CMC & Teacher Ed SIGs Joint Annual Seminar – Università di Bologna, 29-30 March 2012

LEARNING THROUGH SHARING :LEARNING THROUGH SHARING :LEARNING THROUGH SHARING :LEARNING THROUGH SHARING :

OPEN RESOURCES, OPEN PRACTICES, OPEN COMMUNICATIO OPEN RESOURCES, OPEN PRACTICES, OPEN COMMUNICATIO OPEN RESOURCES, OPEN PRACTICES, OPEN COMMUNICATIO OPEN RESOURCES, OPEN PRACTICES, OPEN COMMUNICATIONNNN

This is a draft paper. Please do not distribute or quote from it unless you have obtained

explicit authorisation from the author(s).

Open Educational Resources in Teaching English for Academic Purposes: opening up practice with open corpora, open tools and open content

Alannah Fitzgerald, Durham University English Language Centre & The Open University Support Centre for Open Resources in Education (SCORE), a.t.d.fitzgerald@durham.ac.uk \ alannah.fitzgerald@education.concordia.ca

Terri Edwards, Durham University English Language Centre, terri.edwards@durham.ac.uk

Clare Carr, Durham University English Language Centre, c.c.barker@durham.ac.uk

Abstract

With the Open Educational Resources (OER) and the Open Source Software (OSS) movements we have witnessed an explosion in digital resources available on the web for language learning and teaching. However, as language teaching practitioners we do not currently receive formal training in how to locate, use, adapt, create and share OER with our respective communities of practice (CoP). The sustainability of OER is therefore dependent on those informal CoPs who are engaging in open practices and those practitioners who are acting as OER in their various roles as teachers, trainers and researchers. Consequently, it is of high importance to consider how best to transfer this open practice, enabling non-specialists to engage with OER.

This paper presentation will explore a corpus linguistics approach to OER in teaching English for Academic Purposes (EAP) based on an empirical OER cascade study conducted in the United Kingdom at Durham University’s English Language Centre (DUELC) as part of the TOETOE (Technology for Open English – Toying with Open E-resources) project, managed by Alannah Fitzgerald, with the Support Centre for Open Resources in Education (SCORE) at the Open University. The Flexible Language Acquisition Project (FLAX) http://flax.nzdl.org/greenstone3/flax based on OSS at the University of Waikato in New Zealand will also be introduced. In particular, an exploration of the development of open corpora, web phrases and web collocations, derived from Google and Wikipedia n-gram collections will be provided along with a discussion on the feasibility of developing similar corpora with FLAX for other modern European languages.

Teaching participants involved in the OER cascade project at DUELC, Terri Edwards and Clare Carr, both experienced EAP practitioners, will present their experience of engaging for the first time with open practices for the design, development and delivery of innovative OER for EAP courses. OER in open file format were developed for teacher and learner

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training across two different EAP student cohorts (intermediate and proficient users of English) for enhancing student reading, writing and vocabulary acquisition in their specific subject domains. Training was also received in utilising open tools for text analysis (FLAX and the Compleat Lexical Tutor http://www.lextutor.ca/) and for building your own corpora (the FLAX Moodle plug-in and AntConc http://www.antlab.sci.waseda.ac.jp/software.html), enabling both students and teachers to effectively employ OER for language learning and teaching.

Openness and sharing on a shoestring

The OER project at DUELC is particularly relevant in the current climate of UK higher education (HE), with many institutions forced to improve the quality of their teaching provision with continually diminishing resources and greater student expectations. What better time to showcase an innovative approach to research-led language teaching by openly licensing and releasing resources online, beyond the realms of Durham University’s password protected Virtual Learning Environment (VLE, powered by Blackboard), so that they can be shared with the wider EAP and language teaching CoPs? This paper will outline the development, evaluation and impact assessment of OER for promoting and enhancing the EAP curriculum for international students at DUELC. Unlike traditional copyrighted materials, OER are educational materials that are created by the educational community to be freely used, and often changed or adapted, by other educators and students. They are usually online resources or e-learning materials. Although they were originally considered to be more valuable for informal learning, there is growing evidence that they can be useful in university settings1. This paper explores the use of openly available tools and resources for teaching EAP in traditional university disciplines and settings. Generic skills-based OER for EAP proliferate in dedicated open repositories and on websites. For example, the Prepare for Success resources funded by the Prime Minister's Initiative for International Education through the UK Council for International Student Affairs which prepare international students for study in the UK’s further and higher education institutions. Although highly successful, they are intended as taster materials only for intending and newly arrived international students to the UK. There is a noticeable gap, however, with the absence of in-depth OER for EAP teaching and learning that utilise genre-based and corpus-driven approaches in their pedagogical design. The OER for EAP project at Durham University’s ELC links specifically to Phase 2 of the HEFCE-funded and Higher Education Academy managed, Open Materials for Accredited Courses (OMAC) strand and explicitly addresses aspects of the UK Professional Standards Framework (PSF) for teaching and supporting learning in higher education, including: A1 - designing and planning of learning activities and/or programmes of study; C4 - the use of appropriate learning technologies, and; P5 - commitment to continuing professional development and the evaluation of practice. OER are poised for students as co-creators of knowledge but what will this mean with students paying higher tuition and expecting a higher return on their investment in HE? This project supports the aims of the UK PSF for teaching and supporting learning in HE, 1 McGill, L., Beetham, H., Falconer, I. & Littlejohn, A. (2010) JISC/HE Academy OER Programme: Pilot Phase Synthesis and Evaluation Report. https://oersynth.pbworks.com/w/page/29688444/Pilot-Phase-Synthesis-and-Evaluation-Report. Accessed 28/02/2012

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in particular to realise student and teacher learning through creative and innovative practices that harness Web 2.0 technologies for continuing professional development. Rationale for EAP teacher involvement in opening up practice with OER EAP teachers are increasingly required to develop EAP programmes using authentic academic texts and assessments that address a range of students’ needs across different academic disciplines. The British Association of Lecturers in English for Academic Purposes (BALEAP) is trying to address a deficit in formal EAP training and has devised the ‘Competency Framework for Teachers of English for Academic Purposes’2. Durham University’s English Language Centre is one of a few BALEAP accredited institutions in the UK with staff who also work as BALEAP accreditors. It is also one of a few EAP centres to have completely phased out the use of dedicated off-the-shelf published materials; fostering instead a keen focus on developing in-house materials for every course they run. DUELC has therefore been a good home for the TOETOE project in terms of developing and using OER, and for exploring issues around open licensing, open file formatting and open publishing. The EAP teachers who became involved in the OER project at DUELC did so for two main reasons: firstly, they wanted to see what open-source materials were available online which would support the teaching of vocabulary, and secondly, because they wanted to provide students with tools which would help them to study outside the classroom environment. Arguably, there is also a distinct deficit in formal English Language Teacher (ELT) training with corpora and concordancing tools for text analysis, despite over a decade of work from leading corpus linguists and ELT specialists which has gone into producing corpora, software, research and books on data driven language teaching, most of which have been published and released in proprietary formats. Compare this with the most widely recognised and accredited formal ELT training programmes delivered around the world, the Cambridge ESOL Teaching Awards, where trainee ELT teachers always receive training in how to exploit dictionaries in their teaching for language learner training. Access to published research for those ELT practitioners who are not affiliated with a university or teaching institution that has library subscription rights to published research remains a serious barrier to the uptake of corpus approaches in language teaching and learning. This problem is further compounded by the fact that most corpora and concordancing tools for language analysis are often subscription-only and have often been designed for the expert corpus user, not the language teacher or learner. The training OER for EAP presented in this paper (workshop tasks can be found at http://www.slideshare.net/AlannahOpenEd/ - these will be expanded and updated for the final draft) are based on innovative research from the fields of computer science and corpus linguistics for the development of flexible language learning and teaching resources using both open and proprietary corpora that have been linked with OSS text analysis tools and are accessible via the Internet to increase uptake and use of these resources through enhanced digital infrastructure. Discoverability, maintenance and use of digital resources found on the web for language learning and teaching remains a key issue with the use of online corpora as well (Anderson & Corbett, 2009). 2 Alexander, O., Bell, D., Cardew, S., King, J., Pallant, A., Scott, M., Thomas, D., & Ward Goodbody, M. (2008) Competency framework for teachers of English for Academic Purposes, BALEAP http://www.baleap.org.uk/teap/teap-competency-framework.pdf. Accessed 28/02/2012 2810/04/2011

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As part of her doctoral research, Ms. Fitzgerald has been working with the open source digital library software development community in the use and evaluation of web-based corpora and online concordancers for language learning and teaching. In particular, the FLAX collections developed by Shaoqun Wu et al. at the University of Waikato in New Zealand (see the free e-book, the Book of Flax by Witten, Wu & Yu, 2011, available on the FLAX homepage http://flax.nzdl.org/greenstone3/flax) have been built using linguistic content derived from a number of resources, including archived web dumps provided by Google and Wikipedia to create new web-based corpora and by linking these to reference corpora such as the British National Corpus (BNC) as well as creating links back to the live web via the Yahoo search engine. The FLAX project is unique in the way that corpora are linked to each other and the live web for enhanced understanding of language as it is used in different contexts for support with vocabulary, reading and writing learning (Wu, Witten & Franken, 2009 & 2010; Wu, 2010). Similarly linked corpora and OSS tools for language analysis could be built in this way for other modern languages.

WebPronounsPhrasesOER

h p://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ns4nXsZQmU17

FLAX Web Pronoun Phrases Collection Search (http://flax2.nzdl.org/greenstone3/flax?a=p&sa=home&module=) 18

FLAX Web Pronoun Phrases Collection Search (http://flax2.nzdl.org/greenstone3/flax?a=p&sa=home&module=)

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Figure 1. Excerpt from OER, ‘Word Tools’ on Slideshare http://www.slideshare.net/AlannahOpenEd/ showing the Web Pronoun Phrases collection in FLAX, with an OER video on how to use this corpus available on Youtube (slide 17), a query for the search term, ‘argued’ within the corpus (slide 18), and returns for how the search term is shown in FLAX via the Google and BNC corpora (slides 19 & 20).

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Current EAP resources and misunderstandings about EAP

There are a number of resources (both online and printed) that are available for use and are presented as intended for EAP. To name just a few, the Online Writing Lab (OWL) at Purdue, the “Inside Out” e-learning resources (citation), the “Language Leader” series (citation - this is not intended for an EAP audience but is often treated as such), and Stephen Bailey’s book, Academic Writing for International Students of Business, (citation). All of these resources are problematic in the context of EAP teaching and learning, and tend to resemble scaled-up versions of exam preparation books for the International English Language Testing System (IELTS) rather than EAP resources that are representative of the discipline-specific assessment tasks and text types that EAP students will be required to engage with on a university programme where the target language is English. Moreover, despite the development of online EAP learning resources such as the OWL at Purdue, the UEFAP website [CITATION], and the Academic Word List [CITATION]. There are even fewer online materials to help students to build their formal/academic vocabulary. The online corpora tools such as COBUILD [CITATION], which were previously free, are now proprietary (fee-charging). OER materials would seem to be the ideal solution to the problem of how to encourage students to do more vocabulary self-study, especially as one of our main goals at DUELC is to encourage our students to become autonomous learners. Learner training is a key aspect of EAP as it is in ELT. There are also very few open resources on the market for the development of academic vocabulary. Proprietary resources include a range of textbooks and online resources for practice with the Academic Wordlist (AWL) and some collocations dictionaries resources, most notably Hill and Lewis’ 1997 print publication, the LTP Dictionary of Selected Collocations, and the Oxford Collocation Dictionary for Students of English CD-ROM from 2009 based on the BNC. However, these are not EAP-focused and instead offer no or limited examples of actual usage for collocations and focus more on definitions or collocations with very basic words like any and new. Also, there are licensing restrictions with the Oxford CD-ROM whereby use is limited to one computer installation along with compatibility problems on newer versions of operating system software.

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Figure 2. Entry in the Oxford Collocation Dictionary for Students of English The teaching of vocabulary is often one of the most neglected areas of an EAP programme. EAP courses at DUELC focus heavily on academic writing macro-structures such as essay, argument and paragraph structure, leaving little time for work at the sentence, phrase or word level. The lexis presented on an EAP course can seem quite random to both teachers and learners alike. This is particularly true if the course contains a heavy reading component: students are so busy trying to process texts for main ideas that they seldom have time to organise and build on the new vocabulary which they have encountered. Students often express concern about or interest in developing vocabulary or grammar awareness but often this is difficult to systematically incorporate into the course. Development of effective materials for the teaching of vocabulary is thus an important part of the student learning experience but, as can be seen above, are frequently lacking. Access to third party publications in the form of texts to develop OER from is also another issue faced by the EAP practitioner community. Difficulties of getting access to subject-specific texts Spack, 1988b; Braine, 2001 Terrasche and Wahid – lack of vocabulary was a problem for both groups EAP course attendees and non-attendees – students p.178 Recommendation for context-specific EAP – Ferris and Tagg (Spring 1996) Also Dooey (2011) – What students want from an EAP course [to be developed for final draft] Tom Cobb’s Compleat Lexical Tutor is a useful and openly accessible web-based corpus and concordancing resource, yet when confronted by the homepage the novice user may feel overwhelmed by the seemingly analytical interface. Keyword searches within the Concordance tool and text analysis of student-produced as well as published writing in the VobabProfile tool within the Lextutor are among some of the most popular uses of this site. Once again, there is a lot of mention of the Lextutor in published research but when faced

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with trying to locate learning support resources for how to use the tools in the Lextutor there are no extensive online examples for how to use these tools in classroom teaching. There is an active Facebook group for the Lextutor, however, and these discussions around the site in the social networking world could be further enhanced by the development of OER for the use of the Lextutor.

CompleatLexicalTutor(TomCobb)

h p://www.lextutor.ca/ Figure 3. The Compleat Lexical Tutor homepage by Tom Cobb Further freeware for corpus analysis, BNC Baby and Antconc, require light installation (e.g. via a USB drive or by registration on the Lancaster University website for use of the software) so once again support for the novice teacher and learner of English on how to tap these resources has not yet become mainstream within language teacher and learner training, and is rather left up to the enthusiast teacher who is not intimidated by the use of technology in his or her teaching practice. The OER cascade project at DUELC Research into OER for teacher training in higher education is less prominent than the abundance of literature from e-Learning on training learning technologists on the state of the art in building and managing learning object repositories for open and proprietary educational resources. Too often teachers are offered limited resources and incentives for sustained participation in design-based research for the development and use of educational media. What is more, some leaders in higher education are slow to realize that it is technology that is leading educational innovation and not pedagogy alone (Laurillard, 2002)3. Cross-sector collaboration involving the open-source and educational media research and development sectors is therefore needed to support educational practitioners in the exploration and exploitation of appropriate and cost-effective OER. Following initial continuing professional development (CPD) workshops on OER at the ELC led by Alannah Fitzgerald, teachers who are new to OER have been innovating in their teaching through the use of openly available educational resources. For those participating teachers, materials meetings and cascade training sessions for considering, scoping, and planning the development and use of OER, and directing them to and/or advising them on the selection of existing resources has been central to this OER project

3 Laurillard, D. (2002) Rethinking University Teaching. 2nd ed. London: Routledge. 288.

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at DUELC. They were also assisted with the design and development of new genre-based OER for EAP along with their implementation in their teaching practice with international students at the ELC. The teachers were also helped in the evaluation of their use of OER in their teaching. Data was collected throughout the design, development and implementation stages, whereby participants were asked to share their experiences, thoughts, and issues with Ms. Fitzgerald as they went through the processes of planning and implementing OER in their teaching. This project along with the impact and evaluation stages were designed to provide further insights into how OER might be used in HE settings, and about what the potential problems and barriers of such use might be. [adapted OER for EAP based on the cascade project at DUELC to be inserted here for discussion in final draft – still under development] To provide further evidence of the relevance of this project, the HEFCE Online Learning Task Force (OLTF) released their final report entitled, ‘Collaborate to Compete: seizing the opportunity of online learning for UK higher education’4 in January 2011. In this report, two out of the six recommendations made for increasing the competitiveness of HE in the UK reflect concerns for OER development and distribution. These comprise: recommendation number five - the realignment of training and development between technologists, learning support specialists and academics; and, recommendation number six - a call for investment in the development and exploitation of OER to enhance efficiency, quality and scale in learning and teaching. The means to changing some of the practices and ideas surrounding the value and impact of internationalising curricular with OER for current and prospective international students are enabled by digital technologies and communication channels as will be explored in this project. The evaluation and impact assessment of OER from this project will in turn contribute to the growing body of research on OER as digital content and tools that are contributing to these changing practices and ideas. Conclusion [to come] References

4 Report to HEFCE by the Online Learning Task Force. (2011) Collaborate to compete: Seizing the opportunity of online learning for UK higher education http://www.hefce.ac.uk/pubs/hefce/2011/11_01/. Accessed on 28/02/2012

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Alexander, O., Bell, D., Cardew, S., King, J., Pallant, A., Scott, M., Thomas, D., & Ward Goodbody, M. (2008) Competency framework for teachers of English for Academic Purposes, BALEAP http://www.baleap.org.uk/teap/teap-competency-framework.pdf. Accessed on 28/02/2012 Anderson, W. & Corbett, J. (2009) Exploring English with online corpora: an introduction. China: Palgrave Macmillan. Braine, George (2001) When professors don’t co-operate: a critical perspective on EAP research. English for Specific Purposes, 20, 293-303.

- Mixed – sometimes easy (p.296) sometimes difficult (p.298) to obtain text samples Ferris, Dana, and Tracy Tagg (1996a) Academic Oral Communication Needs of EAP Learners: What Subject-Matter Instructors Actually Require. TESOL Quarterly 30:1, 31-58. Laurillard, D. (2002) Rethinking University Teaching. 2nd ed. London: Routledge McGill, L., Beetham, H., Falconer, I. & Littlejohnm, A. (2010) JISC/HE Academy OER Programme: Pilot Phase Synthesis and Evaluation Report. https://oersynth.pbworks.com/w/page/29688444/Pilot-Phase-Synthesis-and-Evaluation-Report. Accessed 28/02/2012 Oxford Collocation Dictionary for Students of English (2nd Edition) (2009), Oxford University Press. Report to HEFCE by the Online Learning Task Force. (2011) Collaborate to compete: Seizing the opportunity of online learning for UK higher education http://www.hefce.ac.uk/pubs/hefce/2011/11_01/. Accessed on 28/02/2012 Spack, R. (1988b) Two Commentaries on Ruth Spack's "Initiating ESL Students into the Academic Discourse Community: How Far Should We Go?". The Author Responds to Braine. TESOL Quarterly 22:4, 703-705. Limited analysis of existing texts to understand kinds of texts students will be required to produce p.33 Terraschke, A. & Wahid, R. (2011) The impact of EAP study on the academic experiences of international students in Australia Journal of English for Academic Purposes Vol. 10, No. 3 (September 2011), pp.173-182

Wu, S., Franken, M. & Witten, I. H. (2009). Refining the use of the web (and web search) as a language teaching and learning resource. Computer Assisted Language Learning, 22(3), 249-268.

Wu, S., Witten, I. & Franken, M. (2010) Utilizing lexical data from a Web-derived corpus to expand productive collocation knowledge. In ReCALL, The Journal of the European Association for Computer Assisted Language Learning, Vol 22: pp. 83-102

Wu, S. Supporting collocation learning. (2010) PhD thesis in Computer Science. University of Waikato, New Zealand. Available online at

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http://researchcommons.waikato.ac.nz/bitstream/handle/10289/4885/thesis.pdf?sequence=3 Accessed on 13/12/11

Difficulties of getting access to subject-specific texts Spack, 1988b; Braine, 2001 Terrasche and Wahid – lack of vocabulary was a problem for both groups EAP course attendees and non-attendees – students p.178 Recommendation for context-specific EAP – Ferris and Tagg (Spring 1996) Also Dooey (2011) – What students want from an EAP course

Google*FLAXlanguage*

h p:// nyurl.com/7ea4tzq