A corpus-based analysis of grammatical complexity as a measure of international teaching assistants’ oral English proficiency

Thirakunkovit, Suthathip; Rodríguez-Fuentes, Rodrigo A.; Park, Kyongson; Staples, Shelley

doi:10.1016/j.esp.2018.09.002

Cited by 6 publications

(1 citation statement)

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“…Previous research showed the effectiveness of implementing corpus-informed materials, either indirect or direct application (DDL) in many areas. To take for example, language teaching and learning (Flowerdew 2017), language assessment (Huang et al 2018;Taylor and Barker 2008;Xi 2017;Kong 2017;Thirakunkovit et al 2019), needs analysis for material development, (Staples 2019;Karpenko-Seccombe 2018), feedback and error correction (Crosthwaite 2017), register and lexis (Crosthwaite, Wong, and Cheung 2019), teaching grammar (Lin 2021) and vocabulary in ESP context (Đurović and Bauk 2022). Despite the growing interest in corpus-informed material, little is known about how corpusinformed material are designed.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Creating an Aviation English Lesson: A Corpus-Informed Material Design

Nugraha,

Mayuni,

Anwar

2023

ESPEAP

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Since ESP materials call for authenticity and specific content related to the field, books available on the market are sometimes thought to be inadequate for students’ target situations. As a subset of ESP, aviation English in this instance demands teachers to create teaching materials that cater to the students’ needs, wants, and necessities. For many teachers, creating course materials in the aviation setting continues to be challenging. As a result, this article offers an alternative approach to designing aviation English lessons using the corpus. There are essentially two approaches to designing corpus-based material: direct and indirect. Nevertheless, combining the two approaches can be a new challenge in getting students interested in the learning activity. A corpus-data-driven learning activity is created and embedded in a lesson. This activity potentially involves students examining the linguistic patterns, lexical categories, word frequencies, synonyms, and other pertinent vocabulary tasks in the corpus. The activity exerts a considerable influence on enhancing their vocabulary knowledge and vocabulary size. Alternatively, aviation English teachers offer an indirect approach by selecting reading materials from the free online corpus, such as, among others, COCA. Choosing a text from the corpus is believed to ensure the text’s authenticity. The teachers can automatically generate word or phraseology lists related to the field being learned from the text. Here, the corpus assists aviation English teachers in choosing suitable vocabulary for aviation students. This article highlights the approach of corpus-informed material design in an aviation context.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Creating an Aviation English Lesson: A Corpus-Informed Material Design

Nugraha,

Mayuni,

Anwar

2023

ESPEAP

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Exploring the Grammatical Complexity of International Teaching Assistants: A Comparative Corpus Study

Chang,

Raeisi‐Vanani

2024

TESOL Quarterly

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The purpose of this study is to analyze the grammatical complexity features of international teaching assistants' (ITAs) mock‐teaching presentations and to compare the distributions of these features to those found in the Oral English Proficiency Test (a local ITA assessment), university classroom teaching, conversation, and academic writing. The data consisted of 186 prospective ITAs' mock‐teaching presentations collected from two ITA training courses at a large U.S. university: one higher‐level course and one lower‐level course. All presentations were transcribed, proofread, and built into a corpus consisting of 247,043 words. Based on the previous corpus studies, a total of 22 grammatical complexity features were selected for the analysis. Overall, the discourse of ITA mock‐teaching involved a substantial number of both the grammatical complexity features commonly found in spoken conversation (e.g., finite adverbial clauses and modals) and those commonly used in academic writing (e.g., noun premodifiers and prepositional phrases). The frequency distributions of the features differed in complex ways between ITA mock‐teaching and the other registers, as well as between the higher‐level and lower‐level ITAs. Pedagogical implications for ITA training and assessment, and future research directions are discussed at the end.

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