Simple English Wikipedia is a user-contributed online encyclopedia intended for young readers and readers whose first language is not English. We compiled a corpus of the entirety of Simple English Wikipedia as of June 20th, 2017. We used lexical frequency profiling tools to investigate the vocabulary size needed to comprehend Simple English Wikipedia texts. We hypothesized that if the texts are indeed simple, learners should need to know far fewer than 8000 words. Our findings indicate that the texts are not as simple as the creators of the authoring guidelines intended. We suggest that authors of simplified texts be encouraged to provide plain language explanations of low-frequency technical terms either in-text or in glossary form. We will discuss implications for researching the pedagogical usefulness of the Simple English Wikipedia.
Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are easily accessible for anyone in
the world to study any given subject, often for free. However, there is some
question as to whether they are comparable to their real-world counterparts.
The Academic Spoken Word List (ASWL) created by Dang, Coxhead, and Webb
(2017) was designed to create a word list that is more representative of
spoken academic English. To contrast the real-world academic context to
MOOCs, we created a MOOC academic corpus and compared it with the Michigan
Corpus of Academic Spoken English (MICASE). Last, we used both to test the
effectiveness of the ASWL. Overall, we found that the ASWL had similar
coverage in both the MOOC and MICASE corpora but interestingly saw slightly
more coverage in the MICASE dialogic sections. We believe future research
should address the slight discrepancy between dialogic and non-dialogic
academic situations.
This chapter reports on a needs analysis on a joint science program in which students spend two years each in China and Canada. Students take ESL courses in China to help them transition to the English curriculum in Canada. Since many of these students plan to work in Canada upon graduation, the authors aimed to determine how the program prepared them not only for university, but also for out-of-class interactions. They interviewed students currently in the Canadian stage of the program, a science teacher, and two ESL teachers. Students were well prepared for academics, but struggle with informal talk. The science teacher found the students to perform well, though were reluctant to speak up. In contrast, the ESL teachers commented on their lack of motivation. All parties noted that a specialized English for academic purposes (EAP) course might address these issues. The authors discuss implications for cross-cultural curriculum design and the need for communication between domain and language experts.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.