This paper presents a comparison of genre use at three Swiss universities from different language regions. The methodology is one of contrastive genre mapping in which we connect two lines of research usually seen as distinct approaches. The aim of the study is to find ways of comparing the writing cultures of different languages by collecting and comparing the genres used for teaching. Data about genres were gathered through questionnaires in which students and faculty members were asked to describe writing assignments and student texts. From the answers to these questionnaires, genre inventories were constructed and then rechecked with insiders in faculty discussions or interviews. As results, lists of genres from the individual universities are presented, as are the patterns of genre families into which the genres were classified. It turned out that genre use shows strong similarities across the three universities. The main genre families are presented and differences between universities are discussed.
Phraseology has long been used in L2 teaching of academic writing, and corpus linguistics has played a major role in the compilation and assessment of academic phrases. However, there are only a few interactive academic writing tools in which corpus methodology is implemented in a real-time design to support formulation processes. In this paper, we describe several corpus-related methods that we have developed and implemented as part of an interactive thesis-writing tool, Thesis Writer, designed and constructed jointly by the Language Competence Centre and the Center for Innovative Teaching and Learning of the Zurich University of Applied Sciences in Switzerland. Thesis Writer (TW) hosts several linguisticsupport tools and is designed in its first pilot version to support thesis writing in economics with the help of two self-compiled corpora in English and German. Students can access the corpora directly via the IMS Open Corpus Workbench or via a pre-selected collection of central rhetorical elements through the phrase book. Several search options and tutorials have been tested and included into the TW platform: the corpus simple search tool, the corpus syntactic search tool, and the academic phrasebook. In the case of the latter, a new methodology led to the identification of lists of phrases distributed in research-cycle sections of the thesis.
This study aims to analyse the effects of a digitally enhanced teaching strategy in an ESP course. The intervention method consists of guided corpus linguistics exercises which are progressively introduced to improve the students’ academic writing. We collected data from various task-based corpus processing, consultation and analysis stages, each one having a different complexity level: compilation of a discipline-specific expert corpus, consultation of a native speaker English corpus and analyses of both types. The pre- and post-intervention results are quantitatively and qualitatively assessed, controlling for discipline specificity. The results of a corpus consultation satisfaction survey are also included in the analysis. We conclude that corpus consultations not only lead to the improvement of ESP students’ writing but also increasing student motivation. The recommendation is to first test the digital methods in ESP courses and calibrate them according to disciplinary settings.
The modern university has the potential to turn into a nexus of digital embracement and innovation, thus responding to both strategic planning for higher education and societal demands. Priorities in digitalisation strategies (White Paper ‘Bologna Digital 2020’, Rampelt et al. 2019) for higher education institutions (HEIs) are actively promoted, and their implementation is in progress throughout Europe. However, the embedding of the digitalisation reform at the institutional level is considerably uneven from one country to another, with Eastern European HEIs lagging behind (Conrads et al. 2017). The aim of this position paper is to present and discuss the case of digital humanities (DH) as an incentive for digitalisation strategies at Eastern European universities. We briefly contextualize the configuration of DH initiatives in the region by using the results of the Digital Humanities Survey and propose the case study of Romania, where we investigate the implementation status of such initiatives. We further exemplify the process of developing a DH centre and evaluate the institutional impact of the recently created research centre CODHUS, from the West University of Timişoara, Romania, the second DH centre in the country. The strength of the new centre relies on its capacity to converge cross-disciplinary expertise with digital technologies. The centre intends to develop computational solutions and digital tools for research, course development and assessment. CODHUS is also a digital-competence training centre for teachers and students, with the purpose of bridging the gap between teaching strategies and goals, on one hand, and students’ digital experiences and expectations from HEI, on the other. The study offers a multiple-lens perspective on the integration of digital-intensive research initiatives, such as DH, into the Bologna process. We argue that DH centres can support further HE developments which contribute to building “new learning ecologies” (Galvis 2018) and creating an “education area with digital solutions” (Rampelt 2019).
Corpora are valuable technology-supported learning resources to be used
by autonomous language learners or during teacher-guided lessons. This study
explores the potential of corpus consultation approaches for the improvement
of English for Specific Purposes (ESP) students’ academic writing skills. We
investigated the effects of three types of Data-Driven Learning (DDL)
activities in a sample group of 29 first-year and second-year students
majoring in Geography for Tourism at a Romanian university, consisting of
writing tasks supported by: a Learner Corpus (LC), a Native-Speaker Corpus
(NSC), and a Web-based Corpus (WBC). The research methodology involves the
combination of quantitative and qualitative data, extracted from pre- and
post-intervention corpus analyses, with the results of a
learner-satisfaction questionnaire. The findings indicate a significant
differentiation in the complexity of the lexico-grammatical features used by
learners in consequent intervention stages and a better integration of
L2-related academic writing strategies into their written productions. The
study yields first conclusions on the integration of computer-processed
language databases in DDL strategies for ESP learners in the Romanian
university context.
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