLAX server online or;
Build collections offline for use on your PC
FLAX Android app for download
Interact with game-based FLAX collections while on the go
FLAX for MOODLE plug-in for download
FLAX for MOOC Platforms?
FLAX in conjunction with translation technologies?

15. Domain-specific open language collections building

17. The eBook of FLAX
“FLAX enables teachers to build bespoke libraries very easily. It is built upon powerful digital library technology, and provides access to vast linguistic resources containing countless examples of actual, authentic, usage in contemporary text. But teachers can also build collections using their own material, focusing on language learning in a particular domain (e.g., business, law) or motivating students by using text from a particular context (e.g., country or region, common interests).”

18. Working with Full Texts

19. Wikify Your Collections

20. Domain-specific Collocations
We focus on lexical collocations with noun-based structures because they are the most salient and important patterns in domain-specific text.
Collocations from the English Common Law MOOC:
verb + noun e.g. abolish judicial review
noun + noun e.g. precedent case
adjective + noun e.g. common law
noun + of + noun e.g. court of appeal

21. Lexical Bundles Bundles from British Law Report Corpus (BLaRC):
“Lexical bundles” are multi-word sequences with distinctive syntactic patterns and discourse functions that are commonly used in academic prose (Biber & Barbieri, 2007; Biber et al, 2003, 2004).
Bundles from British Law Report Corpus (BLaRC):
noun phrase + of e.g. In the course of his
prepositional phrase + of e.g. on the part of the
it + verb/adjective phrase e.g. it is common ground that
be + noun/adjective phrase e.g. be taken into account in
verb phrase + that e.g. There is no doubt that

22. Lexical Bundles

23. Collocations Within Collections

24. Linking to the FLAX Learning Collocations Collection (Wikipedia, BNC, BAWE)

25. Good Ol’ Part-Of-Speech Tagging

26. References
Biber, D., Conrad, S., & Cortes, V. (2003). Lexical bundles in speech and writing: an initial taxonomy. In A. Wilson, P. Rayson, & T. McEnery (Eds.), Corpus linguistics by the lune: A festschrift for Geoffrey Leech (pp. 71–92). Frankfurt/Main: Peter Lang. 
Biber, D., Conrad, S., & Cortes, V. (2004). If you look at . . .: lexical bundles in university teaching and textbooks. Applied Linguistics, 25, 371–405. Biber, D. (2006). University Language, A corpus-based study of spoken and written registers. John Benjamins, Amsterdam.
Biber, D., Barbieri F. (2007). Lexical bundles in university spoken and written registers. English for Specific Purpose, 26, 263–286.
Milne, D. & Witten, I.H. (2013). An open-source toolkit for mining Wikipedia. Artificial Intelligence, 194,

27. August 16, 2010
Look Out for FLAX in April with Russell Stannard’s - Teacher Training Videos

28. Thank You
FLAX Language Project & Software Downloads: The How-to eBook of FLAX: FLAX Game-based Apps for Android: Alannah Fitzgerald: Shaoqun Wu: Ian Witten: Xiaofeng (Alex) Yu: OER Research Hub: TOETOE Technology for Open English Blog: Slideshare:
Please add your contact detes here, QMUL peeps!