An action research study with low proficiency learners in Japan to promote the learning of vocabulary through collocations.

This action research (AR) study explores an alternative approach to vocabulary instruction for low-proficiency university students: a change from targeting individual words from the general service list (West, 1953) to targeting frequent verb + noun collocations. A review of the literature indicated a focus on collocations instead of individual words could potentially address the students’ productive challenges with targeted vocabulary. Over the course of four reflective cycles, this thesis addresses three main aspects of collocation instruction. First, it examines if the students believe studying collocations is more useful than studying individual lexical items. Second, the thesis investigates whether a focus on collocations will lead to improvements in spoken fluency. This is tested through a comparison of a pre-intervention spoken assessment task with the findings from the same task completed 15 weeks later, after the intervention. Third, the thesis explores different procedures for the instructing of collocations under the classroom constraints of a university teaching context. In the first of the four reflective cycles, data is collected which indicates that the students believe a focus on collocations is superior to only teaching individual lexical items, that in the students’ opinion their productive abilities with the targeted structures has improved, and that delexicalized verb collocations are problematic for low-proficiency students. Reflective cycle two produces evidence indicating that productive tasks are superior to receptive tasks for fluency development. In reflective cycle three, productively challenging classroom tasks are investigated further and the findings indicate that tasks with higher productive demands result in greater improvements in spoken fluency. The fourth reflective cycle uses a different type of collocation list: frequent adjective + noun collocations. Despite this change, the findings remain consistent in that certain types of collocations are problematic for low-proficiency language learners and that the evidence shows productive tasks are necessary to improve the students’ spoken ability.

A lifetime of language experience at each click!

Native speakers learn their mother tongue slowly, from birth, by the constant repetition of common words and phrases in a variety of contexts and situations, within the language community. As foreign language learners, we face considerable disadvantages when compared to children learning their mother tongue. Foreign language learners start later in life, have less time, have fewer opportunities to experience the language, and learn in the restricted environment of the classroom. Teachers and books give us information about many words and phrases, but it is difficult for us to know what we need to focus on and learn thoroughly, and what is less important. The rules and explanations are often difficult for us to understand. A large language corpus represents roughly the amount and variety of language that a native-speaker experiences in a whole lifetime. Learners can now access language corpora. We can check which words and phrases are important, and quickly discover their common meanings, collocations, and structural patterns. It is easier to remember things that we find out ourselves, rather than things that teachers or books tell us. Each click on the computer keyboard can show us the same information in different ways, so we can understand it more easily. We can also get many more examples from a corpus. Teachers and native-speakers can also use corpora, to confirm and enhance their own knowledge of a language, and prepare exercises to guide their students. Each of us can learn at our own level and at our own speed.

A study in Britain and France of the development of cross-cultural in-house sales training using distance learning.

The thesis is concerned with cross-cultural distance learning in two countries: Great Britain and France. Taking the example of in-house sales training, it argues that it is possible to develop courses for use in two or more countries of differing culture and language. Two courses were developed by the researcher. Both were essentially print-based distance-learning courses designed to help salespeople achieve a better understanding of their customers. One used a quantitative, the other qualitative approach. One considered the concept of the return on investment and the other, for which a video support was also developed, considered the analysis of a customer's needs. Part 1 of the thesis considers differences in the training context between France and Britain followed by a review of the learning process with reference to distance learning. Part 2 looks at the choice of training medium course design and evaluation and sets out the methodology adopted, including problems encountered in this type of fieldwork. Part 3 analyses the data and draws conclusions from the findings, before offering a series of guidelines for those concerned with the development of cross-cultural in-house training courses. The results of the field tests on the two courses were analysed in relation to the socio-cultural, educational and experiential background of the learners as well as their preferred learning styles. The thesis argues that it is possible to develop effective in-house sales training courses to be used in two cultures and identifies key considerations which need to be taken into account when carrying out this type of work.

A psychological investigation into the relationship between hemispheric functioning and specific written language difficulties (dyslexia), using pharmaceutical intervention techniques

This thesis attempts a psychological investigation of hemispheric functioning in developmental dyslexia. Previous work using neuropsychological methods with developmental dyslexics is reviewed ,and original work is presented both of a conventional psychometric nature and also utilising a new means of intervention. At the inception of inquiry into dyslexia, comparisons were drawn between developmental dyslexia and acquired alexia, promoting a model of brain damage as the common cause. Subsequent investigators found developmental dyslexics to be neurologically intact, and so an alternative hypothesis was offered, namely that language is abnormally localized (not in the left hemisphere). Research in the last decade, using the advanced techniques of modern neuropsychology, has indicated that developmental dyslexics are probably left hemisphere dominant for language. The development of a new type of pharmaceutical prep~ration (that appears to have a left hemisphere effect) offers an oppertunity to test the experimental hypothesis. This hypothesis propounds that most dyslexics are left hemisphere language dominant, but some of these language related operations are dysfunctioning. The methods utilised are those of psychological assessment of cognitive function, both in a traditional psychometric situation, and with a new form of intervention (Piracetam). The information resulting from intervention will be judged on its therapeutic validity and contribution to the understanding of hemispheric functioning in dyslexics. The experimental studies using conventional psychometric evaluation revealed a dyslexic profile of poor sequencing and name coding ability, with adequate spatial and verbal reasoning skills. Neuropsychological information would tend to suggest that this profile was indicative of adequate right hemsiphere abilities and deficits in some left hemsiphere abilities. When an intervention agent (Piracetam) was used with young adult dyslexics there were improvements in both the rate of acquisition and conservation of verbal learning. An experimental study with dyslexic children revealed that Piracetam appeared to improve reading, writing and sequencing, but did not influence spatial abilities. This would seem to concord with other recent findings, that deve~mental dyslexics may have left hemisphere language localisation, although some of these language related abilities are dysfunctioning.

Supporting English language teachers doing further degrees at a distance:a web based strategy researched

This thesis explores how the world-wide-web can be used to support English language teachers doing further studies at a distance. The future of education worldwide is moving towards a requirement that we, as teacher educators, use the latest web technology not as a gambit, but as a viable tool to improve learning. By examining the literature on knowledge, teacher education and web training, a model of teacher knowledge development, along with statements of advice for web developers based upon the model are developed. Next, the applicability and viability of both the model and statements of advice are examined by developing a teacher support site (bttp://www. philseflsupport. com) according to these principles. The data collected from one focus group of users from sixteen different countries, all studying on the same distance Masters programme, is then analysed in depth. The outcomes from the research are threefold: A functioning website that is averaging around 15, 000 hits a month provides a professional contribution. An expanded model of teacher knowledge development that is based upon five theoretical principles that reflect the ever-expanding cyclical nature of teacher learning provides an academic contribution. A series of six statements of advice for developers of teacher support sites. These statements are grounded in the theoretical principles behind the model of teacher knowledge development and incorporate nine keys to effective web facilitation. Taken together, they provide a forward-looking contribution to the praxis of web supported teacher education, and thus to the potential dissemination of the research presented here. The research has succeeded in reducing the proliferation of terminology in teacher knowledge into a succinct model of teacher knowledge development. The model may now be used to further our understanding of how teachers learn and develop as other research builds upon the individual study here. NB: Appendix 4 is only available only available for consultation at Aston University Library with prior arrangement.

ALEX:mobile language assistant for low-literacy adults

Basic literacy skills are fundamental building blocks of education, yet for a very large number of adults tasks such as understanding and using everyday items is a challenge. While research, industry, and policy-making is looking at improving access to textual information for low-literacy adults, the literacy-based demands of today's society are continually increasing. Although many community-based organizations offer resources and support to adults with limited literacy skills, current programs have difficulties reaching and retaining those that would benefit most from them. To address these challenges, the National Research Council of Canada is proposing a technological solution to support literacy programs and to assist low-literacy adults in today's information-centric society: ALEX© – Adult Literacy support application for EXperiential learning. ALEX© has been created together with low-literacy adults, following guidelines for inclusive design of mobile assistive tools. It is a mobile language assistant that is designed to be used both in the classroom and in daily life, in order to help low-literacy adults become increasingly literate and independent.

Protein-protein interactions classification from text via local learning with class priors

Text classification is essential for narrowing down the number of documents relevant to a particular topic for further pursual, especially when searching through large biomedical databases. Protein-protein interactions are an example of such a topic with databases being devoted specifically to them. This paper proposed a semi-supervised learning algorithm via local learning with class priors (LL-CP) for biomedical text classification where unlabeled data points are classified in a vector space based on their proximity to labeled nodes. The algorithm has been evaluated on a corpus of biomedical documents to identify abstracts containing information about protein-protein interactions with promising results. Experimental results show that LL-CP outperforms the traditional semisupervised learning algorithms such as SVMand it also performs better than local learning without incorporating class priors.

Utilising fiction to promote english language acquisition

Towards the end of the university stage, students residing in the United Arab Emirates and specialising in subjects other than English are expected- amongst other university requirements- to have acquired adequate communicative competence as well as a repertoire of critical thinking skills. Despite the efforts made within the field of teaching English to EFL university students in the country, the output gained in terms of acquired skills and competencies is still below expectations. The main concerns of the current thesis are, therefore, a) to investigate the factors which inhibit EFL university students’ progress in the areas of acquiring adequate communicative competence as well as critical thinking skills, and b) to propose a course book and pedagogic methods to improve students’ progress in the areas of acquiring adequate communicative competence as well as critical thinking skills. Believing in the essential role literature plays in enhancing critical thinking and promoting communicative competence on the part of EFL learners, the current study introduces a course, designed and implemented by the researcher: LEARN AND GAIN. The proposed course is fiction-based language teaching, adopting the view that literature is a resource rather than an object, thus advocating the use of literature as one of the main resources in foreign/second language acquisition. Investigating whether or not the proposed course was effective in promoting EFL university students’ communicative competence as well as enhancing their critical thinking skills, a study sample taken from the study population was selected. Adopting an experimental design, the research project involved two groups: experimental and control. The experimental group students were exposed to the proposed course whilst the control group students were exposed to a general English language course. To examine treatment effectiveness, the researcher set and administered a pre-post test. Divided into two main parts, communicative critical reading competence and communicative critical writing competence, the pre-post test measured subjects’ communicative critical reading competence and subjects’ communicative critical writing competence. In addition, a pre-post questionnaire was administered and a semi-structured interview was conducted involving the experimental group students, to gain an awareness of students’ attitudes towards learning literary texts in general, and the proposed course in particular. To examine issues of interest and relevance, gender differences: male vs. female, and university major: science vs. non-science, were also examined for enrichment purposes. For the purpose of gathering sufficient data about subjects’ achievements on the pre-post, the following statistical tests were conducted: Mann-Whitney test, and paired data t-test. Based on the statistical findings, the experimental group students’ performance on the communicative critical reading competence pre-post test and the communicative critical writing competence pre-post test was significantly better than their counterparts of the control group students. Speaking of gender differences in relation to language performance on the communicative critical reading competence pre-post test and the communicative critical writing competence pre-post test, no significant differences were cited. Neither did the researcher cite any significant performance differences between science/non-science students on the communicative critical reading competence pre-post test and the communicative critical writing competence pre-post test. As far as the questionnaire’s findings are concerned, the experimental group students’ responses to the post-questionnaire’s items were more positive than those of their responses to the pre-questionnaire’s, thus indicating some positive attitudes towards literature, which students possibly gained throughout the course of implementation. Relating the discussion to the interview’s results, students conveyed their satisfaction with the proposed course, emphasising that promoting English language skills through the use of literary texts was rewarding. In the light of findings and conclusions, a number of recommendations as well as implications have been proposed. The current study aimed to arrive at some appropriate suggestions to a number of enquiries, yet concluding with some areas of enquiry to be explored for further research.

Automatically Extracting Procedural Knowledge from Instructional Texts using Natural Language Processing

Procedural knowledge is the knowledge required to perform certain tasks, and forms an important part of expertise. A major source of procedural knowledge is natural language instructions. While these readable instructions have been useful learning resources for human, they are not interpretable by machines. Automatically acquiring procedural knowledge in machine interpretable formats from instructions has become an increasingly popular research topic due to their potential applications in process automation. However, it has been insufficiently addressed. This paper presents an approach and an implemented system to assist users to automatically acquire procedural knowledge in structured forms from instructions. We introduce a generic semantic representation of procedures for analysing instructions, using which natural language techniques are applied to automatically extract structured procedures from instructions. The method is evaluated in three domains to justify the generality of the proposed semantic representation as well as the effectiveness of the implemented automatic system.

Engaging employers as partners in work-based learning assessment:proposal for a quality enhancement framework

This paper seeks to advance research and practice related to the role of employers in all stages of the assessment process of work-based learning (WBL) within a tripartite relationship of higher education institution (HEI), student and employer. It proposes a research-informed quality enhancement framework to develop good practice in engaging employers as partners in assessment. The Enhancement Framework comprises three dimensions, each of which includes elements and questions generated by the experiences of WBL students, HEI staff and employers. The three dimensions of the Enhancement Framework are: 1. ‘premises of assessment’ encompassing issues of learning, inclusion, standards and value; 2. ‘practice’, encompassing stages of assessment made up of course design, assessment task, responsibilities, support, grading and feedback; 3. ‘communication of assessment’ with the emphasis on role clarity, language and pathways. With its prompt questions, the Enhancement Framework may be used as a capacity-building tool for promoting, sustaining, benchmarking and evaluating productive dialogue and critical reflection about assessment between WBL partners. The paper concludes by emphasising the need for professional development as well as policy and research development, so that assessment in WBL can more closely correspond to the potentially transformative nature of the learning experience.

“Showing off” your mobile device:adult literacy learning in the classroom and beyond

For a very large number of adults, tasks such as reading. understanding, and using everyday items are a challenge. Although many community-based organizations offer resources and support for adults with limited literacy skills. current programs have difficulty reaching and retaining those that would benefit most. In this paper we present the findings of an exploratory study aimed at investigating how a technological solution that addresses these challenges is received and adopted by adult learners. For this, we have developed a mobile application to support literacy programs and to assist low-literacy adults in today's information-centric society. ALEX© (Adult Literacy support application for Experiential learning) is a mobile language assistant that is designed to be used both in the classroom and in daily life in order to help low-literacy adults become increasingly literate and independent. Through a long-term study with adult learners we show that such a solution complements literacy programs by increasing users' motivation and interest in learning, and raising their confidence levels both in their education pursuits and in facing the challenges of their daily lives.

Learning from a deceptively spacious policy discourse

Networked Learning, e-Learning and Technology Enhanced Learning have each been defined in different ways, as people's understanding about technology in education has developed. Yet each could also be considered as a terminology competing for a contested conceptual space. Theoretically this can be a ‘fertile trans-disciplinary ground for represented disciplines to affect and potentially be re-orientated by others’ (Parchoma and Keefer, 2012), as differing perspectives on terminology and subject disciplines yield new understandings. Yet when used in government policy texts to describe connections between humans, learning and technology, terms tend to become fixed in less fertile positions linguistically. A deceptively spacious policy discourse that suggests people are free to make choices conceals an economically-based assumption that implementing new technologies, in themselves, determines learning. Yet it actually narrows choices open to people as one route is repeatedly in the foreground and humans are not visibly involved in it. An impression that the effective use of technology for endless improvement is inevitable cuts off critical social interactions and new knowledge for multiple understandings of technology in people's lives. This paper explores some findings from a corpus-based Critical Discourse Analysis of UK policy for educational technology during the last 15 years, to help to illuminate the choices made. This is important when through political economy, hierarchical or dominant neoliberal logic promotes a single ‘universal model’ of technology in education, without reference to a wider social context (Rustin, 2013). Discourse matters, because it can ‘mould identities’ (Massey, 2013) in narrow, objective economically-based terms which 'colonise discourses of democracy and student-centredness' (Greener and Perriton, 2005:67). This undermines subjective social, political, material and relational (Jones, 2012: 3) contexts for those learning when humans are omitted. Critically confronting these structures is not considered a negative activity. Whilst deterministic discourse for educational technology may leave people unconsciously restricted, I argue that, through a close analysis, it offers a deceptively spacious theoretical tool for debate about the wider social and economic context of educational technology. Methodologically it provides insights about ways technology, language and learning intersect across disciplinary borders (Giroux, 1992), as powerful, mutually constitutive elements, ever-present in networked learning situations. In sharing a replicable approach for linguistic analysis of policy discourse I hope to contribute to visions others have for a broader theoretical underpinning for educational technology, as a developing field of networked knowledge and research (Conole and Oliver, 2002; Andrews, 2011).