Second Language Learning in the Context of MOOCs

Shaoqun Wu, Alannah Fitzgerald, Ian H. Witten

2014

Abstract

Massive Open Online Courses are becoming popular educational vehicles through which universities reach out to non-traditional audiences. Many enrolees hail from other countries and cultures, and struggle to cope with the English language in which these courses are invariably offered. Moreover, most such learners have a strong desire and motivation to extend their knowledge of academic English, particularly in the specific area addressed by the course. Online courses provide a compelling opportunity for domain-specific language learning. They supply a large corpus of interesting linguistic material relevant to a particular area, including supplementary images (slides), audio and video. We contend that this corpus can be automatically analysed, enriched, and transformed into a resource that learners can browse and query in order to extend their ability to understand the language used, and help them express themselves more fluently and eloquently in that domain. To illustrate this idea, an existing online corpus-based language learning tool (FLAX) is applied to a Coursera MOOC entitled Virology 1: How Viruses Work, offered by Columbia University.

References

  1. Biber, D., Conrad, S., & Cortes, V. (2003). “Lexical bundles in speech and writing: an initial taxonomy.” In A. Wilson et al. (Eds.), Corpus linguistics by the lune (pp. 71-92). Frankfurt/Main: Peter Lang.
  2. Biber, D., Conrad, S., & Cortes, V. (2004). “If you look at lexical bundles in university teaching and textbooks.” Applied Linguistics, 25, 371-405.
  3. Biber, D., Barbieri F. (2007). “Lexical bundles in university spoken and written registers.” English for Specific Purposes, 26, 263-286.
  4. Bishop, H. (2004) “The effect of typographic salience on the look up and comprehension of unknown formulaic sequences.” In N. Schmidt (Ed.) Formulaic sequences: Acquisition, processing, and use (pp. 227-244). Philadelphia, PA, USA: John Benjamins.
  5. Bloom, B. S. (1984). The 2 sigma problem: The search for methods of group instruction as effective as one-toone tutoring. Educational Researcher, 13 (6), 4-16.
  6. Coxhead, A. (2000). A new academic word list. TESOL Quarterly, 34(2), 213-238.
  7. Daniel, J. (2012). Making sense of MOOCs: Musings in a maze of myth, paradox and possibility. Journal of Interactive Media in Education. Retrieved on Nov 17, 2013 from http://jime.open.ac.uk/2012/18
  8. Dudley-Evans, T., St John, M.J. (1988). Developments in English for Specific Purposes: A multidisciplinary approach. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  9. Gabrielatos, C. (2005) “Corpora and language teaching: Just a fling or wedding bells?” Teaching English as a second or foreign language, 8(4). Retrieved Oct 21 2013 from http://tesl-ej.org/ej32/a1.html.
  10. Hill, J. (2000) “Revising priorities: form grammatical failure to collocational success.” In M. Lewis (Ed.), Teaching collocation, 70-87, LTP, England.
  11. Hyland, K. (2006). English for Academic Purposes: An advanced resource book. London: Routledge.
  12. Milne, D. and Witten, I.H. (2013) “An open-source toolkit for mining Wikipedia.” Artificial Intelligence, (194), pp. 222-239, January.
  13. Nesselhauf, N. (2003) “The use of collocations by advanced learners of English and some implications for teaching.” Applied Linguistics, 24(2), 223-242.
  14. Ng, A. and Koller, D. (2013) “The online revolution: education for everyone.” Proc ACM SIGKDD Int Conf on knowledge discovery and data mining, p.2.
  15. Siemens, G. (2005). Connectivism: A learning theory for the digital age. International Journal of Instructional Technology & Distance Learning, 2(1).
  16. Stubbs, M., and Barth, I. (2003) “Using recurrent phrases as text-type discriminators.” Functions of Language, 10(1), 61-104.
  17. UK Government Department of Business Innovation & Skills. (2013). The maturing of the MOOC. London: UK Government Publications.
  18. West, M. (1953). A general service list of English words. Longman, Green & Co., London.
  19. Witten, I.H., Bainbridge, D. and Nichols, D.M. (2010). How to Build a Digital Library. Morgan Kaufmann, Burlington, MA (second edition).
  20. Wu, S. and Witten, I.H. (2013) “Transcending concordance: Augmenting academic text for L2 writing.” Submitted to Computer Assisted Language Learning Journal.
Download


Paper Citation


in Harvard Style

Wu S., Fitzgerald A. and H. Witten I. (2014). Second Language Learning in the Context of MOOCs . In Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Computer Supported Education - Volume 1: CSEDU, ISBN 978-989-758-020-8, pages 354-359. DOI: 10.5220/0004924703540359


in Bibtex Style

@conference{csedu14,
author={Shaoqun Wu and Alannah Fitzgerald and Ian H. Witten},
title={Second Language Learning in the Context of MOOCs},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Computer Supported Education - Volume 1: CSEDU,},
year={2014},
pages={354-359},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0004924703540359},
isbn={978-989-758-020-8},
}


in EndNote Style

TY - CONF
JO - Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Computer Supported Education - Volume 1: CSEDU,
TI - Second Language Learning in the Context of MOOCs
SN - 978-989-758-020-8
AU - Wu S.
AU - Fitzgerald A.
AU - H. Witten I.
PY - 2014
SP - 354
EP - 359
DO - 10.5220/0004924703540359