(Week 6) Modal Auxiliary in British

From I studied and read about “Modal Auxiliary in British: A CORPUS-BASED STUDY OF MODALITY THROUGH BRITISH NATIONAL CORPUS” I can summarize the knowledge as follow:

👉 Introduction 👈

The British National Corpus contains approximately 100 million words and it is constructed by collection of various types of written British English of the late twentieth century for 90 percent and of different types of spoken data for 10 percent. BNCweb fundamentally provides means of corpus linguistic analysis”: “concordance”, “sort”, “thin”, “collocations”, “distribution”, “frequency breakdown” and etc. And this paper is particularly focused on three modal verb (“should”, “have to” and “must”).

👀 Objectives 👀

BNCweb will be specifically applied through chosen modal verbs in order to:

1. shed some light on modal verbs of which meanings are difficult to make distinction on theoretical background.

2. affirm that modalities can be interchangeable due to different contexts, such as gender, type of data, perceived level of difficulty and etc.

💭 Method 💭

Three modal verbs (“should”, “have to” and “must”) will be scrutinized by available functions via BNCweb in order to offer empirical information, such as grammatical usage and discursive practice, of modalities in British context.

💢 Conclusion 💢

Modal verbs “must”, “have to” and “should” have been explained in theoretical usage in many textbooks and sometimes each one has been exemplified by unrealistic examples. Through application of BNCweb, collocates can elucidate unforeseen patterns that co-occur with each modal verb and this will assist, at least, English teachers to give realistic examples to students from the top list of collocates. However, the top list of collocates is flexible due to, firstly, a span of word in left and right position and, secondly, statistical methods. These two factors are subject to results of collocation if either the span or other statistical methods were to change to other values. Although the difference might be diminutive, other investigation is still appealing as it may enrich our point of view in modalities.

(Week 5) Using corpus analysis software to analyze specialized texts

From I studied and read about “Using corpus analysis software to analyze specialized texts” I can summarize the knowledge as follow:

💬 What is a corpus? 💬

A corpus can be generally defined as a collection of naturally-occurring texts in a computer-readable format which can be retrieved and analyzed using corpus analysis software.

👉 Sources of language corpora 👈

We can subscribe to a large corpus provider such as the British National Corpus (BNC) or use web concordancing (for instance http://corpus.leeds.ac.uk, http://corpus.byu.edu/) or compile own corpora and analyse data using corpus analysis software like ‘Antconc’ , ‘Wordsmith’ or ‘Paraconc’.

💝 Designing a specialized corpus 💝

We have to designing a specialized corpus as follow:

- Corpus size

- Text extracts vs. full texts

- Number of texts

- Medium

- Subject and text type

- Other considerations

💥Example: my specialized corpus profile

Size	50072 words
Source of corpus data	www.wikipedia.com www.traveltalkmag.com www.visitlondon.com
Number of texts	148 texts
Medium	Written
Subject	England country and travel in England
Text type	New article
Authorship
Language	Texts written in English mostly by native speaker
Publication date	Recent texts (Retrieved in August 2018)

👊 Analyzing Specialized Corpus 👊

We have to analyzing specialized corpus from these topics as follow:

- Terminologies and collocation

- Local grammar

- Style

- Content knowledge

(Week 4) Digital Writing

Questions from “Digital Writing” paper. According to the article.

 1. What are the problems struggling writers have in writing classes? 

❤️  The problems struggling writers have in writing classes are often less motivated to write and fail to organize their ideas. They also have problems in expressing their idea through composition and sometime have trouble communicating and understanding their teachers and peers during discussion in the classroom

 2. What does 'digital writing' refer to? 

💙 It refers to the different mediums on the Internet such as email, Instant Messaging, text messaging, Twitter, Line, Facebook, and blogs using different devices such as computers, mobile phones, and tablets.

 3. What are the three digital writing tools? Give brief descriptions? 

          💚 Blogs

          Many people use blogs as a medium to update journals or post their experience to broaden their horizons and to fulfill their needs and interests because blogs provide opportunities, inspirations and motivations for personal writing.

          💚 Instant Messaging (IM)

          Instant Messaging promotes negotiation of meaning, reduces anxiety, encourages self-repair, and enhances spelling performances in young adult L2 learner as well as motivation and attitude in L2 learning.

          💚 Social Network Site (SNS)

          The use of SNSs in education and language instruction has been prominent because there were the positive effect of SNSs on EFL learners’ English grammar and writing and they helped to have improvement in their writing abilities, including paragraph organization, grammar vocabulary and spelling.

           
 4. How has digital writing enhanced the teaching of writing? 

          💛 First, many digital writing applications offer an anonymity feature.

          💛 Second, in digital writing, learners actually type out what they want to communicate to the group or reader.

          💛 Third, digital writing promotes learners' equity in terms of interaction.

 5. What are the things that you should take into consideration to employ digital writing for teaching academic writing? 

💜 I think shorthand and emoticons because it may yield negative impact to many teen users. In particular, digital writing discourse is an informal, speaking style of language which is fill of shorthand, abbreviations, and emoticons. They should be aware that this digital writing discourse, shorthand, abbreviations and emoticons make no sense outside of the digital writing discourse communication. Thus, they should not use the digital writing discourse in academic writing discourse.

 6. Which activity do you like most? Why? 

❤️ I like Little Reporter because this activity, students have to act as reporter for a school newspaper. Students have to search the information first so act as reporter. It helps students practice English grammar, writing and speaking because the topic can be varied to children’s interests.