From the blog TOETOE (ˈtɔɪtɔɪ): Technology for Open English - Toying with Open E-resources http://www.alannahfitzgerald.org/394/

1. Articles from TOETOE Technology for
Open English Toying with Open E-
resources (ˈtɔɪtɔɪ)
Radio Ga Ga: corpus-based resources, you’ve yet to
have your finest hour
2012-09-30 04:09:14 admin
Radio Ga Ga album cover by
Queen via Wikipedia
These past few months I’ve been tuning into a lot of different practitioner events and
discussions across a range of educational communities which I feel are of
relevance to English language education where uses for corpus-based resources
are concerned. There’s something very distinct about the way these different
communities are coming together and in the way they are sharing their ideas and
outputs. In this post, I will liken their behaviour to different types of radio station
broadcast, highlighting differences in communication style and the types of audience
(and audience participation) they tend to attract.
I’ve also been re-setting my residential as well as my work stations. No longer at
Durham University’s English Language Centre, I’m now London-based and have just
set off on a whirlwind adventure for further open educational resources (OER)
development and dissemination work with collaborators and stakeholders in a
variety of locations around the world. TOETOE is going international and is now
being hosted by Oxford University Computing Services (OUCS) in conjunction
with the Higher Education Academy (HEA) as part of the UK government-funded
OER International programme.
I will also be spreading the word about the newly formed Open Education Special
Interest Group (OESIG), the Flexible Language Acquisition (FLAX) open corpus-
based language resources project at the University of Waikato, and select research
corpora, including the British National Corpus (BNC) and the British Academic
Written English (BAWE) corpus, both managed by OUCS, which have been prised
open by FLAX and TOETOE for uses in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) –
also referred to as English as a Second Language (ESL) in North America – and
English for Academic Purposes (EAP). Stay tuned to this blog in the coming months
for more insights into open corpus-based English language resources and their
uses in different teaching and learning contexts.
This post is what those in the blogging business refer to as a ‘cornerstone’ post as it
includes many insights into the past few months of my teaching fellowship in OER
with the Support Centre in Open Educational Resources (SCORE) at the Open
University in the UK. Many posts within one as it were. This post also provides a
road map for taking my project work forward while identifying shorter blogging
themes for posts that will follow this one. This particular post will also act as the
mother-ship TOETOE post from which subsequent satellite posts will be linked.
Please use the menu hyperlinks in the section below to dip in and out of sections of
this blog post. I have elected to choose this more reflective style of writing through
blogging so that my growing understandings in this area are more accessible to
unanticipated readers who may stumble upon this blog and hopefully make
comments to help me refine my work. Two more formal case studies on my
TOETOE project to date will be coming out soon via the HEA and the JISC.
What station(s) are you listening to?
BBC Radio has been going since 1927. With audiences in the UK, four stations in
particular are firm favourites: youth oriented BBC Radio 1 featuring new and
contemporary music; BBC Radio 2 with middle of the road music for the more
mature audience; high culture and arts oriented BBC Radio 3, and; news and
current affairs oriented BBC Radio 4. Of course there are many more stations but
these four are very typical of those found around the world. What is more, I’ve
selected these four very distinct stations as the basis to build a metaphor around the
way four very distinct educational practitioner communities are intersecting with
corpus-based language teaching resources. This metaphor will draw on thought
waves from the following:
[1] what’s new and hip in open corpus-based resources and practices;
[2] the greatest hits in ELT materials development and publishing;
[3] research from teaching and language corpora, and;
[4] the current talk in EAP: open platforms for defining practice.
RADIO 1 – WHAT’S NEW AND HIP IN
OPEN CORPUS-BASED RESOURCES
AND PRACTICES
Flipped conferencing
Focusing on linked resources: which academic vocabulary list?
Open eBooks for language learning and teaching
MOOC on Open Translation tools and practices
Bringing open corpus-based projects to the Open Education
community
A world declaration for OER
Wikimedia – why not?
The open approach to corpus resources development
Original, in-house and live, this station brings us what’s new in the world of OER for
corpus-based language resources.
Flipped conferencing
Kicking things off in late March with Clare Carr from Durham, we co-presented an
OER for EAP corpus-based teacher and learner training cascade project at the

2. Eurocall CMC & Teacher Education Annual Workshop in Bologna, Italy. This was
very much a flipped conference whereby draft presentation papers were sent to be
read in advance by participants and where the focus was on discussion rather than
presentation at the physical event. Russell Stannard of Teacher Training Videos
(TTV) was the keynote speaker at this conference and I have been developing some
training resources for the FLAX open-source corpus collections which will be ready
to go live on TTV soon. New collections in FLAX have opened up the BAWE corpus
and have linked this to the BNC, a Google-derived n-gram corpus as well as
Wikimedia resources, namely Wikipedia and Wiktionary. These collections in FLAX
show what’s cutting edge in the developer world of open corpus-based resources
for language learning and teaching.
Focusing on linked resources: which academic vocabulary list?
In a later post, I will be looking at Mark Davies’ new work with Academic Vocabulary
Lists based on a 110 million-word academic sub corpus in the Corpus of
Contemporary American (COCA) English – moving away from the Academic Word
List (AWL) by Coxhead (2000) based on a 3.5 million-word corpus – and his
innovative web tools and collections based on the COCA. Once again, Davies’
Word and Phrase project website at Brigham Young University contains a bundle of
powerfully linked resources, including a collocational thesaurus which links to other
leading research resources such as the on-going lexical database project at
Princeton, WordNet.
The open approach to developing non-commercial learning and teaching corpus-
based resources in FLAX also shows the commitment to OER at OUCS (including
the Oxford Text Archive), where the BAWE and the BNC research corpora are both
managed. Click on the image below to visit the BAWE collections in FLAX.
BAWE case study text from the Life Sciences collection in FLAX with Wikipedia resources
Open eBooks for language learning and teaching
Learning Through Sharing: Open Resources, Open Practices, Open
Communication, was the theme of the EuroCALL conference and to follow things up
the organisers have released a call for OER in languages for the creation of an open
eBook on the same theme. The book will be “a collection of case studies providing
practical suggestions for the incorporation of Open Educational Resources (OER)
and Practices (OEP), and Open Communication principles to the language
classroom and to the initial and continuing development of language teachers.” This
open-access e-Book, aimed at practitioners in secondary and tertiary education, will
be freely available for download. If you’re interested in submitting a proposal to
contribute to this electronic volume, please send in a case study proposal
(maximum 500 words) by 15 October 2012 to the co-editors of the publication, Ana
Beaven (University of Bologna, Italy), Anna Comas-Quinn (Open University, UK) and
Barbara Sawhill (Oberlin College, USA).
MOOC on Open Translation tools and practices
Another learning event which I’ve just picked up from EuroCALL is a pilot Massive
Open Online Course in open translation practices being run from the British Open
University from 15th October to 7 December 2012 (8 weeks), with the
accompanying course website opening on Oct 10th 2012. Visit the “Get involved” tab
on the following site: http://www.ot12.org/. “Open translation practices rely on crowd
sourcing, and are used for translating open resources such as TED talks
and Wikipedia articles, and also in global blogging and citizen media projects such
as Global Voices. There are many tools to support Open Translation practices, from
Google translation tools to online dictionaries like Wordreference, or translation
workflow tools like Transifex.” Some of these tools and practices will be explored in
the OT12 MOOC.
Bringing open corpus-based projects to the Open Education community
On the back of the Cambridge 2012 conference: Innovation and Impact – Openly
Collaborating to Enhance Education held in April, I’ve been working on another
eBook chapter on open corpus-based resources which will be launched very soon
at the Open Education conference in Vancouver. The Cambridge 2012 event was
jointly hosted in Cambridge, England by the Open Course Ware Consortium
(OCWC) and SCORE. Presenting with Terri Edwards from Durham, we covered
EAP student and teacher perceptions of training with open corpus-based resources
from three projects: FLAX, the Lextutor and AntConc. These three projects vary in
terms of openness and the type of resources they are offering. In future posts I will
be looking at their work and the communities that form around their resources in
more depth. The following video from the conference has captured our presentation

3. and the ensuing discussion at this event to a non-specialist audience who are
curious to know how open corpus-based resources can help with the open
education vision. Embedding these tools and resources into online and distance
education to support the growing number of learners worldwide who wish to access
higher education, where the OER and most published research are in English,
opens a whole new world of possibilities for open corpus-based resources and EAP
practitioners working in this area.
00:00/27:22
A further video from a panel discussion which I contributed to – an OER
kaleidoscope for languages – looks at three further open language resources
projects that are currently underway and building momentum here in the UK:
OpenLives, LORO, the CommunityCafe. Reference to other established OER
projects for languages and the humanities including LanguageBox and the HumBox
are also made in this talk.
A world declaration for OER
The World OER congress in June at the UNESCO headquarters in Paris marked
ten years since the coining of the term OER in 2002 along with the formal adoption
of an OER declaration (click on the image to see the declaration). I’ve included the
following quotation from the OER declaration to provide a backdrop to this growing
open education movement as it applies to language teaching and learning,
highlighting that attribution for original work is commonplace with creative commons
licensing.
Emphasizing that the term Open Educational Resources (OER) was coined at
UNESCO’s 2002 Forum on Open Course Ware and designates “teaching, learning
and research materials in any medium, digital or otherwise, that reside in the public
domain or have been released under an open license that permits no-cost access,
use, adaptation and redistribution by others with no or limited restrictions. Open
licensing is built within the existing framework of intellectual property rights as
defined by relevant international conventions and respects the authorship of the
work”.
Wikimedia – why not?
Earlier in September, I volunteered to present at the EduWiki
conference in Leicester which was hosted by the Wikimedia UK chapter. Most
people are familiar with Wikipedia which is the sixth most visited website in the
world. It is but one of many sister projects managed by the Wikimedia Foundation,
however, along with others such as Wikiversity, Wiktionary etc.
I will also be blogging soon about widely held misconceptions for uses of Wikipedia
in EAP and EFL / ESL while exploring its potentials in writing instruction with
reference to some very exciting education projects using Wikipedia around the
world. The types of texts that make up Wikipedia alongside many academics’
realisations that they need to be reaching wider audiences with their work through
more accessible modes of writing transmission are all issues I will be commenting
on in this blog in the very near future.
Presenting the work the FLAX team have done with text mining, incorporating David
Milne’s Wikipedia mining tool, the potential of Wikipedia as an open corpus resource
in language learning and teaching is evident. I was demonstrating how this
Wikipedia corpus has been linked to other research corpora in FLAX, namely the
BNC and the BAWE, for the development of corpus-based OER for EFL / ESL and
EAP. And, let’s not forget that it’s all for free!
The open approach to corpus resources development
There is no reason why the open approach taken by FLAX cannot be extended to
build open corpus-based collections for learning and teaching other modern
languages, linking different language versions of Wikipedia to relevant research
corpora and resources in the target language. In particular, functionality in the FLAX
collections that enable you to compare how language is used differently across a
range of corpora, which are further supported by additional resources such as
Wiktionary and Roget’s Thesaurus, make for a very powerful language resource.
Crowd-sourcing corpus resources through open research and education practices
and through the development of open infrastructure for managing and making these
resources available is not as far off in the future as we might think. The Common
Language Resources and Technology Infrastructure (CLARIN) mission in Europe is
a leading success story in the direction currently being taken with corpus-based
resources (read more about the recent workshop for CLARIN-D held in Leipzig,
Germany).
RADIO 2 – THE GREATEST HITS IN ELT

4. RADIO 2 – THE GREATEST HITS IN ELT
MATERIALS DEVELOPMENT AND
PUBLISHING
Crosstalk in ELT materials development and publishing
The broken record in ELT publishing
Open Textbooks
A deficit in corpus-based resources training
Gangnam style corpus-based resources development
PublishOER
A matter of scale in open and distance education
Thinking beyond classroom-based practice
In a previous post, I left off with reflections from the 2012 IATEFL conference and
exhibition in Glasgow. Wandering through the exhibition hall crammed with vendor-
driven English language resources for sale from the usual suspects (big brand
publishers), the analogy of the greatest hits came to mind with respects to EFL /
ESL and EAP materials development and publishing. But at this same IATEFL event
there was also a lot of co-channel interference feeding in from the world of self-
publishing, reflecting how open digital scholarship has become mainstream practice
in Teaching English as a Foreign Language (TEFL), also known as Teaching
English as a Second Language (TESL) in North America. The launch of the round
initiative at IATEFL, bridging the gap between ELT blogging and book-making, where
the emphasis is on teachers as publishers is but one example.
Crosstalk in ELT materials development and publishing
Let’s take a closer look at the crosstalk happening within the world of ELT materials
development and publishing, where messages are being transmitted simultaneously
from radio 1 and radio 2 type stations. Across the wider ELT world, TEFL / TESL
has embraced Web 2.0 far more readily than EAP (but there are interesting signs of
open online life emerging from some EAP practitioners, which I will highlight in the
last section of this blog).
Within TEFL, we can observe more in the way of collaboration between open and
proprietary publishing practices. English360, also present at IATEFL 2012,
combines proprietary content from Cambridge University Press with teachers’
lesson plans, along with tools for creating custom-made pay-for online English
language courses. Across the ELT resources landscape open resources and
practices proliferate, including: free ELT magazines and journals; blogs and
commentary-led discussions; micro-blogging via twitter feeds and tweetchat
sessions; instructional and training videos via YouTube and iTunesU (both
proprietary channels that hold a lot of OER), and; online communities with lesson
plan resource banks. These and many more open educational practices (OEP) are
the norm in TEFL / TESL. And, let’s not forget Russell Stannard’s Teacher Training
Videos website of free resources for navigating web-based language tools and
projects drawing on his service as the Web Watcher at English Teaching
Professional for well over a decade now.
The broken record in ELT publishing
Broken record of “I believe in
miracles” by Ian Crowther via
Flickr
Yet, both the TEFL / TESL and EAP markets are still well and truly saturated with
the glossy print-based textbook format, stretching to the CD-ROM and mostly
password-protected online resource formats. The greatest hits get played over and
over again and the needle continues to get stuck in many places.
Exactly why does the closed textbook format concern me so much? It’s an issue of
granularity or size really which leads to further issues with flexibility, specificity and
currency. As we all know, there are only so many target language samples and task
types that you can pack into a print-based textbook. Beyond the trendy conversation-
based topics, what are sometimes useful and transferable are the approaches that
make up the pedagogy contained therein. Unlocking these approaches and linking to
wider and more relevant and authentic language resources is key. We can see this
approach to linked resources development taken by the web-based FLAX and
WordandPhrase corpus-based projects. Publishers are aware of the limitations of
the textbook format but they’re also trying to reach a large consumer base to boost
their sales so it remains in their best interests to keep resources generic. Think of all
the academic English writing books out there, many of which claim to be based on
the current research for meeting your teaching and learning needs for academic
English writing across the disciplines, but turn out to be more of the same topic-
based how-to skills books working within the same essayist writing tradition.
Open textbooks
The open textbook movement brings a new type of textbook to the world of
education. One that can be produced at a fraction of the cost and one that can be
tailored, linked to external resources, changed and updated whenever the
pedagogical needs arise.
The argument in favour of textbooks in ELT has always been one for providing
structure to the teaching and learning sequence of a particular syllabus or course.
Locked-down proprietary textbook, CD-ROM and online resource formats are not
only expensive but they are inflexible. And, these force teachers into problematic
practices. Despite trying to point out the perils of plagiarism to our students, as
language teachers we are supplementing textbooks with texts, images and audio-
visual material from wherever we can beg, borrow and steal them. Of course we do
this for principled pedagogical reasons and if we don’t plan on sharing these
teaching materials beyond classroom and password-protected VLE walls we’re
probably OK, right?
I’ve seen many a lesson handout or in-house course pack for language teaching that
includes many third party texts and images which are duly referenced. Whether the
teacher/materials developer puts the small ‘c’ in the circle or not, marking this
handout or course pack as copyrighted, the default license is one of copyright to the
institution where that practitioner works. And, this is where the problem lies. The
handout or course pack is potentially in breach of the copyright of any third party
materials used therein, unless the teacher/materials developer has gained
clearance from the copyright holders or unless those third party materials are openly
licensed as OER for re-mixing. Good practice with materials development and
licensing will ensure that valuable resources created by teachers can be legitimately
shared across learning and teaching communities. You can do this through open
publishing technologies and/or in collaboration with publishers.

5. A deficit in corpus-based resources training
Good corpus-derived textbooks from leading publishing houses do exist. Finally, the
teaching of spoken grammar gets the nod with The Handbook of Spoken Grammar
textbook by Delta Publishing. But, and this is a big but, do these textbooks go far
enough to address the current deficit in teacher and learner training with corpus-
based tools and resources? I expect the publishers would direct this question to the
academic monographs, of which there are a fair few, on Data Driven Learning
(DDL) and corpus linguistics. I have some on my bookshelf and there are many
more in the library where I am a student/fellow, all cross-referenced to academic
journal articles from research into corpus linguistics and DDL which I will be talking
about more in the third section of this blog. But exactly how accessible are these
resources – in terms of their cost, the academic language they are packaged in, the
closed proprietary formats they are published in, and in relation to much of the
subscription-only corpora and concordancing software their research is based on?
It’s no wonder that training in corpus tools and resources is not part of mainstream
English language teacher training. Of course, there are open exceptions that provide
new models in corpus-based resources development and publishing practices and
this is very much what the TOETOE project is trying to share with language
education communities.
Corpus linguists are well aware that corpus-based resources and tools in language
teaching and materials development haven’t taken off as a popular sport in
mainstream language teaching and teacher training. This does run counter to the
findings from the research, however, where the argument is that DDL has reached
a level of maturity (Nesi & Gardner, 2011; Reppen, 2010; O’Keefe et.al., 2007; Biber,
2006). Similarly, many of the findings from leading researchers (too many to cite!) in
language and teaching corpora have been baffled by the chasm between the
research into DDL and the majority of mainstream ELT materials that appear on the
market that continue to ignore the evidence about actual language usage from
corpus-based research studies. Once again, this comes back to the issue of
specific versus generic language materials and the issues raised around limitations
with developing restricted resource formats.
Gangnam style corpus-based resources development
Gangnam Style by PSY 싸이 강남스타일 via Flickr
So what’s it going to take for corpus-based resources to take off Gangnam style in
mainstream language teaching and teacher training? And, how are we going to
make these resources cooler and more accessible so as to stop language teaching
practitioners from giving them a bad rap? More and more corpus-based tools and
resources are being built with or re-purposed with open source technologies and
platforms. We are now presented with more and more web-based channels for the
dissemination of educational resources, offering the potential for massification and
exciting new possibilities for achieving what has always eluded the language
education and language corpora research community, namely the wide-scale
adoption of corpus-based resources in language education.
I’ve actually been asked to take the word ‘corpus’ out of a workshop title by a
conference organiser so as to attract more participants. If you’re interested in
expressing your own experiences with using corpora in language teaching and
would like to make suggestions for where you think data-driven learning should be
heading you can complete Chris Tribble’s on-going online survey on DDL here.
Radio, what’s new? Someone still loves you (corpus-based resources)…
PublishOER
Publishers constantly need ideas for and examples of good educational resources.
No great surprises there. I would like to propose that OER and OEP are a great way
to get noticed by publishers to start working with them. Sitting on the steering
committee meeting with the JISC-funded PublishOER project members at
Newcastle University in the UK in early September, we also had representatives
from Elsevier, RightsCom, the Royal Veterinary College (check out their exciting
WikiVet OER project) and JISC Collections at the table. Elsevier who have borne the
brunt of a lot of the lash back in academic publishing from the Open Access
movement are trying to open up to the fast changing landscape of open practices in
publishing. PublishOER are creating new mechanisms, a permissions request
system, for allowing teachers and academics to use copyrighted resources in OER.
These OER will include links and recommendations leading back to the publishers’
copyrighted resources as a mechanism for promoting them. Publishers are also
interested in using OER developed by teachers and academics that are well
designed and well received by students. Re-mixable OER offer great business
opportunities for publishers as well as great dissemination opportunities for DDL
researchers and practitioners, enabling effective corpus-based ELT resources to
reach broader audiences.
Sustainability is an important issue with any project, resource, event or community.
How many times have we seen school textbook sets stay unused on shelves, or
heard of government-funded project resources that go unused perhaps due to a lack
of discoverability? To build new and useful resources online does not necessarily
mean that teachers and learners will come in droves to find and use these
resources even if they are for free. David Duebelbeiss of EFL Classroom 2.0 is
currently exploring new business models for sharing and selling ELT resources.
One example is the sale of lesson plans in a can which were once free and now sell
for $19.95, a “once and forever payment”. Some teachers can even make it rich as
is reported in this businessweek article about a kindergarten teacher who sold her
popular lesson plans through the TeachersPayTeachers initiative.
Transaction costs in materials development don’t only include the cost of the tools
and resources that enable materials development, they also include the cost in
terms of time spent on developing resources and marketing them. Open education
also points to the unnecessary cost in duplicating the same educational resources
over and over again because they haven’t been designed and licensed openly for
sharing and re-mixing. Putting your resources in the right places, in more than one,
and working with those that understand new markets, new technologies and new
business models, including open education practitioners and publishers, are all
ways forward to ensure a return on investment with materials development.
Hopefully, by providing new frequencies for practitioners to tune into for how to
create resources from both open and proprietary resources a new mixed economy
(as the PublishOER crowd like to refer to it) will be realised.
A matter of scale in open and distance education
Let’s not forget those working in ELT around the world, many of whom are
volunteers, who along with their students simply cannot afford the cost of proprietary
and subscription-only educational resources, let alone the investment and

6. infrastructure for physical classrooms and schools. Issues around technology and
ELT resources and practices in developing countries did surface at IATEFL 2012
but awareness around the more pressing issues may not be finding ways to
effectively filter their way through to well-resourced ELT practitioners and the
institutions that employ them. ELT is still fixated on classroom-based teaching
resources and practices.
The Hornby Educational Trust in collaboration with the British Council which is a
registered charity have been offering scholarships to English language teachers
working in under-resourced communities since 1970. I attended a session given by
the Hornby scholars at IATEFL 2012 and although I was impressed by the
enthusiasm and range of expertise of those who had been selected for
scholarships, reporting on ELT interventions they had devised in their local contexts,
I couldn’t help but wonder about the scale of the challenges we currently face in
education globally. How are we going to provide education opportunities for the
additional 100 million learners currently seeking access to the formal post-
secondary sector (UNESCO, 2008)? In Sub-Saharan Africa, more than half of all
children will not have the privilege of a senior high school education (Ibid). What
open and distance education teaches us is that there are just not enough
teachers/educators out there. Nor will the conventional industrial model of
educational delivery be able to meet this demand.
As DDL researchers and resource developers who are looking for ways to make our
research and practice more widely adopted in language teaching and learning
globally, wouldn’t we also want to be thinking about where the real educational
needs are and how we might be reaching under-resourced communities with open
corpus-based educational resources for uses in EFL / ESL and EAP among other
target languages? First of all, we would need to devote more attention to unpacking
corpus-based resources so that they are more accessible to the non-expert user,
and we would need to find more ways of making these resources more
discoverable.
In interviews released as OER on YouTube by DigitaLang with leading TEFLers at
IATEFL 2012, I was able to catch up on opinions around the use of technology in
ELT. Nik Peachey corrected the often widely held misconception about the digital
divide for uses of technology in developing countries, pointing to the adoption of
mobile and distance education rather than the importation of costly print-based
published materials with first-world content and concerns that are often
inappropriate for developing world contexts. You can view his interview here:
Thinking beyond classroom-based practice
Scott Thornbury, writer of the A-Z of ELT blog – another influential and popular
discussion site for the classic hits in ELT for those who are both new and old to the
field – also praised the Hornby scholars and gave his views on technology in ELT in
a further IATEFL 2012 DigitaLang interview. He talks about the ‘human factor’ as
something that occurs in classroom-based language teaching. In order to nurture
this human factor, he recommends that technology be kept for uses outside the
classroom or at best for uses in online teacher education. Open and distance
education practitioners and researchers would also agree that well-resourced face-
2-face instruction yields high educational returns as in the case of the Hornby
scholarships, but they would also argue that this is not a scalable business model
for meeting the needs of the many who still lack access to formal post-secondary
education. What is more, the human factor as evidenced in online collaborative
learning is well documented in the research from open and distance education as it
is from traditional technology-enhanced classroom-based teaching.
For a view into how open and distance education practitioners and researchers are
trying to scale these learning and accreditation opportunities for the developing
world, the following open discussion thread from Wayne Mackintosh on MOOCs for
developing countries – discussion from the OERuniversity Google Groups provides
an entry point:
“Access to reliable and affordable internet connectivity poses unique challenges in
the developing world. That said, I believe it possible to design open courses which
use a mix of conventional print-based materials for “high-bandwidth” data and mobile
telephony for “low-bandwidth” peer-to-peer interactions. So for example, the OERu
delivery model will be able to produce print-based study materials and it would be
possible to automatically generate CD-ROM images of the rich media (videos /
audio) contained in the course for offline viewing. We already have the capability to
generate collections of OERu course materials authored in WikiEducator to
produce print-based equivalents which could be reproduced and distributed locally.
The printed document provides footnotes for all the web-links in the materials which
OERu learners could investigate when visiting an Internet access point. OERu
courses integrate microblogging for peer-to-peer interactions and we produce a
timeline of all contributions via discussion forums, blogs etc. The bandwidth
requirements for these kind of interactions are relatively low which address to some
extent the cost of connectivity.”
RADIO 3 – RESEARCH IN TEACHING AND LANGUAGE CORPORA
Bridging Teaching and Language Corpora (TaLC)
Prising open corpus linguistics research in Data Driven Learning (DDL)
DIY corpora with AntConc in English for Specific Academic Purposes
(ESAP)
Beyond books and podcasts through linking and crowd-sourcing
I confess that I spend most of my time listening to BBC Radio 3. The parallel that I
will draw here is that I was never formally educated in classical music in the same
way as I have never worked toward formal qualifications in corpus linguistics during
any of my studies. Because I am working broadly across the areas of language
resources development and enhancing teaching and learning practices through
technology it was only a matter of time, however, before I started exploring and
toying with corpus-based resources. I met Dr. Shaoqun Wu of the FLAX project
while at a conference in Villach, Austria in 2006 and by 2007 I had begun to delve
into the world of open-source digital library collections development with the
University of Waikato’s Greenstone software, developed and distributed in
cooperation with UNESCO, for realising the much broader vision of reaching under-

7. resourced communities around the world with these open technologies and
collections.
Bridging Teaching and Language Corpora (TaLC)
Let’s fast forward to the 2012 Teaching and Language Corpora Conference in
Warsaw, Poland. Although I have participated in corpus linguistics conferences
before, this was my first time to attend the biennial TaLC conference. TaLCers are
very much researchers working in the area of corpus linguistics and DDL and this
conference was themed around bridging the gap between DDL research and uses
for corpus-based resources and practices in language teaching and learning.
One of the keynote addresses from Mike Thomas, Let’s Marry, called for greater
connectedness in pursuing relationships between those working in DDL research
and those working in pedagogy and language acquisition. At one point he asked the
audience to make a show of hands for those who knew of big names in the ELT
world, including Scrivener, Harmer and Thornbury. Only a few raised their hands. He
also made the point that these same ELT names don’t make their way into citations
for research on DDL. Interestingly, I was tweeting points made in the sessions I
attended to relevant EAP and ELT / EFL / ESL communities online without a TaLC
conference hashtag. It would’ve been great to have the other TaLCers tweeting
along with me, raising questions and noting key take-away points from the
conference to engage interested parties who could not make the conference in
person and to catalogue a twitterfeed for TaLC that could be searched by anyone via
the Internet at a later point in time. It would’ve also been great to record keynote and
presentation speakers as webcasts for later viewing. When approached about these
issues later, however, the conference organisers did express interest in ways of
amplifying their events by building such mechanisms for openness into their next
conference.
Prising open corpus linguistics research in Data Driven Learning (DDL)
Problems with accessing and successfully implementing corpus-based resources
into language teaching and learning scenarios have been numerous. As I discussed
in section 2 of this blog, many of the concordancing tools referred to in the research
have been subscription-based proprietary resources (for example, the Wordsmith
Tools), most of which have been designed for at least the intermediate-level
concordance user in mind. These tools can easily overwhelm language teaching
practitioners and their students with the complex processing of raw corpus data that
are presented via complex interfaces with too many options for refinement. Mike
Scott, the main developer of the Wordsmith Tools has also released a free version
of his concordancing suite with less functionality and this would suffice for many
language teaching and learning purposes. He attended my presentation on opening
up research corpora with open-source text analysis tools and OER and was very
open-minded as were the other TaLCers whom I met at the conference regarding
new and open approaches for engaging teachers and learners with corpus-based
resources.
There are many freely available annotated bibliographies compiled by corpus
linguists which you can access on the web for guidance on published research into
corpus linguistics. Many researchers working in this area are also putting pre-print
versions of their research publications on the web for greater access and
dissemination of their work, see Alex Boulton’s online presence for an example of
this. Also hinted at earlier in part 2 of this blog are the closed formats many of this
published research takes, however, in the form of articles, chapters and the few
teaching resources available that are often restricted to and embedded within
subscription-only journals or pricey academic monographs. For example, Berglund-
Prytz’s ‘Text Analysis by Computer: Using Free Online Resources to Explore
Academic Writing’ in 2009 is a great written resource for where to get started with
OER for EAP but ironically the journal it is published in, Writing and Pedagogy, is not
free. Lancaster University is home to the openly available BNCweb concordancing
software which you only need register for to be able to install a free standard copy
on your personal computer. A valuable companion resource on BNCweb was
published by Peter Lang in 2008 but once again this is not openly accessible to
interested readers who cannot afford to buy the book. The great news is that the
main TaLC10 organiser, Agnieszka Lenko, has spearheaded openness with this
most recent event by trying to secure an Open Access publication for the TaLC10
proceedings papers with Versita publishers in London.
DIY corpora with AntConc in English for Specific Academic Purposes (ESAP)
At TaLC10 I discovered a lot of overlap with Maggie Charles’ work on building DIY
corpora with EAP postgraduate students using the AntConc freeware by Laurence
Anthony. We had also included workshops on AntConc for students in our OER for
EAP cascade at Durham so it was great to see another EAP practitioner working in
this way who had gathered data from her on-going work in this area for presentation
and discussion at the conference. Many of her students at the University of Oxford
Language Centre are working toward dissertation or thesis writing which raises
interesting questions around enabling EAP students to become proficient in
developing self-study resources for English for Specific Academic Purposes
(ESAP). Her recent paper in the English for Specific Purposes Journal (2012) points
to AntConc’s flexibility for student use due to it being freeware that can be installed
on any personal computer or flash-drive key for portable use. Laurence Anthony’s
website also offers a lot of great video training resources for how to use AntConc.
The potential that AntConc offers for building select corpora to those students
currently pursuing inter-disciplinary studies in higher education is also noted by
Charles. Having said this, drawbacks with certain more obscure subject disciplines,
for example Egyptology (Ibid.), that had not yet embraced digital research cultures
and were still publishing research in predominantly print-based volumes or image-
based .pdf files made the development of DIY corpora still beyond the reach of those
few students.
Beyond books and podcasts through linking and crowd-sourcing
TOETOE: English for Academic Purposes (EAP) with OER​ from Alannah
Fitzgerald

8. While presenting on the power of linked resources within the FLAX collections and
pushing these outward to wider stakeholder communities through TOETOE, I came
across another rapid innovation JISC-funded OER project at the Beyond Books
conference at Oxford. The Spindle project, also based at OUCS, has been exploring
linguistic uses for Oxford podcasts with work based on open-source automatic
transcription tools. Automatic transcription is often accompanied with a high rate of
inaccuracy. Spindle has been looking at ways for developing crowd-sourcing web
interfaces that would enable English language learners to listen to the podcasts and
correct the automatic transcription errors as part of a language learning crowd-
sourcing task.
Automatic keyword generation was also carried out in the SPINDLE project on
OpenSpires project podcasts, yielding far more accurate results. These keyword
lists which can be assigned as metadata tags in digital repositories and channels
like iTunesU offer further resource enhancement for making the podcasts more
discoverable. Automatically generated keyword lists such as these can also be used
for pedagogical purposes with the pre-teaching of vocabulary, for example. The
TED500 corpus by Guy Aston which I also came across at TaLC10 is based on the
TED talks (ideas worth spreading) which have also been released under creative
commons licences and transcribed through crowd-sourcing.
The potential for open linguistic content to be reused, re-purposed and redistributed
by third parties globally, provided that they are used in non-commercial ways and
are attributed to their creators, offers new and exciting opportunities for corpus
developers as well as educational practitioners interested in OER for language
learning and teaching.
RADIO 4 – THE CURRENT TALK IN EAP: OPEN PLATFORMS FOR DEFINING
PRACTICE
Toward open practices in EAP
English for Specific Academic Purposes with data driven learning
resources
A parallel universe in EAP materials development
In-house EAP materials development
A lot of talk around defining current and trending practices in EAP can be tuned into
via open as well as proprietary channels. In this section, I will refer to new-found
open practices in EAP which are embracing Web 2.0 technologies amidst a
backdrop of closed practices in EAP academic publishing and within subscription-
only EAP memberships. I will open up discussion around these different practices
within EAP to sketch out common ground for where EAP could be heading with
respects to global outreach.
Toward open practices in EAP
Recent months have evidenced a steady opening up of practices for sharing
expertise and resources in EAP. The new EAP teaching blog based at Nottingham
University as a discussion-based side-shoot to their new Masters programme in
EAP teaching makes use of the most widely used open-source blogging software,
WordPress. Thanks to our friends in Canada, EAP tweetchat sessions are run on
twitter with the hashtag #EAPchat every first and third Monday of the month, bringing
together EAP practitioners who wish to participate in global EAP discussions as well
as suggest topics for upcoming tweetchat sessions. An archived transcript page is
available at the end of each EAPchat twitter session.
Free webinars from Oxford University Press (OUP), the largest academic publishing
house in the world, are also broadcasting talk on EAP to the world. Julie Moore who
has collaborated on the new Oxford EAP book series has also contributed free
webinars with OUP attended by EAP practitioners from around the world. A review
of one of Julie’s webinars on academic grammar can be found on the OUP-
sponsored ELT global blog. Wouldn’t it be great if more EAP practitioners opened up
their practice in this way to suggest areas of expertise in EAP that they would like to
contribute and broadcast via webinars with OUP’s considerable market outreach?
The EAP community in the UK mainly gathers around BALEAP with their
Professional Issues Meetings, accreditation scheme, biennial conference and lively
email discussion list. There is a noticeable push-pull between open and closed EAP
practices within BALEAP which I would like to bring into the open for discussion.
Openness was built into the Durham PIM on the EAP Practitioner in June of this
year to make this the first BALEAP event to have a twitter hashtag thanks to forward
thinking from Steve Kirk. Since this PIM he has also been curating a useful EAP
practitioner resources site with Scoop.it!
There does seem to be a willingness on the part of BALEAP members to explore
with new technologies so that their discussions around issues on EAP are openly
available. However, the BALEAP email discussion list which I mentioned above is
the only one of half a dozen similarly JISC-hosted email discussion lists that I belong
to which is closed off by the BALEAP membership subscription pay-wall. The others
which I subscribe to for free are all open, and discussion transcripts from their
contributing members can be searched via the web through the JISC email
archives. This has been a BALEAP executive committee decision to keep the email
discussion list closed and I question whether this decision best reflects the current
drive toward openness among BALEAP members who are interested in sharing
their insights and expertise with those around the world for whom BALEAP
membership is not an affordable option.
BALEAP recently added the strap-line the global forum for EAP practitioners to its
website. Formerly the British Association of Lecturers in EAP (hence the continuity
from the acronym to the name BALEAP), some of their event and research outputs
can be found on their website but others can only be accessed via the subscription-
only Journal of English for Academic Purposes (JEAP). And, you can probably
guess where I’m going here with concerns around openness or lack thereof with
respects to being the global EAP practitioner forum…
Nonetheless, an invaluable EAP resource that BALEAP have put out onto the wild
web is the EAP teacher competency framework. An EAP practitioner portfolio
mentoring programme is currently in the pilot stages and there is talk of matching
EAP teaching competencies in BALEAP with the UK Professional Standards
Framework (UKPSF) at the HEA, but once again for those non-UK and freelance
EAP practitioners who do not work for UK higher education institutions that
subscribe to the HEA such an alignment of frameworks may not be suitable or
relevant. That said, the essence of the UKPSF is useful and perhaps with the
current OER International programme at the HEA we can see ownership of
the UKPSF go international? HEA accreditation as a UK body will remain a reality,
however, so it will be interesting to see what the HEAL working party at BALEAP
who are collaborating with the HEA will come up with in response to shaping the
identity of BALEAP who aspire to be known as the global forum for EAP
practitioners.
Having recently formed a Web Resources Sub Committee (WRSC) with other
technologically and OER oriented EAPers at BALEAP we may yet see things open
up. Below is the presentation Ylva Berglund Prytz and myself (both on the WRSC
at BALEAP) gave on Openness in English for Specific Academic Purposes (ESAP)
at the PIM in Sheffield in November, 2011.

9. Openness in English for Specific Academic Purposes from Alannah Fitzgerald
Elsevier are the publishers of JEAP and from experience open access in academic
publishing has come about through the pressure tactics of certain academic
communities of practice lobbying for green and gold standard open access
publications in their representative fields. Open Access week – set the default to
open is coming up again on October 22nd.
Moving to open access research publications all depends on the culture of the
academic research community. It will take those EAP practitioners and researchers
working in privileged and well-resourced institutions that can easily afford
institutional subscriptions to memberships like BALEAP to seriously consider open
access and the potential for global reach of research into EAP. It will also take those
EAP practitioners who are working off their institutional radars, so to speak, and who
are experimenting with Web 2.0 technologies to get their message and expertise out
there for global interaction around issues in EAP practice and research. Something I
picked up from Steve Kirk’s Scoop.it! account is a recent book setting an open trend
in EAP publishing, Writing Programs Worldwide: Profiles of Academic Writing in
Many Places which is published in a free digital online format as well as a pay-for
print version. This echoes what publishers are doing with big names in more open
fields such as the Bloomsbury Academic publication of The Digital Scholar by Martin
Weller. Exciting times and opportunities lie ahead for EAP publishing.
English for Specific Academic Purposes with data driven learning resources
It seems to be no great coincidence that Tim Johns who coined the term Data
Driven Learning (DDL) in 1994 had also come up with the term English for
Academic Purposes (EAP) in 1974 (Hyland, 2006). According to Chris Tribble’s
preliminary results from his latest survey in-take on DDL (announced at the TaLC
closing keynote address), EAP practitioners still make up a high percentage of those
who took the survey, indicating greater uptake of corpus-based resources and
practices in EAP than those in EFL / ESL, for example.
Open corpus-based tools and resources have the potential to equip and enable EAP
practitioners to develop relevant ESAP materials. Awareness of and training in these
open corpus-based resources will need to be shared across the EAP community,
however, to ensure that we are crowd-sourcing our expertise and our resources in
this area. If you click on the image below this will take you to a talk I gave at the
Open University in the UK on addressing academic literacies with corpus-based
OER. This was inspired by the Tribble DDL survey and the lead up to the TaLC10
conference. It was an added bonus to have one of the BAWE corpus developer
team members in the audience that day and to receive positive feedback on how
FLAX have opened up the BAWE in collaboration with TOETOE and OUCS.
OU video presentation on Addressing Academic Literacies with open corpus-based resources
Over the course of this academic year FLAX and TOETOE will continue to build
onto work around opening up research corpora like the BAWE and the BNC
managed by OUCS for developing resources for ESAP. We will also be engaging
with various stakeholder groups through f2f workshops, online surveys and
interviews for open corpus-based resources evaluation which I will be sharing
insights from on this blog.
One final word on OER and where corpus-based resources might play a significant
role in making higher education more accessible to the estimated 100 million
learners worldwide who currently qualify to study at university level but do not have
the means to do so (UNESCO, 2008). Because English is the educational lingua
franca, open educationalists are going to source support resources for academic
English from the approaches and materials that are currently popular and openly
available to re-use under creative commons licences. This throws up interesting
issues around specificity in EAP for supporting learners with discipline-specific
English.

10. A parallel universe in EAP materials development / resources
Cartoon image referred to by Niko Pfund, USA
president of OUP in podcast on Ebooks,
Reading and Scholarship in a Digital Age
It would be an understatement to say that the academic publishing world is
undergoing a radical transformation with the arrival of digital and open publishing
formats which are democratising publishing as we know it. Niko Pfund, President of
Oxford University Press (USA), discusses the ways in which technology affects
reading, scholarship, publishing and even thinking in a presentation he gave at
Oxford recently which you can access by clicking on the cartoon image above.
I learned a lot from this podcast, including OUP’s commitment since 2003 to
publishing all research monographs in both digital and print formats. I also learned of
their admiration for what Wikipedians have done for opening up knowledge and
publishing through human crowd-sourcing that utilise open technologies and
platforms. A parallel drawn here to something that was brought up repeatedly at the
Wikimedia conference is how academic publishing houses like OUP are well placed
to open up the disciplines in the same way as Wikipedia by bringing the voices of
the academy into the public sphere through more accessible means of
communication than research, and by effectively linking this research to current
world events to gain wider relevance and readership.
Pfund refers to messy experimental times in academic publishing with lots of new
business models currently being explored for spear-heading changes in publishing.
OUP heavily subsidise and give away a lot of published resources including ELT
textbooks to the developing world, but not yet under open licences (someone please
correct me if I’m wrong here) for those practitioners working in under-resourced
communities so that they can re-mix and re-distribute these same resources.
OUCS and OUP are literally down the road from one another, a parallel universe as
it were. The former is research, learning and teaching focused with a strong
commitment to public scholarship, and the later is focused on exploring new
practices and business models for delivering the best in academic publishing.
Arguably, there is a lot of overlap that can be tapped into here for the collaborative
development of open corpus-based resources and practices for the global ELT
market.
In-house EAP materials development
EAP teachers have been developing in-house EAP materials in response to the
generic EAP teaching resources available on the mainstream market as a means to
meeting the real needs of their students going onto all number of degree
programmes. However, as I mentioned in section 2 of this blog post, many of these
in-house EAP materials make use of third party copyrighted texts and therefore
cannot be shared beyond the secret garden of the classroom or the institutional
password-protected VLE. An enormous opportunity presents itself here to EAP
practitioners and corpus linguists alike to push out resources in English for Specific
Academic Purposes (ESAP) using open Data-Driven Learning (DDL) methods,
texts, tools and platforms for sharing OER for ESAP. A significant cultural shift in
practice will be required, however, to realise this vision for developing flexible and
open ESAP resources that can be adapted for use in multiple educational contexts
both off- and on-line. Once again, in subsequent blog posts, I will be presenting open
educational practices and open research methods to open up discussion for ways
forward with this particular global EAP vision.
References:
Anthony, L. (n.d.). Laurence Anthony’s Website: AntConc.
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.
Altbach, P. G., Reisberg, L., & Rumbley, L. E. (2009). Trends in Global Higher Education:
Tracking an Academic Revolution. A Report Prepared for the UNESCO 2009 World
Conference on Higher Education. Retrieved from
http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0018/001832/183219e.pdf
Berglund-Prytz, Y (2009). Text Analysis by Computer: Using Free Online Resources to
Explore Academic Writing. Writing and Pedagogy 1(2): 279–302.
Biber, D., (2006). University language: a corpus-based study of spok en and written registers.
Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
British National Corpus, version 3 (BNC XML Edition). 2007. Distributed by Oxford University
Computing Services on behalf of the BNC Consortium.
Coxhead, A. (2000). The Academic Word List.
Lexical Analysis Software & Oxford University Press (1996-2012). Wordsmith Tools.
Hoffmann, S., Evert, S., Smith, N., Lee, D. & Berglund Prytz, Y. (2008). Corpus Linguistics
with BNCweb – a Practical Guide. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.
Hyland, K. (2006). English for Academic Purposes: An Advanced Handbook. London:
Routledge.
Johns, T. (1994). From Printout to Handout: Grammar and Vocabulary Teaching in the Context
of Data-driven Learning. In Odlin, T. (ed.), Perspectives on Pedagogical Grammar: 27-45.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Nesi, H, Gardner, S., Thompson, P. & Wickens, P. (2007). The British Academic Written
English (BAWE) corpus, developed at the Universities of Warwick, Reading and Oxford
Brookes under the directorship of Hilary Nesi and Sheena Gardner (formerly of the Centre for
Applied Linguistics [previously called CELTE], Warwick), Paul Thompson (Department of
Applied Linguistics, Reading) and Paul Wickens (Westminster Institute of Education, Oxford
Brookes), with funding from the ESRC (RES-000-23-0800)
Nesi, H. and Gardner, S. (2012). Genres across the Disciplines: Student writing in higher
education. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
O’Keeffe, A., McCarthy, M., & Carter R. (2007). From Corpus to Classroom: language use and
language teaching. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Reppen, R. (2010). Using Corpora in the Language Classroom . Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.