24/10/2009 • 06:51 0
Open access to knowledge is something I firmly believe in. The open access week perhaps provides a good oportunity to us all to learn more about the movement and its aims.
There are more and more individuals as well as universities opening access to knowledge. An open society can provide a better future to us all.
A few useful links:
Open access week
Wikipedia: Open access publishing
SPARC Europe
Science Commons
CC Learn
Directory of Open Access Journals
27/02/2009 • 20:59 0
“Potentials and Challenges of ESP Learner Corpora: The Case of Modal Auxiliaries in Slovene ESP Learners’ Written Interlanguage” is the title of an article I wrote over a year ago. It was published in Inter Alia 1, the proceedings of a 2007 LSP conference I attended. The abstract is below and the article is available at the publication’s website.
ABSTRACT
A corpus-based approach to interlanguage analysis has been used for over a decade now and its impacts on foreign language teaching materials and teaching practices has been quite substantial. The approach, however, has rarely been used for studying ESP learners’ interlanguage. This paper therefore aims to address the potentials that a small ESP learner corpus can present to ESP teachers, and determine whether the resources available can at present support such an analysis. Based on a small corpus of ESP student essays, central modal auxiliaries were studied with a focus on overuse errors. The analysis revealed that providing a reliable explanation for students’ overuse errors is rather difficult given the existing corpus resources and that these are still too few in the fields of ESP. Nevertheless, the results can provide sufficient grounds for ESP teachers to adjust their teaching materials to their learners’ needs.
25/07/2008 • 21:09 0
I was browsing Varieng’s website again when I came across two lectures:
I’ve watched the first one (left the second one for tomorrow) and I found it most interesting and informative. The leading researchers in English historical corpus linguistics present their corpora, their aims and the design principles used. A treat.
Filed under: Corpora, Discourse, Linguistics, Research
01/10/2007 • 11:21 0
The International Journal of Applied Linguistics has got a number of articles available for free viewing. Nothing new, you’d rightly say. But there’s one I’d really like to recommend for reading.
Cathrine Walter’s First- to second-language reading comprehension: not transfer, but access raises an issue which ESP teachers are particularly familiar with: reading comprehension development in a foreign language. She reports on a research carried out among French learners of English. She found out that lower-intermediate learners have difficulty accessing their structure building skill when reading texts in a FL although they have no similar problems when reading in their mother tongue. Also the same learners seem to be suffering from working memory deficit while processing FL texts. The length of the text does not seem to play a relevant role here. Interestingly, she suggests that classroom time should not be spent on teaching comprehension skills to our students. Instead we should be focusing on activities which help students improve their parsing skills. Also Walter suggests working with shorter texts (100 words each) and paying attention to pronunciation.
BTW, I really appreciate the journal’s policy to publish the article’s abstract in the author’s mother tongue. 
15/07/2007 • 06:13 0
The Association Française de Linguistique Cognitive (AFLiCo) has started publishing a new journal – CogniTextes. As its name tells, they will publish manuscripts focusing on cognitive research.
The journal is published online and is available free of charge at http://aflico.asso.univ-lille3.fr/cognitextes/.
Filed under: Research
ESSE conference calls
