Presented at the EAP and Corpora BALEAP Professional Issues Meeting in Coventry, UK on June 21st 2014. Research and Development Collaboration with the FLAX Language Project (University of Waikato), The Open Educational Resources Research Hub (The UK Open University) and the Language Centre at Queen Mary University of London (with Martin Barge, William Tweddle and Saima Sherazi).
Sharing an Open Methodology for Building Domain-specific Corpora for EAP
1. Sharing an Open Methodology for
Building Domain-specific Corpora for EAP
Martin Barge, William Tweddle,
Saima Sherazi, Alannah Fitzgerald
http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/35165/
2. Outline
• FLAX Language Project at Waikato University
• Developing an EAP Resource Interface between
Traditional EAP and Massive Open Online Courses
• Developing ESAP Collections in FLAX (Academic
English for Law at QMUL)
– What’s in the Demo Collection and What’s to Come!
– Formatting Open Access Articles for FLAX Corpora
• Fully Open Texts
– Beyond Parsing with Text Augmentation & Linked Data
– Lexical Bundles, Collocations, Wordlists, Cherry Picking
Functions
– Building in Interactivity
• Design-based Research with FLAX, Queen Mary and
the OER Research Hub
– Research & Development Cycles with Design-based
Research for Iterating Collections Development
– Rapid Prototyping of Online Demo Collections to Evaluate
the Design Process and to Share with Stakeholders
3. FLAX Language at Waikato University
http://flax.nzdl.org FLAX image by permission of non-commercial reuse by Jane Galloway
4. FLAX Language Project at the
Greenstone Digital Library Lab,
Waikato University NZ
Professor Ian Witten
FLAX Project Lead
Dr Shaoqun Wu
FLAX Project Lead Researcher & Developer
5. QM’s Critical Thinking & Writing in Law
• Queen Mary’s Critical Thinking and Writing in Law
(CTWL) Programme has been running successfully for
over 7 years.
• It is delivered by QM Language Centre’s EAP/ESAP
team as part of the Insessional provision.
• Over 600-800 LLM students enroll on it every year.
• A team of 6-7 EAP tutors teach on it, and are under
constant pressure to develop better and new
materials for their high calibre students.
6. The FLAX System for Subject-
Specific Corpus Development
Corpus Linguistics – pioneered by Sinclair 1991.
DDL – Data-Driven-Learning – term coined by Johns 1991.
An empirical method of linguistic enquiry
•Used to discover the lexico-grammatical properties of genre or text-type
•Used to discover the key terminology given field or discipline – English
for Specific Academic Purposes (ESAP)
•Used for exploring collocations:
“You shall know a word by the company it keeps.” (Frith, 1957:11)
7. Collaboration with Subject Specialists
“In the emerging academic literacies approach
involving cooperation between subject specialists and
writing teachers, the aim is to help the students
develop metacognitive awareness of the roles and
functions of writing in that discipline, to enable them to
stand back from it and observe how it functions, and
then to help them gradually participate in the genres,
where genre is understood as a constellation of actions
rather than a list of formal features.” (Breeze, 2012)
8. Benefits
• Inductive – promotes critical thinking
• Promotes learner autonomy
• Based on evidence, not instinct
• Especially relevant for ESP and ESAP
Limitations
• Need for Ts and Sts to have technical skills to use corpora and
concordancers
• Need for access to corpora and software programmes
• Large amount of data can be overwhelming
“Every student is Sherlock Holmes.” (Johns, 2002:108)
10. ESAP Law Collections in FLAX
Type of media in the FLAX
Law Collections
Number and source of items in the FLAX
Law Collections
Podcast audio files & transcripts
(OpenSpires)
10-15 Lectures (Oxford Law Faculty & the Centre
for Socio-Legal Studies)
MOOC lecture transcripts &
videos (streamed via YouTube &
Vimeo)
4 MOOC Collections: Copyright Law (Harvard/edX),
English Common Law (Uni. of London/Coursera),
Age of Globalization (Texas at Austin/edX),
Environmental Law & Politics (OpenYale)
Student PhD thesis writing and
Pre-sessional for Law ESAP essay
writing
70 QMUL EThoS Theses at the British Library (Open
Access but not licensed with Creative Commons –
will need permission to develop for Non-
Commercial Educational & Research purposes); 20+
Essays from QMUL Law Pre-sessional
Open Access research articles
(relevant to QMUL Law and EAP
for Law and Globalisation)
40 Articles (DOAJ - Directory of Open Access
Journals)
29. Design-Based Research Cycles with FLAX,
the OER Research Hub & Queen Mary
• Practitioners/Researchers involved in iterative
development of ESAP language collections
– Interfacing with open Law resources
Open Access articles, Open Government research reports with
contributions from QMUL Law professors, Case Law, Open lectures,
Openly-licensed student writing
– Developing expertise with open tools and resources
– Developing interaction within the corpus and derivatives
from the corpus
– Documenting the collections development process for
sharing across the EAP and Open Education sectors
30. Free to Do Whatever You Want
• Open Resources for EAP
Soup Dragons:
– Building ESAP Corpora
– Developing Interactivity into
ESAP Corpora
– Developing ESAP Course Book
and Lesson Plan Derivatives
– Researching and Developing
ESAP Corpora & Derivatives
– Researching and Developing
Corpus Tools e.g. Interfaces,
Text Augmentation and
Linked Data Approaches
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Soup_Dragons
31. Thank You
FLAX Language Project flax.nzdl.org
Shaoqun Wu: shaoqun@waikato.ac.nz / Ian Witten: ihw@cs.waikato.ac.nz
OER Research Hub http://oerresearchhub.org/
Alannah Fitzgerald: a_fitzg@education.concordia.ca; @AlannahFitz;
www.alannahfitzgerald.org TOETOE Blog; Slideshare:
http://www.slideshare.net/AlannahOpenEd/
The Language Centre – Queen Mary University of London http://language-centre.
sllf.qmul.ac.uk/
Martin Barge m.i.barge@qmul.ac.uk
William Tweddle w.tweddle@qmul.ac.uk
Saima Sherazi s.n.sherazi@qmul.ac.uk
Editor's Notes
TIRF is The Int. Research Foundation of English language education that is partly funding Alannah to be in the UK to work with QMUL along with the OER Research Hub
CTWL students are target users at QMUL for the Law collections in FLAX in addition to the Pre-Sessional Law-strand students on the summer programme at QMUL. An additional target user group are the MOOC learners registered on the courses where we have reused their MOOC lectures for this corpus.
The Access limitation with corpus-based approaches is dealt with at 3 levels by FLAX:
Free and Open Access of the software (and the code) and most of the corpus resources used. In the case of this Law corpus all resources are open and free.
Accessible interfaces in FLAX that have been designed for the non-expert corpus user, namely language teachers and learners and anybody wanting linguistic support with specific academic resources, here in the case of MOOC learners who are not registered language learners. FLAX avoids the complex querying language which most corpus-based tools rely on users understanding.
Accessible Open Educational Resources and Open Access resources that can be further used in the development of corpus-based derivatives for classroom use as exemplified with this Law ESAP corpus.
Aiming for flexible ESAP (English for Specific Academic Purposes) resources for uptake in traditional classroom-based EAP and in online and open education, including MOOCs.
Less than half of all Open Access journals are published using Creative Commons licenses so this is where Open Educational Resources and Open Source Software have more in common than they do with OA. But there are OA journals we can use and most of which are published under the most flexible Creative Commons licenses e.g. CC-BY with only a few being the most restrictive e.g. CC-ND. Depending on the field there will be less or more OA journals. There are not many OA journals for Law but there are many Openly-licensed government papers in the field of Law. We will look at adding samples of these also in future.
Being able to show demo corpora like the one we are building in FLAX online, enables us to explain to e.g. the British Library, what our intended uses are for theses writing for NC Educational and Research Development purposes for ESAP.
OA articles have been pre-formatted by journals and to remove this formatting is somewhat of a challenge. Martin Barge has developed the first iteration of a formatting OA tool which can export text sections with relevant code into html format for use in FLAX. More iterations of this tool will be developed as we continue to rebuild the corpus.
Text augmentation – linking in other data resources, here Wikipedia, to enhance the efficacy of the corpus
A further example of text augmentation, whereby the smaller subject-specific corpus is linked to larger corpora (The British National Corpus, The British Academic Written English Corpus and Wikipedia as a Corpus) and further resources (Roget’s Thesaurus, Wikipedia,Wiktionary) for comparison across relevant corpora and for further linguistic support for key terms and phrases.
Open resources that you can do whatever you want with: corpus building and online activities based on the corpus with open source software as in the FLAX project; developing course book derivatives from the open resources; researching the effectiveness of the corpus for future iterations of collections building and interface designs.