2025-10-10
Online social annotation (SA) tools like Hypothes.is offer students a means of working collaboratively on an online document like a webpage. Such collaborations involve multiple students making annotations on a single digital platform to deconstruct assigned course readings. This type of collaborative endeavour is potentially helpful in the Content-Based Instruction (CBI) classroom because the emphasis on academic content in the CBI classroom can lead to difficulties for students, especially when students engage with threshold concepts that form part of the academic content required. Collaborations using SA tools could thus provide opportunities for peer learning and active engagement that would help students in facing the challenge of tackling threshold concepts. This pilot study aims to examine the usefulness of the Hypothes.is platform in the CBI classroom for facilitating student learning of threshold concepts. Analysis of annotations showed that students engaged with assigned electronic webpage articles in a variety of ways. Furthermore, textual analysis of a sample from the course’s final assignment showed evidence that relevant threshold concepts had been utilized appropriately and constructively. Finally, a follow-up survey also indicated a significantly positive response towards the utilization of Hypothes.is. In all, the study’s findings show that the employment of online SA tools can potentially serve as a complementary teaching and learning tool to help students learn through collaborative peer learning and active engagement.
In Scenario-based assessment (SBA), a real-life scenario is created for students to do reading and writing tasks in a computer-mediated environment. It has been recognized that task authenticity will help strengthen assessment validity and task settings and characteristics will influence cognitive efforts. This study attempts to explore the underlying reading-to-write processes in an SBA setting by contrast with those in a non-SBA setting, and thereby investigate the impact of task settings on cognitive processes. Four participants were invited to complete three forms of integrated reading-writing tasks in different settings and then recall their thinking processes stimulated by screen capture recordings and their writing outcomes. The data were analyzed through parsing, encoding, and classifying. The results showed that there were differences between the processes elicited from the SBA setting and the non-SBA setting in the saliency and frequencies of some process categories, and in the ways the source texts were used. Comparatively, the processes summarized in the SBA setting were more congruent with those summarized in theoretical frameworks of integrated reading-writing processes and findings from previous studies in other contexts. The SBA setting not only encouraged a more comprehensive understanding of the multiple texts provided but also found the participants more active in making connections between new and prior ideas rather than scanning for supporting piecemeal information and patch-making. The findings affirmed the effectiveness of the authentic scenario created by computer technology, which provides insights into the constructs and validity of the assessment.
Student plagiarism has been prevalent in academic discourse. This paper investigates through a questionnaire and interviews the use and effectiveness of Turnitin, a major plagiarism detection system, in Chinese university students’ EAP writing in a Sino-foreign joint institute in Shanghai. The study finds except for its online marking tool GradeMark, Turnitin has been well-received by most students. Two most welcomed features are the similarity report and its convenience in submitting assignments. Besides, most students perceived Turnitin as an effective tool in reflecting and reducing plagiarism in their writing. However, the study also shows although students’ general understanding of the Western concept of plagiarism has been greatly improved, some students may still have misconceptions, and lack sufficient knowledge of what constitutes plagiarism, which can be a major factor contributing to the high similarity rate in their writing on Turnitin. Based on these findings, the study puts forward suggestions on how to reduce student plagiarism in EAP writing, in particular pointing out the introduction of Turnitin in EAP writing instruction in EFL contexts may help to cut down plagiarism.
Creating language learning exercises is a time-consuming task and made-up sample sentences frequently lack authenticity. Authentic samples can be obtained from corpora, but it is necessary to identify material that is suitable for language learners. Parallel corpora of written text consist of translated material. Comparing the text in one language with its translation into another (known) language makes the structure accessible to the learner. However, the correspondence of words between the two languages is more important. By carefully selecting well-suited parallel sentences, a learner can explore the target language in a guided way. We present an approach to generate a novel type of language learning exercise from a large parallel corpus based on movie subtitles. The size of the corpus allows for defining selective criteria, favoring precision over recall. It is a non-trivial task to give reliable feedback to automatically generated exercises. ICALL literature often deals with fill-inthe-blanks exercises or multiple-choice questions, which allow for very limited answer options. Our proposed exercise is a special case of sentence reconstruction on bilingual sentence pairs. It combines two elements which have proven to be effective for language learning: a gamified approach, to awaken the students’ competitive desire, and the identification of syntactic structures and vocabulary use, to improve language sensitivity. This article presents the methods used to select example pairs and to implement a prototype.
Machine translation (MT) systems such as Google Translate, Bing or Youdao are increasingly present in everyday life. Anecdotal evidence suggests that language students might use them to produce written work in the target language (TL) and thus possibly get around a potentially difficult writing task. The crucial question to ask would be whether it is possible to differentiate the output of MT from learner language. This paper seeks to address this question by comparing the lexical features of these two types of discourse in the Chinese context. In particular, it examines the use of English translation equivalents of polysemous Chinese words in two parallel corpora: A Chinese webpage corpus translated into English using Bing and Youdao on the one hand and a Chinese learner writing corpus on the other. While the comparison yields similar error rates, it also establishes that human learners and translation engines have difficulties with different sets of words. Word frequency also plays a significant role in differentiating between the two sets of output. The paper concludes with the finding that MT output is sufficiently different from learner language in terms of lexis. The findings could be used to create an algorithm for the detection of ethics code violation through the use of MT engines in written assignments.
Automated Writing Evaluation (AWE) is gaining more and more presence, with Grammarly being a prominent example of this kind of software, which provides automated feedback on essay writing. While the Grammarly advertisement is full of praise regarding its ability to give meaningful feedback at various levels, including grammar or form, plagiarism, vocabulary and style, there has been little third party research to support these claims. Since Grammarly’s vocabulary feedback accuracy has already been examined to some extent (Dodigovic, Mlynarski & Wei, 2016), this study was designed to evaluate the accuracy of Grammarly’s grammar checker feedback. It did so by investigating the reports generated by Grammarly as a response to a small corpus of EFL writing, compiled from essays written by Armenian undergraduate students. The results were compared with those of human raters. In addition to Grammarly’s error detection power, the study also investigated the kind of remediation that Grammarly suggested. The comparisons revealed that on detected errors of form, Grammarly mostly provides accurate feedback, with occasional inconsistencies. It was also found to provide mainly adequate remediation for the correctly detected errors of form. However, it also left a number of errors undetected, which led to the omission of remediation. The study concluded that, despite its considerable usefulness, when using Grammarly, English learners should avoid relying solely on its feedback.
Professor Laurence Anthony is probably best known for his corpus tools – including the freeware concordancer called AntConc. He is also known for his contributions to fields of English for Specific Purposes (ESP), Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Educational Technology. In this interview, Laurence Anthony talks about the early beginnings of his interests in science, programming and language learning; some of the background to AntConc; his views on needs analysis and other aspects of English for Specific Purposes; and his perspectives on machine feedback and machine evaluation.
The purpose of this study is to measure the effect of study abroad on one aspect of learners' pragmatic competence, listenership. A total of 8 Japanese university students participated in this study (4 females and 4 males). Each student was given pragmatic tests at three points in time: within four to seven days of going abroad (pre-test), within seven days of returning to Japan (post-test 1), and approximately eight weeks later (i.e., post-test 2, the delayed post-test). Each of these tests involved participating in an intercultural conversation with a native speaker of English (NES) and being interviewed. To determine the efficacy of preparatory instruction, half of the students set to study abroad (N = 4) were given explicit instruction on listenership. This consisted of two (2-hours each) instructional sessions whereby the teacher drew students' attention to various features of listenership, engaged them in discussions on the implications of cross-cultural communication styles and, subsequently, taught them of some common patterns of listenership in English. The results of this study point to the benefits of long-term study abroad (SA), particularly on the learners who received instruction prior to studying abroad.
In this interview, after briefly summarising his contributions to Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) up to this point in his career, Martin addresses key issues in relation to multilingual grammatical description and functional language typology. He reviews some prominent features of the grammatical descriptive work he is engaged in, elaborates on the notion of defeasible language typology, discusses key hierarchies and complementarities in SFL, comments on recent developments in multilingual grammatical description, and anticipates applications informed by robust functional accounts of diverse languages.
Informed by Critical Genre Analysis (CGA), an English for Specific Purposes (ESP) lesson on classroom language is designed for prospective English teachers in Hong Kong to assist them in demystifying their discursive performance in the professional context of English language classrooms in local schools and achieving pragmatic success in their professional practice of conducting English lessons. Needs of target learners are analyzed with respect to the professional culture, professional practice, and genres relevant to English teachers in Hong Kong. On the basis of the needs analysis, a recorded English lesson language is selected as an input material for the lesson and analyzed at textual, socio-cognitive, and socio-critical levels. Pedagogical procedures of the lesson embody genre analysis, generic transfer, and free genre production. After completion of the lesson, students’ genre ownership, discursive performance, and competent specialist behaviour are expected to be assessed by means of a weblog recording prospective English teachers’ discursive performance during their teaching practice in a local school.
China’s 2001 curriculum reform aimed to shift the exam-oriented teacher-dominated instructional model to quality-oriented learner-centred education. Accordingly, China’s National English Curriculum Standards focus on students’ all-round development to prepare students for future learning and development. The standards aim to facilitate the development of students’ English linguistic and communicative competence, learning and thinking ability, and intercultural awareness and understanding. However, the implementation of the curriculum has been challenging for teachers who are used to traditional teaching styles, and who have large classes with students of varying English learning backgrounds and many other constraints. To date, limited evidence is available regarding how teachers engage with the new curriculum to facilitate learning in the classroom. To illustrate how the curriculum reform has been taken up in terms of teacher practices, this paper reports on classroom activities used in the teaching of vocabulary, grammar and speaking by seven teachers in two secondary schools, drawing on the observation data generated for a larger project investigating teachers’ practices and beliefs. While most teachers mainly used activities in line with traditional practices, some teachers used a range of activities in ways designed to facilitate students’ active learning and practice of English, as well as learning strategies and higher order thinking development. The findings are informative for second or foreign language teachers, teacher educators and policymakers in China and countries of similar contexts.
8-72 characters
1 day ago
Your contribution has been approved successfully
12 hours ago
Your submission has failed to be reviewed; Failure reason: the
