Shaoqun Wu’s research while affiliated with University of Waikato and other places

This chapter presents a new paradigm for sustainable data-driven language learning systems design in higher education that draws on qualitative reflections spanning a decade (2012–2022) with stakeholders from an ongoing global research study with the FLAX (Flexible Language Acquisition) and F-Lingo projects at the University of Waikato in Aotearoa New Zealand (Fitzgerald (2019) A new paradigm for open data-driven language learning systems design in higher education; König et al. (2022) Smart CALL). Design considerations are presented for remixing domain-specific open access content into Open Educational Resources (OER) for academic English language provision across formal and non-formal higher education contexts. Primary stakeholders in the research collaboration include the following three groups: (1) Knowledge organisations that provide open access to academic content—libraries and archives, including the British Library and the Oxford Text Archive, universities in collaboration with MOOC providers and the CORE (COnnecting REpositories) open access aggregation service at the UK Open University; (2) Researchers who mine and remix academic content into corpora and open data-driven language learning systems—converging from the fields of open education, computer science and applied corpus linguistics; (3) Knowledge users who re-use and remix academic content into OER—English for Academic Purposes (EAP) practitioners from university language centres. Automated content analysis was carried out on a corpus of interview and focus discussion data with the three stakeholder groups in this research. We discuss themes arising from the research data that reflect the different stakeholders’ experiences of remixing open access research content that has been produced within the academy for re-use as open educational content for teaching and learning features of academic language within open data-driven language learning systems. These open learning systems have been specifically designed to scale with OER expansion and traction in mind for their sustainable uptake both within and beyond the brick and mortar of the traditional university. The new paradigm presented in this chapter challenges, as the OER movement must, established business models and deeply embedded cultural or institutional norms that present obstacles to OER expansion and traction and the sustainability of the movement. One persistent challenge concerns the lack of open education policy across the higher education sector for full open access (for use, modification, adaptation) via Creative Commons licensing to content produced within the academy. Thus, while this research has theoretical and practical implications in applied linguistics, computer science, language teaching and learning and open education, more generally, it also has significant cultural, business model and policy implications for higher education.KeywordsData-driven learningDesign-based researchEnglish for academic purposes (EAP)Higher educationMassive open online courses (MOOCs)Open accessOpen educational practicesOpen educational resources (OER)Systems design

Lexical bundles are recurrent multiword combinations and often function as discourse building blocks. Lexical bundles have been analysed in university students’ writing to detect linguistic errors, measure writing competence, and investigate the divergence between L1 and L2 writing. Few studies, however, have focused on the high-stakes genre of PhD thesis and investigated the bundle productions of the same genre within the same level and discipline. This paper compares sentence initial lexical bundles in the corpora of English theses written by Chinese and New Zealand PhD students in the discipline of General and Applied Linguistics. Forty-six bundles from a Chinese corpus and forty-two bundles from a New Zealand corpus were generated. Among them, 94% of sentence initial bundles were identified as metadiscursive bundles. Chinese and New Zealand doctoral students showed considerably different preferences in their bundle selection. The paper examines the possible impact of these preferences and suggests there is a need to extend the metadiscourse knowledge of doctoral students in terms of lexical bundles.

This book brings together some thought-provoking papers around the theme of “Smart CALL.” The term “smart” nowadays means “connected to and exchanging information with other devices.” The contributions in this volume focus on a more human-centered perspective, namely the definition of smartness in terms of three qualities or dimensions: personalization (adaptation to the learner and the teacher), contextualization (adaptation to the sociocultural, educational, and geotemporal context of the learner) and socialization (the extent to which CALL stimulates interaction and relatedness between the learner, co-learner, teacher, and other stakeholders). Contributing authors are established scholars coming from different continents, using different technologies, and representing different points of view. A smart initiative.

Massive Open Online Courses are becoming popular educational vehicles through which universities reach out to non-traditional audiences. Many enrollees 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, a growing trend in language teaching and learning. Typical MOOCs supply a large corpus of interesting linguistic material relevant to a particular area, including supplementary images (slides), audio and video. Such corpus provides an excellent context to study domain-specific lexico-grammatical features of any word or phrase, a challenging aspect of English productive use even for quite advanced learners. 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 English Common Law offered by the University of London. We will illustrate how this resource has been augmented for language learning, and then review how learners can use it to explore language usage. This article uses a single running example, a Coursera MOOC course, but the approach is fully automated and can be applied to any collection of English writing. .