Data-driven learning for younger learners: Secondary female students’ perceptions and use of corpora for improving science report writing
Open to the Public
Thursday, October 27, 5 PM – 5:50 PM EDT (Friday, October 28 at 7am, Brisbane time)
Dr. Peter Crosthwaite, Senior Lecturer in the School of Languages and Cultures, University of Queensland
Zoom Information:
Zoom Link: https://msu.zoom.us/j/92673801650
Meeting ID: 926 7380 1650
Passcode: 816980
Secondary school students in Australia must quickly develop knowledge of the language features required to meet disciplinary literacy standards for STEM. However, many girls feel frustrated when encountering STEM language, particularly those for whom English is an additional language (Jones & Seilhamer, 2020), while science subject teachers often lack the technological, pedagogical and content knowledge (TPACK, Koehler & Mishra, 2009) to develop students’ abilities to discover the language of science through technology.
Corpora are increasingly used to enhance the teaching of disciplinary literacies – including science writing- through Data-Driven Learning (DDL, Johns, 1997). However, its empirical efficacy for secondary education is still largely untested (Crosthwaite, 2019). This paper explores how DDL pedagogy can support secondary girls’ reporting of observed science experiments through written research reports, focusing particularly on how DDL can help develop receptive and productive knowledge of the passive voice. Participants included 60 Year 9-10 girls at an Australian high school. A pre-test of receptive knowledge and production of passive constructions was conducted, alongside the collection of written reports retelling an observed science experiment, on which written corrective feedback was provided for corpus-assisted revisions. During a 10-week term, students completed guided homework tasks and short in-class group DDL activities using freely available online corpus applications including SketchEngine and Linggle. Following treatment, a post-test was conducted while questionnaire and interview data was collected to determine the perceptions of younger female learners regarding engagement with corpora and DDL. Follow-up questionnaire data was also collected 10 weeks after the treatment to determine continued engagement with corpora post-treatment.
The data suggest that while DDL did not result in increased receptive knowledge of the passive (which was already quite high), the DDL treatment resulted in increased production of accurate passive voice constructions in pre/post-test conditions. Analysis of students’ written production contained little evidence of the use of corpora for the passive but did contain numerous revisions to highlighted issues with academic phraseology. Student’s qualitative perceptions of corpora and DDL were mixed, including positive perceptions of DDL as a concept alongside reservations about existing corpora and tools, while follow-up survey data suggests only a few students continued to use corpora 10 weeks after the treatment. I spend time at the end of this presentation discussing these issues, while outlining what can be done in future training.
References
Crosthwaite, P. (2019). Data-Driven Learning for the Next Generation: Corpora and DDL for Pre-tertiary Learners. Routledge.
Johns, T. (1997) Contexts: the background, development and trialling of a concordance-based CALL program. In A. Wichmann, S. Fligelstone, T. McEnery and G. Knowles (eds) Teaching and Language Corpora (pp.100-115). Longman.
Jones, S. A., & Seilhamer, M. F. (2020). Girls Becoming Mathematicians: Identity and Agency in the Figured World of the English-Medium Primary School. Journal of Language, Identity & Education, 1-17.
Koehler, M., & Mishra, P. (2009). What is technological pedagogical content knowledge (TPACK)? Contemporary Issues in Technology and Teacher Education, 9(1), 60-70.
Dr. Peter Crosthwaite is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Languages and Cultures at UQ (since 2017), having formerly been an assistant professor at the Centre for Applied English Studies (CAES), University of Hong Kong (since 2014). He holds an MA TESOL from the University of London and an M.Phil/Ph.D in applied linguistics from the University of Cambridge. His areas of research and supervisory expertise include corpus linguistics and the use of corpora for language learning (known as ‘data-driven learning’), as well as English for General and Specific Academic Purposes. He is the author of the monograph ‘Learning the language of Dentistry: Disciplinary corpora in the teaching of English for specific academic purposes’ as part of Benjamins’ Studies in Corpus Linguistics series (with Lisa Cheung, published 2019), as well as the edited volumes ‘Data Driven Learning for the Next Generation: Corpora and DDL for Pre-tertiary Learners’ (published 2019) and ‘Referring in a second language: Reference to person in a multilingual world’ (with Jonathon Ryan, published 2020) with Routledge. He is also currently serving as Associate Editor for the Q1 Journal of English for Academic Purposes, as well as on the editorial boards of IRAL, System, and Applied Corpus Linguistics, a new journal covering the direct applications of corpora to teaching and learning.