Papers by Penny MacDonald
Lenguaje y sociedad interactúan constantemente y, a veces, resulta difícil saber cuál de los dos ... more Lenguaje y sociedad interactúan constantemente y, a veces, resulta difícil saber cuál de los dos elementos ejerce más influencia sobre el otro. El lenguaje es una herramienta poderosa que puede pasar a ser un instrumento determinante en la transformación de la sociedad. Así pues, de acuerdo con esta premisa nuestro estudio parte de la idea que el lenguaje puede cambiar la sociedad. Los medios de comunicación son elementos de una gran proyección social que influyen notablemente en la creación de opinión y de ideología sobre las personas y por lo tanto configura actitudes y comportamientos. Dentro de una sociedad como la nuestra, aún desigual, que discrimina la mujer, ésta resulta infra-representada y por tanto infravalorada a través de herramientas de gran potencia como los medios de comunicación. A partir del estudio de 10 informativos de Canal-9 RTVV (Radio Televisión Valenciana) demostramos como, efectivamente, la mujer no consigue la representación que le corresponde en la sociedad y queda relegada al ámbito secundario e irrelevante. En esta discriminación se involucran factores de gran influjo social, como los medios de comunicación, que pasan a ser responsables, entre otros, de esta discriminación sexista.
The present study analyses the errors identified in the written argumentative texts of 304 Spanis... more The present study analyses the errors identified in the written argumentative texts of 304 Spanish university students of English taken from two different corpora –one from a technical university context and the other from learners enrolled in the Humanities. Considered an important design criterion for computer learner corpora studies, the metadata of the students’ was recorded and their competence levels were measured using the Oxford Quick Placement Test. The scores obtained (0 to 60) were then related to the CEFR (Common European Framework of Reference for Languages) levels ranging from A1 to C2.
Within the field of applied linguistics and language teaching/learning, many studies have been carried out over the years designed to address the phenomenon of interlanguage errors made by learners of English (Dusková 1969, Green & Hecht 1985, Lennon 1991, Olsen 1999, among many others). These studies involved analyzing a small number of texts with a limited number of tags, based on either linguistic taxonomies or surface structure categories of errors (Dulay, Burt, & Krashen 1982). However, in the last three decades, technological advances have been made which have facilitated the analysis of much larger amounts of data using computers for both the development of learner corpora and programs for a more detailed analysis of the learner data.
The error coding system used in the present research work has been designed to address all the possible levels of error (with as many sub-categories as required) since learners writing in a foreign language not only make errors related to grammar and vocabulary, but also with regard to their competence in the use of syntax, discourse relations and pragmatics, among others.
The aim of the present study is two-fold. Firstly, we explore the nature of the errors coded in the corpus i.e. which errors are most frequent, including not only the main categories but also the most delicate levels of errors. Secondly, we address the question of the relationship, if any, of the learners’ competence levels and the type and frequency of the errors they make. The results show that grammar errors are the most frequent, and that the linguistic competence of the learners has a lower than expected influence on the most frequent types of errors coded in the corpus.
Translational Systems Sciences, 2016
Revista Del Congres Internacional De Docencia Universitaria I Innovacio, Mar 11, 2015
Abstract
This article presents CoMoViWo, an ongoing European project that aims at modernizing ed... more Abstract
This article presents CoMoViWo, an ongoing European project that aims at modernizing education at Higher Education Institutions (HEIs), vocational institutions and enterprises in order to meet the needs of virtual and mobile work. The innovative character of this project is embedded in the combination of mobile and virtual communication, new technologies, multiculturalism and collaboration of and with enterprises. The difference phases of the project will undertake a review on communication literacy, the design of the virtual training modules, their piloting and their revision. The project results and outcomes will benefit the various actors dealing with virtual and mobile communication in multicultural environments and will also contribute to improve the employability needs of students and the success of enterprises in the global market.
Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences, 2015
This article will set the theoretical background on which CoMoViWo, an ongoing European project, ... more This article will set the theoretical background on which CoMoViWo, an ongoing European project, is based. First, the article critically analyses the concept of workplace language teaching and learning and the trends followed by current workplace language programs. A second focus of research analyses the changes that affect the literacy practices required in the new working context, which imply new ways of writing, speaking, and communicating through different media. A final consideration of the article addresses the role of English as a Lingua Franca, that is, English as a language currently used as a means of communication and interaction by speakers of different first languages.
Corpus-Based Approaches to English Language Teaching, Jun 7, 2010
The development of Computer Learner Corpora (CLC) in the early 1990s marked a new direction in th... more The development of Computer Learner Corpora (CLC) in the early 1990s marked a new direction in the field of corpus linguistics and its relation to foreign language learning research and pedagogy. According to Granger (2003), CLC are electronic collections of authentic foreign or second language data. Undoubtedly, the International Corpus of Learner English (ICLE), founded and coordinated by Sylvianne Granger of the Université Catholique de Louvain in Belgium (Granger 1993, 1998), is the most cited in the literature. ...
Iii Congres Internacional Sobre Llengues Per a Finalitats Especifiques Ease Seminar Actes 8 9 I 10 De Setembre De 1999 Canet De Mar 2000 Isbn 84 475 2373 X Pags 252 257, 2000
To organise the teaching of English as a Foreign Language (EFL), it is important to have a clear ... more To organise the teaching of English as a Foreign Language (EFL), it is important to have a clear picture of the grammatical competence of the learners at each level of proficiency. The TREACLE project has been set up to develop a methodology for producing grammatical profiles which detail the degree to which learners at each proficiency level have mastered the various grammatical features they need to know. The corpus-based methodology takes a two-pronged approach, using automatic grammatical analysis, to see what the students are getting correct at each level, and manual Error Analysis to see what the learners do wrong. This paper describes this methodology, providing details on the derivation and use of the automatic grammatical analysis, and on the error annotation process. Some notions of profiling will also be discussed.
This paper first considers some of the practical and theoretical issues involved when teaching or... more This paper first considers some of the practical and theoretical issues involved when teaching or learning vocabulary items in an ESP course, and discusses (briefly) the notion of what it means to know a word. Following that, it reports on the results of an experiment designed to test the usefulness of a slightly modified version of the Vocabulary Knowledge Scale
International Journal of Educational Development, 32-1, pp. 179 - 186 , 2012
This paper aims to explore the potential of a curriculum designed to develop Nussbaum’s cosmopoli... more This paper aims to explore the potential of a curriculum designed to develop Nussbaum’s cosmopolitan
abilities through two elective subjects offered to future engineers in a Spanish Technical University. To
this end, Nussbaum’s proposition of cosmopolitan abilities is presented in relation to the broader
academic literature on cosmopolitanism and higher education. From this perspective, the origin, context
and pedagogical rationale of the curriculum are described including the discussion of an exploratory
study based on discourse analysis and how it has informed our pedagogical practice. Finally we argue for
the importance of electives that develop cosmopolitan values for students of technical programmes in
Higher Education and the need to consider the implications of their cessation as a consequence of the
Bologna Process.
Language Learning & Technology 17/2, Jun 2013
This study focuses on the computer-aided analysis of interlanguage errors made by the participant... more This study focuses on the computer-aided analysis of interlanguage errors made by the participants in the telematic simulation IDEELS (Intercultural Dynamics in European Education through on-Line Simulation). The synchronous and asynchronous communication analysed was part of the MiLC Corpus, a multilingual learner corpus of texts written by language learners from different language backgrounds. The main research questions centred on the differences in the amount and types of errors found in both the synchronous and asynchronous modes of communication, and whether different L1 groups committed certain errors more than their counterparts from other mother tongue backgrounds. As we hypothesised, more errors were found in the synchronous mode of communication than in the asynchronous; however, when examining the exact types of errors, some categories were more frequent in the synchronous mode (the formal and grammatical errors, among others), while in the asynchronous, errors of style and lexis occurred more frequently. A analysis of the data revealed that the frequency of error types varied with each different L1 group participating in the simulation, this same analysis also showed that highly relevant associations could be established the participants’ L1 and specific error types.
Conference Presentations by Penny MacDonald
Online language learning systems in general need to cater to potential users from a wide-range of... more Online language learning systems in general need to cater to potential users from a wide-range of mother-tongue contexts. Learners from a particular mother-tongue background may find some of this material unnecessary, where the concepts involved can be easily transferred from their mother tongue. Additionally, aspects of the target language which are difficult for the particular mother tongue may be under-catered to. This paper will explore a methodology for using learner corpora to discover exactly what grammatical concepts are most critical for a language learner of a particular learning context, and explain how this information is being integrated into an online grammar learning system currently being developed.
An additional problem is that even learners from a similar learning context are not identical: they may be at different points of the learning process, or may have different learning styles. The learning system needs to be able to adapt to the individual’s needs: firstly, identifying the concepts which the learner has already mastered, and those yet to be mastered, and thus steering the learner towards those grammatical concepts that are most critical for the learner at the current point of their personal linguistic development. This paper describes the system being developed, which selects the reference material and quiz questions for the individual learner which are most critical to the learner.
This article describes ongoing research within the TREACLE project. TREACLE aims to profile the s... more This article describes ongoing research within the TREACLE project. TREACLE aims to profile the specific grammatical skills of Spanish university learners of English at various proficiency levels, and, on the basis of these profiles, develop proposals for re-designing curriculum and teaching materials particularly focused on the real needs of Spanish students at distinct proficiency levels. To this end, we are developing a methodology for grammatical profiling of proficiency levels using learner corpora.
Some approaches (e.g. Dagneaux et al. 1998) have explored grammatical competence of learners by looking at the errors they make at each proficiency level. However, we believe that to get a clear picture of learner competence, we need to measure not only what they do wrong (errors), but also what they do right. We thus take a two-pronged approach, involving automatic syntactic tagging of the corpus to see what structures students are attempting, and manual error annotation to see what they do wrong. This paper presents our approach and reports on some preliminary results in profiling provided by our combined approach.
This study deals with the computer-aided analysis of interlanguage errors made by the Spanish par... more This study deals with the computer-aided analysis of interlanguage errors made by the Spanish participants in a telematic simulation called the IDEELS Project (Intercultural Dynamics in European Education through on-Line Simulation) involving undergraduate students of different Engineering and Humanities degrees from five European countries. The participants communicate via computers as either synchronous or asynchronous communication. Using the Error Tagging Method and Error Editor developed by the Centre for English Corpus Linguistics at the Université Catholique de Louvain in Belgium, the interlanguage errors were identified, classified and tagged. As regards the output of the Spanish participants (N = 35), it was found that in the synchronous mode the highest percentage of errors involved formal, grammatical and lexical errors, whereas in the asynchronous mode, the largest percentage of errors were in the grammatical, and in almost equal amount, lexical category. We carried out a further analysis of the formal errors to investigate the possible causes of the deviant forms, and it was found that a high percentage could be attributed to typographical errors and, to a lesser extent, L1 transfer. The results suggest that special attention should be given to a more careful revision of written texts in language learning classes and to the overt comparison of mother tongue and target language systems.
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Papers by Penny MacDonald
Within the field of applied linguistics and language teaching/learning, many studies have been carried out over the years designed to address the phenomenon of interlanguage errors made by learners of English (Dusková 1969, Green & Hecht 1985, Lennon 1991, Olsen 1999, among many others). These studies involved analyzing a small number of texts with a limited number of tags, based on either linguistic taxonomies or surface structure categories of errors (Dulay, Burt, & Krashen 1982). However, in the last three decades, technological advances have been made which have facilitated the analysis of much larger amounts of data using computers for both the development of learner corpora and programs for a more detailed analysis of the learner data.
The error coding system used in the present research work has been designed to address all the possible levels of error (with as many sub-categories as required) since learners writing in a foreign language not only make errors related to grammar and vocabulary, but also with regard to their competence in the use of syntax, discourse relations and pragmatics, among others.
The aim of the present study is two-fold. Firstly, we explore the nature of the errors coded in the corpus i.e. which errors are most frequent, including not only the main categories but also the most delicate levels of errors. Secondly, we address the question of the relationship, if any, of the learners’ competence levels and the type and frequency of the errors they make. The results show that grammar errors are the most frequent, and that the linguistic competence of the learners has a lower than expected influence on the most frequent types of errors coded in the corpus.
This article presents CoMoViWo, an ongoing European project that aims at modernizing education at Higher Education Institutions (HEIs), vocational institutions and enterprises in order to meet the needs of virtual and mobile work. The innovative character of this project is embedded in the combination of mobile and virtual communication, new technologies, multiculturalism and collaboration of and with enterprises. The difference phases of the project will undertake a review on communication literacy, the design of the virtual training modules, their piloting and their revision. The project results and outcomes will benefit the various actors dealing with virtual and mobile communication in multicultural environments and will also contribute to improve the employability needs of students and the success of enterprises in the global market.
abilities through two elective subjects offered to future engineers in a Spanish Technical University. To
this end, Nussbaum’s proposition of cosmopolitan abilities is presented in relation to the broader
academic literature on cosmopolitanism and higher education. From this perspective, the origin, context
and pedagogical rationale of the curriculum are described including the discussion of an exploratory
study based on discourse analysis and how it has informed our pedagogical practice. Finally we argue for
the importance of electives that develop cosmopolitan values for students of technical programmes in
Higher Education and the need to consider the implications of their cessation as a consequence of the
Bologna Process.
Conference Presentations by Penny MacDonald
An additional problem is that even learners from a similar learning context are not identical: they may be at different points of the learning process, or may have different learning styles. The learning system needs to be able to adapt to the individual’s needs: firstly, identifying the concepts which the learner has already mastered, and those yet to be mastered, and thus steering the learner towards those grammatical concepts that are most critical for the learner at the current point of their personal linguistic development. This paper describes the system being developed, which selects the reference material and quiz questions for the individual learner which are most critical to the learner.
Some approaches (e.g. Dagneaux et al. 1998) have explored grammatical competence of learners by looking at the errors they make at each proficiency level. However, we believe that to get a clear picture of learner competence, we need to measure not only what they do wrong (errors), but also what they do right. We thus take a two-pronged approach, involving automatic syntactic tagging of the corpus to see what structures students are attempting, and manual error annotation to see what they do wrong. This paper presents our approach and reports on some preliminary results in profiling provided by our combined approach.
Within the field of applied linguistics and language teaching/learning, many studies have been carried out over the years designed to address the phenomenon of interlanguage errors made by learners of English (Dusková 1969, Green & Hecht 1985, Lennon 1991, Olsen 1999, among many others). These studies involved analyzing a small number of texts with a limited number of tags, based on either linguistic taxonomies or surface structure categories of errors (Dulay, Burt, & Krashen 1982). However, in the last three decades, technological advances have been made which have facilitated the analysis of much larger amounts of data using computers for both the development of learner corpora and programs for a more detailed analysis of the learner data.
The error coding system used in the present research work has been designed to address all the possible levels of error (with as many sub-categories as required) since learners writing in a foreign language not only make errors related to grammar and vocabulary, but also with regard to their competence in the use of syntax, discourse relations and pragmatics, among others.
The aim of the present study is two-fold. Firstly, we explore the nature of the errors coded in the corpus i.e. which errors are most frequent, including not only the main categories but also the most delicate levels of errors. Secondly, we address the question of the relationship, if any, of the learners’ competence levels and the type and frequency of the errors they make. The results show that grammar errors are the most frequent, and that the linguistic competence of the learners has a lower than expected influence on the most frequent types of errors coded in the corpus.
This article presents CoMoViWo, an ongoing European project that aims at modernizing education at Higher Education Institutions (HEIs), vocational institutions and enterprises in order to meet the needs of virtual and mobile work. The innovative character of this project is embedded in the combination of mobile and virtual communication, new technologies, multiculturalism and collaboration of and with enterprises. The difference phases of the project will undertake a review on communication literacy, the design of the virtual training modules, their piloting and their revision. The project results and outcomes will benefit the various actors dealing with virtual and mobile communication in multicultural environments and will also contribute to improve the employability needs of students and the success of enterprises in the global market.
abilities through two elective subjects offered to future engineers in a Spanish Technical University. To
this end, Nussbaum’s proposition of cosmopolitan abilities is presented in relation to the broader
academic literature on cosmopolitanism and higher education. From this perspective, the origin, context
and pedagogical rationale of the curriculum are described including the discussion of an exploratory
study based on discourse analysis and how it has informed our pedagogical practice. Finally we argue for
the importance of electives that develop cosmopolitan values for students of technical programmes in
Higher Education and the need to consider the implications of their cessation as a consequence of the
Bologna Process.
An additional problem is that even learners from a similar learning context are not identical: they may be at different points of the learning process, or may have different learning styles. The learning system needs to be able to adapt to the individual’s needs: firstly, identifying the concepts which the learner has already mastered, and those yet to be mastered, and thus steering the learner towards those grammatical concepts that are most critical for the learner at the current point of their personal linguistic development. This paper describes the system being developed, which selects the reference material and quiz questions for the individual learner which are most critical to the learner.
Some approaches (e.g. Dagneaux et al. 1998) have explored grammatical competence of learners by looking at the errors they make at each proficiency level. However, we believe that to get a clear picture of learner competence, we need to measure not only what they do wrong (errors), but also what they do right. We thus take a two-pronged approach, involving automatic syntactic tagging of the corpus to see what structures students are attempting, and manual error annotation to see what they do wrong. This paper presents our approach and reports on some preliminary results in profiling provided by our combined approach.
workplace, which is the ultimate objective of the present project.