Presented with Shaoqun Wu at the Symposium on Second Language Writing in Auckland, New Zealand on 21st of November, 2015.

1. Bridging Formal and Informal Learning for
Second Language Writing in FLAX
Alannah Fitzgerald & Shaoqun Wu
Image: https://www.flickr.com/photos/38446022@N00/4866805870

2. Overview
• The FLAX project vision for building language
collections
• MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) content
• Reuse across formal and informal learning
• Open Educational Resources (OER) as corpora
• Open Access publications as corpora
• Free gamed-based apps for Android devices
for interacting with FLAX collections

3. Informal learning - Moocs Massive
open online courses

4. MOOC content in FLAX

5. FLAX language help in Coursera

6. Digital library search interface

7. Law collections in FLAX

8. Openness in corpus development

10. 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).”
http://flax-doc.nzdl.org/BOOK_OF_FLAX/BookofFLAX%20fullsize%20with%20links.pdf

11. EAP teacher-developed corpora

13. http://creativecommons.org/

15. http://www.slideshare.net/cavlec/open-sesame-and-other-open-movements

16. BLaRC Open Access legal corpus
http://flax.nzdl.org/greenstone3/flax?a=fp&sa=collAbout&c=BlaRC&if=

17. Openness in corpus building
Alannah: You know, my next question: Could you have even built the BLaRC without
those open government licenses on all of those documents in the BAILII (British and
Irish Legal Information Institute)?
Maria: No, that’s the thing, that’s the thing. The amazing discovery was the BAILII...
and they have added a lot of overseas legal documents, including United States
documents. They have the whole planet in there. It’s amazing how much stuff you can
find. So, to me it was a huge, huge discovery. That was the best thing that could
happen to me. That’s why I started my research on legal corpora. I mean that was one
of the reasons.
Alannah: Access is so key isn’t, it? And, I’m sure that’s a big part of why the BAILII
exists as well because they knew people couldn’t access LexusNexus.

18. Pilot study on open corpus reuse in
formal learning

19. Construcción de Corpus para I + D:
Proyecto multimodal FLAX
Maria José Marín-Maria Angeles Orts
http://tv.um.es/video?id=71961&cod=a1

20. Pilot study on MOOC remix in Legal
Translation Studies
• 52 students in the fourth year of the Translation Degree at
the University of Murcia (Spain) were selected as
informants. All the students’ linguistic competence level
complied with the CEFR requirements for the B2 level
• The experimental group (16 informants organised in 4 sub-
groups) were requested to only consult the FLAX website as
the single source of information to draft their essays. The
remaining 36 students (divided into 9 different groups)
would act as the control group.
• The subject syllabus did not coincide in its entirety with the
course lessons included in FLAX, only 4 out of 13 topics
overlapped with the ones listed on the online learning
platform.

21. 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

22. Collocations in FLAX

23. Linking to Learning Collocations Collection
(Wikipedia, BNC, BAWE)

24. Lexical Bundles
“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

25. Pilot study
NON-FLAX-BASED TEXTS FLAX-BASED TEXTS
Text
Number
Tokens Text
Number
Tokens
1 4,025 1 6,128
2 10,068 2 4,066
3 5,348 3 4,068
4 5,480 4 2,677
5 9,449 Total 16,939
6 8,495
7 5,133
8 4,004
9 3,028
Total 55,030

26. FLAX text subject areas
FLAX-BASED TEXTS
1. Judicial Decisions: the Meaning of Precedent in Common Law
2. Parliament and Statutes
3. History and Peculiarities of the Common Law
4. Introduction to the Civil and Common Courts. The European Court.
Parliaments and Europe.

27. Non-FLAX text subject areas
NON-FLAX-BASED TEXTS
1. Family Law: a Comparison between the Spanish, British and American
Systems
2. Civil and Criminal Law in the Spanish and Common Law Systems
3. International Law
4. Powers of Attorney in the Spanish and Common Law Systems
5. An overview on Legal Translation in English and Spanish
6. Probate Law: Wills in Civil and Common Law Systems
7. Contracts: a Comparative Study
8. Royal Assent
9. Delegated legislation in the UK, USA and Spain

28. Termostat analysis
TERMS
IDENTIFIED BY
TERMOSTAT
(A)
(Drouin, 2003)
CORPUS SIZE
AFTER
REDUCTION
NUMBER OF
TOPICS (B)
TERM
AVERAGE
(A/B)
FLAX CORPUS 226 16,939 4 56.5
NON-FLAX
CORPUS
385 16,264 9 42.77

29. Initial findings from pilot study
• The experimental FLAX group appears to have acquired the
specialised terminology of the area better than the control Non-
FLAX group as attested by the higher term average
• Figures show that in spite of containing a greater proportion of
terms, which appear to be more specialised, the FLAX corpus has a
poorer lexicon judging by its Standardised Type/token ratio (35.23),
3 points below the same datum obtained from the non-FLAX
corpus.
• Finally, it has also been observed that the lexicon of the FLAX
corpus tends to be more basic than the vocabulary in the non-FLAX
corpus as 78.57% of the words found therein overlapped with the
list of the 3,000 most frequent words of English from the British
National Corpus, as opposed to 62.03% coincidence with the
wordlist extracted from the non-FLAX corpus.

30. Future research
• Repeating the Murcia study to boost data
collection and analysis
• Collecting MOOC learner survey data on
openness of MOOC content for the
development of corpus derivatives for
language support
• Developing diagnostic domain-specific
language tests for MOOC learners
– Tests derived from MOOC content in law corpora

31. FLAX Android APPS for teacher-
developed & mooc collections

32. FLAX TEAM Apps for Android via GooglePlay
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/
File:Android_robot_skateboarding.svg /
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Google_Play_Store.svg

33. Collocation Guessing
Developers’ Interface

34. Collocations Guessing
Learners’ Web Interface

37. Collocation Dominoes
Developers’ Interface

38. Collocation Dominoes
Learners’ Web Interface

43. Thank You
FLAX Language Project & Software Downloads: http://flax.nzdl.org/
The How-to eBook of FLAX: http://flax-doc.nzdl.org/BOOK_OF_FLAX/BookofFLAX%20fullsize%20with%
20links.pdf
FLAX Game-based Apps for Android via Google Play Store (free):
https://play.google.com/store/apps/developer?id=FLAX%20TEAM&hl=en
Ian Witten (FLAX Project Lead): ihw@cs.waikato.ac.nz
Shaoqun Wu (FLAX Research and Development): shaoqun@waikato.ac.nz
Alannah Fitzgerald (FLAX Open Language Research): a_fitzg@education.concordia.ca
Maria José Marín (Legal English Research and Development): mariajose.marin1@um.es
Maria Angeles Orts (Legal English Research and Development): mageorts@um.es
Jemma Konig (FLAX Apps Development): jemmakonig@hotmail.com
Xiaofeng Alex Yu (FLAX Apps Development): Alex.Yu@wintec.ac.nz
OER Research Hub: http://oerresearchhub.org/
TOETOE Technology for Open English Blog: www.alannahfitzgerald.org
Slideshare: http://www.slideshare.net/AlannahOpenEd/
Twitter: @AlannahFitz