iReasearch学术科研网

江进林推荐： 本文研究者基于前人在EAP（English for Academic Purpose）研究领域对高等教育中某些专门学科创建学术英语词汇语料库资源的方法，创建了基于中学教育语境的八个核心科目（生物、化学、经济、英语、地理、历史、数学和体育）的专门学科词汇表——SVL（the Secondary School Vocabulary Lists，中学专门学科学术英语词汇）以及相关学科的词族和词汇搭配列表，以帮助中学教师进行专门学科学术英语教学，提高中学生的学术英语学科素养。

摘要：In spite of extensive research on reading comprehension in EAP, the literature on how it is conceptualized and taught by teachers is still scanty. Moreover, in some contexts, EAP reading comprehension courses are taught by two groups of teachers with different specializations, that is, ELT instructors and subject teachers, which, in turn, may render the gap in teachers' understanding of EAP reading comprehension instruction wider. In this study, we explored the actual classroom practices and cognitions within and across these two groups of teachers teaching EAP reading comprehension in Iran. Three ELT instructors and three subject teachers teaching discipline-based EAP courses at a university of medical sciences were observed for eight sessions. In addition to carrying out observations and taking field-notes, we conducted semi-structured interviews with the teachers in order to probe their underlying cognitions. The findings indicated considerable inconsistencies among the subject teachers compared with the ELT instructors as well as noticeable discrepancies across the two groups of teachers with respect to their practices and cognitions in EAP reading comprehension instruction. The findings point to some new ideas, issues, and options for reflection in EAP reading comprehension instruction and promise implications for EAP teacher education programs. [Copyright The American University; published by Elsevier Ltd.]

摘要：The purpose of this research was twofold: to examine the vocabulary demands of English-medium engineering textbooks and to create an Engineering English Word List (EEWL) to cover EFL students' lexical shortage. The researcher compiled a corpus containing 4.57 million running words of 100 college textbooks across 20 engineering subject areas from e-book databases as the source of analysis. The results demonstrate that knowing the most frequent 5000 word families plus proper nouns, apparent compounds and abbreviations would command 95% lexical coverage of an engineering textbook to ensure adequate comprehension. Civil engineering and mechanical engineering, involving 3500 word families necessary for minimally acceptable comprehension, were the least lexically demanding, while marine engineering and biochemical engineering were the most demanding in lexis, stretching to a threshold of 8500 word families. Beyond the first 2000 words, 729 of the most frequently-occurring word families in the corpus were ultimately chosen, and these covered 14.3% of the total words in the engineering textbooks. The present EEWL may provide a window to the engineering register for matriculating engineering students and may be helpful for English for science and technology teachers when preparing Engineering English teaching materials for reading and vocabulary development. [Copyright The American University; published by Elsevier Ltd.]

摘要：EAP tutors are increasingly aware of the issue of reticence in the classroom, especially during small group discussions. They note students' reluctance to begin discussions in a quiet environment and observe short student contributions in group work. This study captured the perspectives of international postgraduate students studying on pre-sessional EAP programmes before pursuing Masters level studies in TESOL or Applied Linguistics, focusing on small group discussions and the use of background music during lessons, especially during those discussions. The findings indicated positive attitudes towards using background music in these settings, with more than half saying that it should or could be used during group discussions and almost two-thirds saying that they would adopt background music in future in their own language teaching classrooms. The findings of this exploratory study are useful for language teachers as well as tutors in other disciplines and with other age groups. Further research is required in order to consider tutors' viewpoints and to study the actual effects of background music on group interaction during discussions in classrooms. Adapted from the source document

摘要：Extended noun phrases are a feature of academic prose. An analysis of noun phrases in the writing of international students on an EAP course in New Zealand showed that their use of noun modifiers was atypical of academic writing in general. One example is that nouns as noun pre-modifiers were used relatively infrequently. Our purpose in this article is to present an approach to task development that can usefully guide teachers in developing their own complex noun phrase tasks. Our exemplar task aims to increase learners' understanding and use of noun-noun phrases with repeated application to many different academic texts throughout a programme of study. Adapted from the source document

摘要：Autonomy is an important educational goal in international universities in countries with Confucian heritage cultures, such as Vietnam. However, approaches taken to support autonomy can sometimes be limited by over-generalizations about culture, dependence on pre-packaged materials, and a focus on technical practice. This can result in the slow development of learner autonomy. We report on an attempt to stimulate autonomous practices among EAP learners in Vietnam. This collaborative action research first focused on discovering how learners perceived and experienced autonomy, with data collected through questionnaire and focus groups. Data were analysed and discussed with teachers, autonomy levels identified, and strong autonomy-supporting strategies selected for use. Priorities included developing goal setting and self-reflection. An independent learning journal that included focused autonomy-supporting tasks was developed, trialled, and evaluated. Although this was a small-scale intervention, it provided evidence that socially mediated support for autonomy can help Vietnamese university learners take greater control over their own learning. Adapted from the source document

摘要：English for academic purposes (EAP) has established itself as a considerable part of English as a foreign language (EFL) instruction in Iranian universities. Considering the Internet as a major educational source in EAP reading courses, it is highly important that the stakeholders have positive attitudes toward it and be aware of promises and challenges. This study was conducted to investigate the participants' attitudes toward the Internet in EAP courses for undergraduate students of civil engineering (CE) in Iran. To this end, 723 undergraduate students, 67 EAP instructors and 105 CE instructors participated in the study. Instrumentation included a questionnaire, semi-structured interviews and non-participant observation. Our analysis of the data revealed that the majority of EAP instructors, CE instructors and undergraduate students have positive attitudes toward the Internet. However, the results showed that EAP instructors do not make use of any types of Internet-based activities in their classes. Moreover, the majority of limitations in using the Internet in EAP courses were identified. It is concluded that undergraduate students of CE need training in various Internet-based skills. The findings promise implications for renewing the EAP programs. Adapted from the source document

摘要：The globalization of English in Sweden is examined as it takes shape in educational policy and practice. Following in the tradition of a "new wave" of language policy and planning research that emphasizes connections between policy and how it is interpreted by local stakeholders, this investigation focuses on textual data from Swedish national curricular documents and observational data of preservice English language educators during teacher training. Discourse analysis was conducted in order to illuminate underlying policy discourses, on the one hand, and facilitate tracing intertextual connections to the voices of educators, on the other hand. Drawing upon current perspectives on linguistic globalization, major discursive tensions engendered in the processes of transculturation through which English as a global language is locally situated in Sweden are brought to light. The study illustrates how educational language policy serves as a discursive space for ongoing negotiation about the status of English in Sweden. Adapted from the source document

摘要：This article describes a study examining the effects of Sheltered Instruction Observation Protocol (SIOP) model instruction on the academic language performance of middle and high school English language learners. The SIOP model is an approach for teaching content curriculum to students learning through a new language. Teachers employ techniques that make the content concepts accessible and also develop students' skills in the new language. Using a quasi-experimental design, the research was conducted in content area and English as a second language classes in two districts in northern New Jersey over 2 years. The analysis presents student achievement data from state-mandated language proficiency tests in the final year of the intervention, after most of the treatment teachers had completed their professional development in the SIOP model. There were statistically significant differences in the average mean scores in favor of the treatment student group on Writing, Oral Language, and Total English scores of the IDEA Language Proficiency Tests with small to medium effect sizes. The results from this study show that the SIOP model offers a promising approach to professional development that can improve the quality of instruction to English language learners and increase their English language achievement. Adapted from the source document

摘要：This article reports a case study that examined English as a Second Language students' peer response stances from an activity theory perspective. More specifically, the study was guided by the constructs of activity and motive/object in Leont'ev's theory. Multiple sources of data were collected from two native Spanish-speaking students enrolled in a low-advanced EAP writing class, including recordings of their peer response sessions and individual interviews. An inductive and recursive qualitative analysis approach was adopted to analyze the data. Transcripts of student participation in peer response sessions were analyzed to identify the two participants' stances during peer response, and interviews were analyzed to understand the students' motives/objects for participation in peer response. Data analyses indicate that each participant had a distinct motive/object for participating in peer response, and that these motives/objects motivated the students' peer response stances. Implications of the study for instructional practices and research are discussed. Adapted from the source document

摘要：The important yet under-researched role of item writers in the selection and adaptation of texts for high-stakes reading tests is investigated through a case study involving a group of trained item writers working on the International English Language Testing System (IELTS). In the first phase of the study, participants were invited to reflect in writing, and then audio-recorded in a semantic-differential-based joint discussion, on the processes they employed to generate test material. The group were next observed at a simulated item writers' editing meeting to refine their texts and items for an IELTS reading test module. The participants' written descriptions and recorded discussions provided rich data on how source texts were perceived, selected and adapted for the Test. The study reports findings from textual analyses using indices of readability and lexical density from the original material sourced by the item writers and their adapted versions for the test. Results from qualitative and quantitive analyses are discussed in terms of the implications for the IELTS reading module of editing actions such as: reducing redundancy and technical language, changing styles, deciding on potentially sensitive issues and relationships between texts and test items. The important issue of text authenticity in tests such as IELTS is also broached. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications, Ltd., copyright holder.]

摘要：English language development or proficiency (ELD/P) standards promise to play an important role in the instruction and assessment of the language development of English language learner (ELL) pre-K-12 students, but to do so effectively they must convey the progression of student language learning in authentic school contexts for authentic academic purposes. The construct of academic English is defined as the vocabulary, sentence structures, and discourse associated with language used to teach academic content as well as the language used to navigate the school setting more generally. The construct definition is informed by a relatively modest number of empirical studies of textbooks, content assessments, and observations of classroom discourse. The standards of a state with a large ELL population and a large multi-state consortium are then reviewed to illustrate the role of the academic English construct in the standards' coverage of language modalities or domains, levels of attainment or proficiency, grade spans, and the needs of the large number of young English learners. Recommendations and potential strategies for validating, creating, and augmenting standards that reflect authentic uses of academic language in school settings are also made. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications, Ltd., copyright holder.]

摘要：This article reports on a mixed-methods study of Chinese university students' knowledge of and attitudes toward plagiarism in English academic writing. A sample of 270 undergraduates from two Chinese universities rated three short English passages under different conditions, provided open-ended responses to justify their ratings, and completed a written questionnaire. The rating tasks were designed to determine their ability to recognize two forms of intertextuality (i.e., unacknowledged copying and paraphrasing) generally regarded as plagiarism in Anglo-American academia. The questionnaire was administered to collect self-appraisals of competence in source use and to assess declarative knowledge of intertextual practices that match typical Anglo-American definitions of blatant and subtle plagiarism. Qualitative and quantitative analyses revealed that a minority of the students recognized the two forms of plagiarism and generally took a punitive attitude toward the detected cases of plagiarism. Further quantitative analyses found that discipline, self-reported competence in referencing, and knowledge of subtle plagiarism were consistently significant predictors of successful plagiarism detection. These findings raise questions about some culturally based interpretations of plagiarism and point to the need to take a nuanced approach to plagiarism in L2 writing. Adapted from the source document

摘要：This paper presents a comprehensive overview of lexicogrammatical devices which highlight important or relevant points in lectures. Despite the established usefulness of discourse organizational cues for lecture comprehension and note-taking, very little is known about the marking of relevance in this genre. The current overview of lexicogrammatical relevance markers combines a qualitative and quantitative investigation of 160 lectures from the British Academic Spoken English (BASE) corpus. These markers could mostly be classified according to their main element into adjective, noun, verb and adverb patterns. Verb patterns were the most common, followed by noun patterns. The verb pattern V clause (e.g., remember slavery had already been legally abolished) and the noun pattern MN v-link (e.g., the point is) are the predominant types of relevance markers. The discrepancy between the prevalent markers and what may be thought of as prototypical or included in EAP textbooks as relevance markers also demonstrates the need for corpus linguistic research. Implications for EAP course design, teaching English for lecturing purposes, and educational research are discussed. [Copyright The American University; published by Elsevier Ltd.]

摘要：This article examines the stance options used by writers responding to a data description task in the discipline of Statistics. Based on a small learner corpus, it uses inductive qualitative content analysis to explore both the content propositions that students included in their writing, and the ways in which they expressed evaluative stance vis-a-vis such propositions. In the light of an interview with a specialist informant, the article discusses the appropriacy of the content choices and stance options taken by students. It then discusses the potential exploitation of the learner corpus for pedagogic purposes. [Copyright The American University; published by Elsevier Ltd.]

摘要：This paper presents an analysis of the major generic structures of empirical research articles (RAs), with a particular focus on disciplinary variation and the relationship between the adjacent sections in the introductory and concluding parts. The findings were derived from a close 'manual' analysis of 433 recent empirical RAs from high-impact English-language journals in 39 disciplines in the fields of engineering, applied sciences, social sciences and the humanities. This analysis reveals that while many empirical RAs follow the 'standard' Introduction -- Method -- Results -- Discussion (IMRD) pattern, this structure is not the default option for organizing such studies. The findings indicate that the most frequently used structural pattern is Introduction -- Literature Review -- Method -- Results and Discussion -- Conclusion (ILM[RD]C). The other prominent patterns found in the corpus are IM[RD]C, IMRDC, ILMRDC and ILMRD. The paper identifies and highlights the importance of the sections that are not fully accounted for in the conventional IMRD framework, namely the Literature Review (L), the merged (as opposed to separated) Results and Discussion [RD], and the Conclusion (C). The paper concludes by discussing the implications of the study for academic writing research as well as the design of RA writing courses and materials for research students and early-career academics. [Copyright The American University; published by Elsevier Ltd.]

摘要：With the increasing use of integrated tasks in assessing writing, more and more research studies have been conducted to examine the construct validity of such tasks. Previous studies have largely focused on reading-writing tasks, while relatively little is known about graph-writing tasks. This study examines second language (L2) writers' test-taking strategies in relation to their performance on a graph-writing test administered to English learners in health science and medical majors. Data from a strategy inventory and open-ended questions were collected and analyzed to determine if the task elicited academic writing strategies and to identify construct-related issues. The results from structural equation modeling analyses indicated that writers were engaged in graph comprehension, graph interpretation, and graph translation strategies during the task, and each type of strategy use generally had a positive impact on their test performance. The qualitative results pointed to L2 writers' difficulties in lexical knowledge and use, as well as possible sources of construct-irrelevant variance including graph familiarity, topical knowledge, and test-wiseness strategy use. The findings have theoretical and practical implications for the development and use of graph-writing tasks. [Copyright The American University; published by Elsevier Ltd.]

摘要：Several previous studies have investigated the use of questions to facilitate interactions in academic lectures in tertiary education. However, the issue of how disciplinary cultures influence the patterns of questions in lectures has received little attention. Therefore, this study aims to examine the interdisciplinary differences in professors' use of questions in terms of both their forms and functions. The corpus used in this study consists of 15 small-class lectures from three academic divisions: Humanities & Arts (HA), Social Sciences & Education (SS) and Physical Sciences & Engineering (PS). These data are a subset of the Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English (MICASE). Previous studies on academic spoken English have reported that, compared with other contextual factors, the disciplinary culture seems to exert a more critical influence on the use of various linguistic features. However, the results of this study show far more similarities than differences across different disciplines. Based on the major findings pertaining to the use of question forms and functions across the three divisions, it is suggested that for questions in academic lectures at the tertiary level, the influence of genre seems to outweigh that of disciplinary culture. [Copyright The American University; published by Elsevier Ltd.]

摘要：This paper reports on the feasibility and value of an approach to teaching EAP writing in which students construct and examine their own individual, discipline-specific corpora. The approach was trialed in multidisciplinary classes of advanced-level students (mostly graduates). The course consisted of six weekly 2-h sessions. Data were collected from initial and final questionnaires, which provided background information and asked students to evaluate the corpus work. Data from 50 participants are presented and show generally positive results. Over 90% of students found it easy to build their own corpora and most succeeded in constructing a corpus of 10-15 research articles. Most students were enthusiastic about working with their own corpora: about 90% agreed that their corpus helped them improve their writing and intended to use it in the future. This suggests that even corpora of this size and type can provide a useful resource for writing discipline-specific texts. The paper discusses the data on participants' attitudes and experiences and considers the issues and problems that arise in connection with do-it-yourself corpus-building. It argues that this approach need not be restricted to small groups of well-resourced students, but can be implemented in mainstream EAP classes. [Copyright The American University; published by Elsevier Ltd.]

摘要：As is the worldwide trend, scientists in China face strong and increasing pressure to publish their research in international peer-reviewed journals written in English. There is an acute need for graduate students to develop the required language skills alongside their scientific expertise, in spite of the distinct division currently existing between English teaching and the other disciplines. Researchers in the workplace also need ongoing training, presenting a complex challenge for the sector. We present an analysis of data gathered as we have introduced, in Chinese science- and English teaching-based contexts, an approach to the development of international publishing capacity entitled CIPSE -- Collaborative Interdisciplinary Publication Skills Education. This approach involves scientists and English language specialists working together on education programs adapted to fit local contextual constraints, and builds on collaborative approaches used extensively in ESP contexts elsewhere. Our analysis suggests some possible components of the multi-faceted strategy set that will clearly be required to address the challenges. We argue for changes to the teaching of English to research students in the sciences, including the development of a strong research base incorporating corpus linguistics, English for Specific Purposes pedagogy and interdisciplinary collaborative practice. [Copyright The American University; published by Elsevier Ltd.]