1. What is a digital library?
The term ‘digital library’ refers to a wide range of electronic sources of information, including such sources as the Web, bibliographic information, and shared databases.
The digital library concept is applied to a collection of texts, including but not restricted to those selected by the teacher.
The texts are organized into a digital library by means of specific software, Greenstone (
The collection is searchable and browseable (see Franken & Wu, 2012).
It can be used to query student-generated text; and to generate language exercises (see Wu, Franken & Witten, in press).
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This work sits within the
New Zealand Digital Library Project,
a research programme at the University of Waikato whose aim is to develop the underlying technology (Greenstone) for digital libraries and make it available publicly so that others can use it to create their own collections.
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Data Driven Learning (DDL)
In DDL, a student has access to a large body of authentic language, from which s/he can extract language items in context. (see Boulton, 2011)
The student is a language “research worker” (Johns).
Corpus Linguistics
Corpus linguistics is the analysis of language patterns occurring in a corpus - a database of natural texts, compiled from writing or a transcription of recorded speech.
surgical and almost consequence free uh in order that that public opinio
uh which would be a consequence only of the part-time and working time
indications that the consequence of that is that there is very little tax
atever the cause the consequence was clear
Concordancer
“a piece of software… [is] used to search, access and analyse language from a corpus” (Peachey, 2005, What is a concordancer? Section, ¶ 1).
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Collocation
database
Digital Library:
e.g.
Academic Abstracts
BAWE corpus
Any other resource
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
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Using the Academic Abstracts collection: Educational leadership
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SQ’s page
to comment on identification of colocations
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Observations of student use of the Educational Leadership Abstracts collection
However, there was evidence of some teachers who engage in innovative practices in science teaching. What this implies is that teacher self-efficacy in teaching in rural schools like being innovative can be improved depending on how long they teach and experience. It is fundamental to explore rural secondary school science teachers’ work and perceptions. One of the ways to address problems faced by science teachers in rural schools is to involve them in professional development programs that will build up their capacity of pedagogical content knowledge to improve the quality of education. This view has been supported by Baker and Ambrose (1985) who concluded that management of rural schools have been recommended for their teachers undertake in-service training to meet the requirements of the new educational reforms. (Sections of EG’s literature review showing ‘traces’)
‘tracks’ and ‘traces’ in Franken & Wu in press
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Using the BAWE corpus
SQ’s page
The British Academic Written English (BAWE) corpus was created through a project entitled 'An investigation of genres of assessed writing in British Higher Education' from
The BAWE corpus contains 2761 pieces of proficient assessed student writing, ranging in length from about 500 words to about 5000 words. Holdings are fairly evenly distributed across four broad disciplinary areas (Arts and Humanities, Social Sciences, Life Sciences and Physical Sciences) and across four levels of study (undergraduate and taught masters level). Thirty-five disciplines are represented.
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SQ architecture of page
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11. Observations of student use of the subset of the BAWE corpus
Words or phrases I had heard before but had trouble understanding properly, it was very good to look up these in relation to my assignment.
Origins of words like notation that were used in a different context that I’m used to. Makes me understand the text better.
When reading other texts related to assignment I could look words up I didn't understand.
I looked up words that I normally overlook as normal dictionaries don't tend to have these phrases or words.
(EC’s comments on using the system for her phonology assignment)
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Affordances
Directive cues (Grabinger & Osman-Jouchoux, as cited in Bishop, 2004, p. 229) support the process of noticing in that they allow students to be selective in what they focus on, making it less likely that they will be overwhelmed by too much information or text.
Multiple contexts provide rich information on a word’s ‘personality’ (McAlpine & Myles, 2003) - a word’s collocates, grammatical patterns, word family members, related meanings, and homonyms (Nation, 2001).
“The power of themes to draw together and recycle the specialized vocabulary of expository materials should… be duly noted in many areas of English language education, especially in content-based instruction and English for academic purposes” (Gardner, 2008).
The combination of discourse and corpus work is particularly valuable as it “can provide enriched input for students, thus enabling them to make the connection between general rhetorical purposes and specific lexico-grammatical choices. This understanding is essential to the construction of appropriate academic discourse (Charles, 2007, p.300)
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References
Boulton, A. (2011). Data driven learning: The perpetual enigma. In S. Goźdź-Roszkowski (Ed.), Explorations across languages and corpora (pp ). Frankfurt: Peter Lang. Charles, M. (2012) “Proper vocabulary and juicy collocation: EAP students evaluate do-it- yourself corpus building.” English for Specific Purposes, Vo. 31, pp. 93–102. Franken, M. & Wu. S. (2012). The nature and scope of student search strategies in using a web derived corpus for writing. The Language Learning Journal. doi: / McAlpine, J. and Myles, J. (2003) Capturing phraseology in an online dictionary for advanced users of English as a second language: A response to user needs. System 31, Nation, P. (2001). Learning vocabulary in another language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wu, S., Franken, M., & Witten, I. H. (in press). Collocation games from a language corpus. In Reinders, H. (Ed.), Computer games in language learning and teaching. Palgrave McMillan.
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Bibliography
Franken, M. (2010). Exploring digital library possibilities for English language learners. Proceedings of International Conference of Education, Research and Innovation (ICERI). Madrid, Spain: International Association for Technology, Education and Development (IATED). Franken, M. & Wu. S. (2012). The nature and scope of student search strategies in using a web derived corpus for writing. The Language Learning Journal. doi: / Wu, S., Franken, M., & Witten, I. H. (in press). Collocation games from a language corpus. In Reinders, H. (Ed.), Computer games in language learning and teaching. Palgrave McMillan. Wu, S., Franken, M., & Witten. I. H. (2010). Supporting collocation learning with a digital library. Computer Assisted Language Learning. 23(1) doi: / Wu, S., Franken, M. & Witten, I. H. (2009). Refining the use of the web (and web search) as a language teaching and learning resource. Computer Assisted Language Learning 22(3), Wu, S., Witten, I. H. & Franken, M. (2010). Utilizing lexical data from a Web-derived corpus to expand productive collocation knowledge. ReCALL, 22(1), 83–102. doi: /S
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