Huaqing Hong

For the past two decades or so, the world has witnessed the global craze of learning Chinese as foreign language and the mushrooming of Confucius Institutes through the efforts of promotion of the Chinese government. By the end of 2010, there have been more than 690 Confucius Institutes/Schools established in 96 countries/regions, most of which are with English as a dominant language. There is a growing concern and critique about the Chinese ideology and culture emerged with this rapid expansion may affect the world view of non-Chinese speakers. This study thus attempts to examine the issue from a perspective of corpus-based critical discourse analysis of Chinese textbook materials used in Confucius Institutes. The analysis will look at how the ideology and culture embedded in the reading materials have been reflected in the Chinese textbooks commonly used in Confucius Institutes around the world, and what culture images they have been projected to the learners. We will firstly build a corpus of reading texts to collect a dozen of Chinese textbooks widely used in those Confucius Institutes. Following on corpus annotation and content analysis, we hope our findings can capture the patterns of language use and cultural images identified and distributed in the texts. We believe that the selected teaching materials in the textbooks reflects an ideology that serves the interests of particular groups in society to the exclusion of others, and thus contributes a lot to the attitude of the learners towards the ideology and culture carried by the language itself.

This paper discusses the compilation of the International Corpus of Crosslinguistic Interlanguage (the ICCI corpus), and how the corpus data can be explored with a sophisticated query package for learner language research. We first present the design and compilation of such a specialized corpus in compliance with corpus linguistics standards; next, we provide a comprehensive description of the steps undertaken to turn the hand-written paper collection into the creation of a linguistically annotated text corpus and its characteristics; finally, we report the corpus database built in-house, its query interface, and some innovative features for linguistic research.

This study investigates how young English as a foreign language (EFL) learners from Chinese, Spanish, and Polish mother tongue backgrounds use interactional metadiscourse in descriptive and argumentative English essays by drawing data from the ICCI corpus. The quantitative and qualitative analyses show that (i) there are significant differences among the three groups of EFL learners in the use of boosters, attitude markers, self-mentions, and engagement markers; and (ii) there are significant differences between the descriptive essays and the argumentative essays in the use of hedges and self-mentions. Discussion of the results is related to intergroup homogeneity and heterogeneity in the use of metadiscourse and the influences of essay types as well as topics/prompts. Pedagogical implications are provided for teaching interactional metadiscursive resources to young EFL learners from different mother tongue backgrounds and in relation to descriptive and argumentative writing.

Abstract The purpose of this study is to compare the usage of metadiscourse in English and in Chinese research articles (RAs) published in applied linguistics journals and to investigate how metadiscourse may contribute to knowledge construction in RAs. A small corpus in each language was built consisting of 20 journal articles in English and another 20 in Chinese. In order to highlight metadiscourse features, an established model of metadiscourse was adopted to annotate both Chinese and English articles. It was found that there are generally more metadiscourse features in the English sub-corpus than in the Chinese sub-corpus. While both English sub-corpus and Chinese sub-corpus were found to use statistically significantly more interactive metadiscourse resources (organising discourse) than interactional metadiscourse resources (indicating writers' attitude and stance to themselves, text and audience), the English sub-corpus employed statistically significantly more interactional metadiscourse features than the Chinese sub-corpus. Implications of this study are discussed for both English and Chinese academic writing, including the teaching of English writing as a second language (L2).

... to them, SCE serves the following functions: to create a feeling of solidarity (Richard and Tay 1977). ... Ltd. Luke, A., Freebody, P., Shun, L. and Gopinathan, S. (2005)Towards research-based innovation and reform: Singapore schooling in ... Xiao, R., McEnery, T and Qian YF (2006). ...

... EDUCATIONAL DISCOURSE IN SINGAPORE SCHOOLS Paul Doyle and Hong Huaqing 1 ... PaulDoyle is an Assistant Professor with the English Language and Literature Academic Group at the National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. ...

This project seeks to conduct an investigation and evaluation of the pedagogical approaches adopted in the acquisition of English language literacy for low-waged, low-skilled adult learners of English in Singapore. The research focuses on the pedagogical approach undertaken in the curriculum and training programmes that have been delivered under Singapore's Workplace Literacy Programme through the approved Workplace Literacy Training Providers, and further determines the pedagogical approaches which would be most effective in enabling low-waged and low-skilled adult learners to acquire English literacy and meet programme outcomes.

The three groups identified in this project are found to have developed different Mandarin oral proficiencies in relation to their different exposures of language use at home in terms of their vocabulary coverage and code-switching. The CSF group has a much bigger ...

ABSTRACT: Colloquial Singapore English is an outer-circle variety that exhibits contact-induced lin-guistic change. It has been characterized as the L variant in diglossic opposition to standard English. In this paper, we address two related issues: (1) the extent to which the Singapore English diglossia is supported by corpus data, and (2) the extent to which the diglossia is reducible to register variation. We investigate the usage pattern of two linguistic variables which have acquired novel grammatical meanings, and show that our data support the Singapore English diglossia, but the variation is greater than what is normal in register variation. The diglossia of which one variant is an outer-circle variety does not reduce easily to register variation. INTRODUCTION1 It is generally accepted in the scholarly literature that the English language in Singapore comprises two major varieties, the vernacular variety called Colloquial Singapore English, and the formal variety called Stan...

Well-aligned parallel texts are an excellent source of information for contrastive linguistic and translation studies. There already exist quite a few alignment tools and parallel text concordancers, but the aligners found in the literature mostly work towards an automated alignment of words or sentences in a restrictive or ideal domain and context (Barlow 1995;

and volunteer faculty and students from Brigham Young University Wed Pre-conference workshop: Using R for Corpus Linguistics (4188 JFSB) 12:00 Retrieving corpus-linguistic data from corpora with R (Stefan Th. Gries) 4:30 Statistically analyzing data with R (Harald Baayen) Thurs 8:30 Welcome

Aristotle (Cooper 1960) defined rhetoric as "the faculty of discovering all the available means of persuasion in any given situation. " The use of rhetoric in advertisements is universal just because of its strongly persuasive strengths. The use of rhetoric in a monolingual advertising context has been investigated by some researchers (Angela Goddard 1998; Phillips 2002; McQuarrie 1996; Leigh 1994; Lagerwerf 2005) while the contrast of rhetoric use in a bilingual/multilingual context has received relatively less attention (Villalobos 2004), and the comparative analysis regarding the use of repetition of sound, word and phrase is rarely seen. To probe into this issue with a corpus linguistics approach, based on the data from our ongoing project of a parallel corpus of English and Chinese advertisements in Singapore print media, this paper adopts McQuarrie and Mick's taxonomy (McQuarrie 1996) to investigate how different types of rhetorical figures are used in this corp...

As a mirror of present-day China, Chinese neologisms on new media are useful not only for linguistic analysis but also for teaching advanced learners of Chinese as a foreign language. Through analysing the word-formation mechanisms or strategies of Chinese neologisms on new media, learners can not only reinforce their understanding about the unique linguistic features of the Chinese language that they acquired before but also obtain a better understanding of the social and cultural soil that nurtures and shapes the Chinese language and its development. Using a small corpus that consists of authentic usage samples of 50 neologisms originated from Chinese new media, we attempt to explain how information about neologism formation strategies can be utilized in teaching Chinese as a second or foreign language.

... to them, SCE serves the following functions: to create a feeling of solidarity (Richard and Tay 1977). ... Ltd. Luke, A., Freebody, P., Shun, L. and Gopinathan, S. (2005)Towards research-based innovation and reform: Singapore schooling in ... Xiao, R., McEnery, T and Qian YF (2006). ...

... EDUCATIONAL DISCOURSE IN SINGAPORE SCHOOLS Paul Doyle and Hong Huaqing 1 ... PaulDoyle is an Assistant Professor with the English Language and Literature Academic Group at the National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. ...

This chapter explores the question of how teacher educators can prepare student language teachers to teach in digital classrooms. More specifically, it considers the following questions: (1) what makes an effective language teacher in a digital classroom? (2) how can teacher education prepare language teachers to effectively use ICT? We draw on our teaching and research experience in working with student teachers in preparing them to teach the English language in the digital classroom in Singapore. Data sources for this chapter include our course curriculum/ syllabus and assessment materials; students’ reflections on educational policies on ICT (e.g. Ministry of Education master plans for ICT in education, Ministry of Education, Singapore [MOE], 2018); their reflections on a field trip to an innovative, ICT-saturated learning hub; their analysis and commentaries on selected research literature on ICT integration in schools and their reflections on the use of the Net Gen Learners’ Terrace, a new initiative of the National Institute of Education (2017) to support telecollaboration. Our work has developed the following principles. First, student language teachers need some knowledge of language learning and teaching, as a guide for their pedagogical decision-making. Second, they need first-hand experiences of reading and producing digital projects with a range of digital platforms. Third, they need opportunities to observe and reflect on innovative practices through field trips and through reading relevant research literature. Finally, they need sufficient knowledge about the school (local) contexts that may affect ICT integration in the classroom.

This paper documents the development of a Singapore learner corpus of English writing for pedagogy, which has been constructed at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. This corpus comprises sample English artefacts produced by students at 3 levels, i.e. Primary 6 (Year 6), Secondary 4 (Year 10) and Junior College 2 (Year 12). It is built to capture and compare learners’ developmental features in terms of vocabulary, grammar and discoursal devices at different learning stages and therefore theorize on the nature of English writing development of learners in Singapore. The texts are tagged with meta information of learners’ school level, gender, ethnic group and grade. Issues of corpus design, e.g. representativeness in sampling, are also addressed. Finally, pedagogical implications and potential applications of the project are presented.

The three groups identified in this project are found to have developed different Mandarin oral proficiencies in relation to their different exposures of language use at home in terms of their vocabulary coverage and code-switching. The CSF group has a much bigger ...

Gong Wengao, Hong Huaqing, Koh Kim Hong (1&2 National University of Singapore, 3 CRPP, NIE, Nanyang Technological University) Abstract English, Maths, and Mother Tongue are three very important subjects for primary students in Singapore. Among them, the first two are of extreme importance. The successful learning of the latter is often affected by that of the former. Nevertheless, teachers of content subjects are often not fully aware of this. One indicator of this unawareness is that students’ poor performance in content learning is often attributed to their lack of effort or poor intelligence. In fact, the real barrier leading to students’ poor performance often lies in their incompetence in understanding the specific language used in mathematics. In other words, it is more of a language problem than an intelligence problem. This is especially the case in Singapore where the language of instruction is nobody’s mother tongue, which inevitably increases the difficulty of learning ab...

This chapter presents a learning analytics framework aimed at discovering salient factors that influence learning outcomes in a self-directed team-based learning (SDL-TBL) environment. The data used in this study consists of online logs and formative assessment scores from Year 1 and Year 2 curricula across two cohorts of students at the Lee Kong Chian School of Medicine, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. Firstly, descriptive analytics was performed on the frequency of online access to learning materials and individual readiness assessment (iRA) scores, independently, to compare the distribution of engagement features and iRA scores of the two cohorts. Secondly, to find the significant factors influencing learning, a predictive analytics layer was built using the engagement features to predict the learner’s iRA scores. Next, regression analysis was performed using boosted decision trees, both at the module and lesson-level to gain insights into factors of learner’s engage...

In recent years Singapore‟ s educational system, from pre-schools through to junior colleges, has undergone fundamental changes. Aiming to optimize its educational provision and better prepare its workforce for an increasingly globalized world economy, the ...

Abstract: This paper reports on work in progress of a large-scale study which seeks to examine and compare knowledge construction and the development of grammatical metaphor in Secondary 3 (Year 9) student writing in English and Social Studies. Through a combination of ...

This paper discusses the compilation of the International Corpus of Crosslinguistic Interlanguage (the ICCI corpus), and how the corpus data can be explored with a sophisticated query package for learner language research. We first present the design and compilation of such a specialized corpus in compliance with corpus linguistics standards; next, we provide a comprehensive description of the steps undertaken to turn the hand-written paper collection into the creation of a linguistically annotated text corpus and its characteristics; finally, we report the corpus database built in-house, its query interface, and some innovative features for linguistic research.

Abstract: This paper reports on work in progress of a large-scale study which seeks to examine and compare knowledge construction and the development of grammatical metaphor in Secondary 3 (Year 9) student writing in English and Social Studies. Through a combination of ...

A number of researchers (e.g., Christie, 2002; Derewianka, 2003; Foley, 1998; Halliday, 1993a, 1993b, 1994, 2004; Halliday and Matthiessen,1999; Painter, Derewianka and Torr, 2007) have pointed out that mastery of grammatical metaphor, i.e. reconstrual of experience into moreabstract, general level, represents a landmark in the development of children’s writing ability and affords them access to educational and schoolknowledge. Contributing to this line of work, this paper examines and compares the development of grammatical metaphor in Primary 5 and Secondary 3 student writing in subject English. Computer-assisted analyses indicate that, in meeting the demands of discipline-based, specialized curricula, the older pupils exhibit a firmer grasp of the grammar of written language than the younger ones, and that this has paved the way for a new foundation for learning.

While the study of Mandarin Chinese intensifiers has been prolific, the methodologies used have been limited to comparative and grammaticalization studies, revealing little about the discourse-pragmatic usages of individual intensifiers. Utilizing a balanced corpus composed of 15 different prototypical genres, the associative strength of 12 commonly used intensifiers in each genre was statistically determined based on their frequency distribution. The results reveal a clear preference pattern of intensifiers across a range of “written” and “spoken”-based genres. Upon the premise that the genre preferences of intensifiers stem from matching dimensions of communicative intent/discourse context between genre and intensifier, genre-analysis was conducted to unveil the core “stances” each intensifier might possibly project. In conclusion, it is argued that genre-analysis based on empirical corpus data provides a valid alternative means to uncover seemingly “covert” aspects of language use.

Colloquial Singapore English is an outer-circle variety that exhibits contact-induced linguistic change. It has been characterized as the L variant in diglossic opposition to standard English. In this paper, we address two related issues: (1) the extent to which the Singapore English diglossia is supported by corpus data, and (2) the extent to which the diglossia is reducible to register variation. We investigate the usage pattern of two linguistic variables which have acquired novel grammatical meanings, and show that our data support the Singapore English diglossia, but the variation is greater than what is normal in register variation. The diglossia of which one variant is an outer-circle variety does not reduce easily to register variation.

While the study of Mandarin Chinese intensifiers has been prolific, the methodologies used have been limited to comparative and grammaticalization studies, revealing little about the discourse-pragmatic usages of individual intensifiers. Utilizing a balanced corpus composed of 15 different prototypical genres, the associative strength of 12 commonly used intensifiers in each genre was statistically determined based on their frequency distribution. The results reveal a clear preference pattern of intensifiers across a range of “written” and “spoken”-based genres. Upon the premise that the genre preferences of intensifiers stem from matching dimensions of communicative intent/discourse context between genre and intensifier, genre-analysis was conducted to unveil the core “stances” each intensifier might possibly project. In conclusion, it is argued that genre-analysis based on empirical corpus data provides a valid alternative means to uncover seemingly “covert” aspects of language use.

Programme Schedule The international symposium on Using Corpora in Contrastive and Translation Studies 2008 Conference Programme Hangzhou, China 25th-27th 2008 Day One: Thursday 25th September 2008 08: 00–08: 50 Conference Registration at Room 227, Building E6, ...

For the past two decades or so, the world has witnessed the global craze of learning Chinese as foreign language and the mushrooming of Confucius Institutes through the efforts of promotion of the Chinese government. By the end of 2010, there have been more than 690 Confucius Institutes/Schools established in 96 countries/regions, most of which are with English as a dominant language. There is a growing concern and critique about the Chinese ideology and culture emerged with this rapid expansion may affect the world view of non-Chinese speakers. This study thus attempts to examine the issue from a perspective of corpus-based critical discourse analysis of Chinese textbook materials used in Confucius Institutes. The analysis will look at how the ideology and culture embedded in the reading materials have been reflected in the Chinese textbooks commonly used in Confucius Institutes around the world, and what culture images they have been projected to the learners. We will firstly build a corpus of reading texts to collect a dozen of Chinese textbooks widely used in those Confucius Institutes. Following on corpus annotation and content analysis, we hope our findings can capture the patterns of language use and cultural images identified and distributed in the texts. We believe that the selected teaching materials in the textbooks reflects an ideology that serves the interests of particular groups in society to the exclusion of others, and thus contributes a lot to the attitude of the learners towards the ideology and culture carried by the language itself.

This paper discusses the compilation of the International Corpus of Crosslinguistic Interlanguage (the ICCI corpus), and how the corpus data can be explored with a sophisticated query package for learner language research. We first present the design and compilation of such a specialized corpus in compliance with corpus linguistics standards; next, we provide a comprehensive description of the steps undertaken to turn the hand-written paper collection into the creation of a linguistically annotated text corpus and its characteristics; finally, we report the corpus database built in-house, its query interface, and some innovative features for linguistic research.

The purpose of this study is to compare the usage of metadiscourse in English and in Chinese research articles (RAs) published in applied linguistics journals and to investigate how metadiscourse may contribute to knowledge construction in RAs. A small corpus in each language was built consisting of 20 journal articles in English and another 20 in Chinese. In order to highlight metadiscourse features, an established model of metadiscourse was adopted to annotate both Chinese and English articles. It was found that there are generally more metadiscourse features in the English sub-corpus than in the Chinese sub-corpus. While both English sub-corpus and Chinese sub-corpus were found to use statistically significantly more interactive metadiscourse resources (organising discourse) than interactional metadiscourse resources (indicating writers' attitude and stance to themselves, text and audience), the English sub-corpus employed statistically significantly more interactional metadiscourse features than the Chinese sub-corpus. Implications of this study are discussed for both English and Chinese academic writing, including the teaching of English writing as a second language (L2).

This paper examines learning of science in 15 grade nine classrooms by analyzing the type of talk that teachers engaged in. Using transcripts from audio recordings that are part of the Singapore Corpus of Research in Education database, annotations were carried out on the phrases of teacher talk using Mortimer and Scott's framework for meaning making in science classrooms. Interpreted from a sociocultural view of science learning and based on text coverage per 1,000 words spoken by teachers and students, we analyzed the content of instruction and found that (1) teachers in all three sub-disciplines of science used the least number of words to make statements of generalizations, with chemistry teachers privileging description more than physics and biology teachers, while physics teachers use more words for explanation when compared with biology and chemistry teachers and (2) teachers from all three sub-disciplines depended more on empirical justification than theoretical justifications. These findings suggest that most scientific stories in Singaporean grade nine classrooms are dependent on specific contexts and that the nature and organization of knowledge in each sub-discipline defines the features that teachers use in the classrooms to talk knowledge into being. We discuss our findings on whether science curriculum should be framed as ‘separate subjects’ or if they should be developed as ‘integrated science’ and draw implications to science teacher education and the conduct of high stakes public placement examinations.

While the study of Mandarin Chinese intensifiers has been prolific, the methodologies used have been limited to comparative and grammaticalization studies, revealing little about the discourse-pragmatic usages of individual intensifiers. Utilizing a balanced corpus composed of 15 different prototypical genres, the associative strength of 12 commonly used intensifiers in each genre was statistically determined based on their frequency distribution. The results reveal a clear preference pattern of intensifiers across a range of “written” and “spoken”-based genres. Upon the premise that the genre preferences of intensifiers stem from matching dimensions of communicative intent/discourse context between genre and intensifier, genre-analysis was conducted to unveil the core “stances” each intensifier might possibly project. In conclusion, it is argued that genre-analysis based on empirical corpus data provides a valid alternative means to uncover seemingly “covert” aspects of language use.