Australian Review of Applied Linguistics - Volume 43, Issue 2, 2020

Abstract

The National Assessment Program – Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) has been a key tenet of Australian education policy since its launch over a decade ago. Print media coverage of NAPLAN and myschool.edu.au,1 which displays and compares NAPLAN results across Australia, has played a role in both reporting and shaping this aspect of education policy. This paper uses a corpus-assisted approach to map print media representations of NAPLAN over the first decade of the Program, from 2008 to 2018. Building on previous work on NAPLAN and the print media (Mockler, 2013, 2016), it draws on a corpus of almost 6,000 articles from the Australian national and capital city daily newspapers published between 2008 and 2018. It charts the discursive shifts that have taken place over this period as NAPLAN has transitioned in the public space from a diagnostic tool seen to be useful to educators, to a comparative tool seen to be useful to parents and the general public, and more recently to a contested tool seen to have narrow or limited utility.

Abstract

To properly understand sex education, it is important to consider the informal education that takes place outside the classroom. Students often seek out other resources to supplement the education they receive in school, especially to cover topics which are absent or underdeveloped in the formal sex education curriculum. A key resource for this, especially among young women, is the magazine advice column. Advice columns create a direct interaction between the reader and the magazine and encourage the disclosure of intimate, confidential information, making them a ready medium for the production and consumption of sex education. This study uses the advice columns in Dolly, a popular Australian magazine, to investigate adolescents’ concerns about normality. This research is based on a corpus of 88,000 words, with data from advice columns published 20 years apart (mid-1990s and mid-2010s), which is analyzed using keywords and concordancing. This is a unique corpus study in that it considers similarity as well as difference in the data by investigating the recurring concern with normality that is evident in both decades of the corpus.

Abstract

This paper describes the rationale, design and implementation of a short private online course (SPOC) on data-driven learning (DDL) (Johns, 1991), focusing on L2 error correction in postgraduate academic writing and involving over 300 registered users. I discuss the affordances of using a SPOC platform (namely EdX) for online DDL training, describing activities that cover a range of useful strategies for DDL-led error detection and correction. Learners’ usage of the SPOC platform and their quantitative and qualitative perceptions of the course are described for the reader. The paper also outlines certain conceptual and methodological challenges involved in taking DDL instruction online.

Abstract

This study aims to exemplify how language teaching can benefit from learner corpus research (LCR). To this end, this study determines how L1 and L2 English speakers with diverse L1 backgrounds differ with respect to adjective amplification, based on the International Corpus of Learner English (ICLE) and the Louvain Corpus of Native English Essays (LOCNESS). The study confirms trends reported in previous research, in that L1 speakers amplify adjectives more frequently than L2 English speakers. In addition, the analysis shows that L1 and L2 English speakers differ substantially with respect to the collocational profiles of specific amplifier types and with respect to awareness of genre-specific constraints on amplifier use, and that even advanced L2 speakers tend to be unaware of stylistic constraints on adjective amplification because they model their academic output based on patterns generalized from informal conversation. These findings are useful for language teaching in that the data can be used to target L1-specific difficulties experienced by L2 English speakers.

This article reviews Introducing English for specific purposes9781351031 189