He Yushuang Chongqing University
Multiple-choice questions(MCQ) have been increasingly improved and developed in practice, but there are still many shortcomings. In this study, MCQ of vocabulary in TEM4 in 2019 will be selected as research object, and Corpus of Contemporary American English(COCA) is used to analyze the options of these MCQ. The research results show that there are significant differences in the frequency and rank of the usage of different options in a MCQ in COCA, and in the collocation of options and node words, Mutual Information Score(MI) of the correct answer far exceeds that of distractors in most cases. For test takers, if the gaps of frequency and MI between options are too significant, the interference of distractors will be unstable, even lose their interference. In this case, the test cannot achieve its expected results. The findings of this study can provide empirical evidence for the future study and improvement of TEM4 vocabulary MCQ and other kinds of MCQ.
A Multimodal Analysis on Academic Paper Presentations of Chinese Doctoral Candidates
Liu Bing, Jiang Ting Chongqing University
With the advancement of the construction of world-class universities and disciplines in China, Chinese doctoral students should strengthen their international academic communicative ability. Through participating in international academic conferences and delivering paper presentation, Chinese doctoral candidates can update their academic information and have the opportunity to make academic communications with scholars worldwide. However, using English to make academic communication in international academic conferences still remains a great challenge for Chinese doctoral students. In order to reveal the current situation faced by Chinese doctoral students in paper presentations, this study videotapes the English academic paper presentations by doctoral students with no experience in paper presentation in Chongqing University. By analyzing the four modes used in their presentation from the perspective of multimodal analysis, including the verbal, written, non-verbal material and body language modes, the paper concludes by discussing the multimodal characteristics of Chinese doctoral paper presentations as well as the implications of the pedagogy for doctoral English teaching.
Keywords: academic paper presentations, multimodality, doctoral candidates
Cognitive Mechanism of English Proverbs from the Perspective of Conceptual Blending Theory
Wen Jun Chongqing University
Conceptual blending theory is an important part of contemporary cognitive psychology. It has a wide range of applications and attracts great attention in the fields of linguistics, conceptual cognition and symbol recognition. With the help of conceptual blending theory, this paper analyzes the psychological cognitive mechanism of readers' interpretation of English proverbs and explains why people can understand the real intention of these proverbs in a cognitive way.This paper chooses typical proverbs for qualitative analysis with the help of COCA corpus as a wide ting each of the 101 American proverbs into the corpus, the frequency of the proverbs will be counted. Then, based on the conceptual blending theory’s four mental spaces – two input spaces, a generic space and a blended space, the process of English proverbs’ interpretation is studied. The study finds that when people try to understand the real intention of English proverbs or something else, they often carry out a series of cognitive activities, such as construction, improvement and expansion, to integrate the implied meaning in the English proverbs, and then project it into reality, and finally reach a new meaning. Therefore, conceptual blending theory can describe and explain the relevant cognitive mechanism of reader's interpretation of English proverbs in detail, which provides a broader prospect for such research.
Using Corpus-based Approach to Create the Vocabulary List for ESP Teaching and Learning
Zhang Xiuhai, Zhao Tong
抚顺职业技术学院; Shenyang Pharmaceutical University
Vocabulary use often varies significantly across academic disciplines, and even more significantly across specific research fields. However, most of the previous studies focus on the development of common academic vocabulary lists or vocabulary lists of certain disciplines, and rarely explore into vocabulary in specific research fields. This research set out to select English for Specifc Purposes (ESP) vocabulary for a specific field English teachers and learners on the basis of a corpus created and existing word lists made from corpora. A total of 191 research papers within one single research field, tubulin-related research, were collected to create a corpus of 1.52 million words. Charts, appendices, and quotations were removed, since they are not recognized by computer software or that do not affect the results of vocabulary analysis. New General Service List (NGSL) and Academic Vocabulary List (AVL) were selected as the comparative vocabulary lists, both of which use lemma as statistical unit, so we decided to use lemma, rather than word families, for our results. We then ran the present corpora on program antconc 3.5.8, and used the three selection criteria below. First of all, vocabularies outside NGSL were divided two levels by comparing AVL. Those included in AVL belonged to the first-level vocabulary list, a common academic vocabulary list, while those outside of AVL fell into the second-level vocabulary list, a specialized technical vocabulary list. Secondly, Minimum frequency was used to ensure that the words (lemmas) should be of high frequency. We decided to use the minimum frequency, 22 PMWs for the selection of the list. Thirdly, we stipulated that a lemma should occur in at least 10 research papers (the range of 5% ). As a result, after eliminating 1807 NGSL, we created a first-level vocabulary list of 628 lemmas, and a second-level vocabulary list of 718 lemmas. This study took tubulin research field as an example to discuss the process of ESP vocabulary list development. We hope that field- specific vocabulary list will enable teachers and learners in the field to efficiently teach or learn relevant vocabulary, accurately understand English reading materials, and fully express academic views.
Application of CLIL in Construction of Ecological Classroom for Business- related Courses of Business English Majors
Gu Tong
Zhejiang Yuexiu University of Foreign Languages
In recent years, the construction of ecological classroom is widely discussed by researchers a s an effective paradigm to practice student-
centered class. Effective interaction between students and teachers is one of the key elements to co nstruct an ecological classroom. Since business-
related courses need to be taught in English for Business English majors, imbalanced relationship between language knowledge and business knowledge would lower the efficiency of interaction. T herefore, teachers need to coordinate sensitive factors of an ecological classroom so that can solve the problem of imbalance. This paper mainly focuses on four sensitive factors of business-
related courses. To coordinate them effectively, the author suggests applying CLIL method as the f our aspects of its framework can provide effective ways for teachers to integrate language knowle dge and business knowledge. For example, contributed by cognitive and communication aspects, CLIL has advantages in designing a deep and sustainable interaction activity in class. What is mor e, by applying CLIL in the construction of ecological classroom, it is hoped that more and more ne w modes can be proposed to enhance learners’ competences.
Keywords：ecological classroom, sensitive factors, CLIL, integration, interaction
Narrative Study on Teacher Identity Crisis in ESP Curriculum Construction--- A Case Study in the “College English Course for Art Majors” of a key University in China
Xie Jia Chongqing University
Teacher identity is one of the key elements to ensure effective teaching. It is influenced by both teacher’s individual factors and social factors, and it is not fixed once it is formed. This study conducts a narrative research on teacher identity crisis by semi-structured interviews and classroom observations of two English teachers in “ College English Course for Art Majors ” of a key university in China. This study aims to examine 1. the main manifestations of their teacher identity crisis in the process of ESP curriculum construction for art majors; 2. the main reasons for their teacher identity crisis; and 3. the ways to re-build their teacher identity. It is hoped that the results of the study may have not only implications for college English teachers who have encountered teacher identity crisis in the context of curriculum reform, but also positive significance for the design of college English courses for art majors in both this university and China contexts.
Keywords: art majors, ESP curriculum construction, teacher identity crisis, narrative research
Re-examination A Corpus-based Study of Verb Passivization in Academic Writing
Ji Wanru Chongqing University
as associate that only occurred in the passive form while transitive verbs such as acquire only occurred in the active form in academic writing. And this phenomenon was later corroborated by Swales’(2004) study. However, Huddleston's corpus was edited in the 1960s and the texts were not restricted to one specific genre and the corpus used in Swales’ study, which was the science and engineering components of Ken Hyland's (2000) corpus of 240 research articles, was compiled in the 1990s and its disciplinary coverage was absence of chemistry. In view of this, the present study utilizes newly-published journal articles to build our own corpus, which contains 150 research articles published in recent 10 years from the fields of physics, biology, chemistry, mechanical engineering and electrical engineering (30 each). Based on this corpus, this study intends to carry out an updated examination to see whether transitive verbs vary widely in their propensity to passivize in recent academic writing papers. The study finds that transitive lexical verbs such as associate, arrange, attach, derive, distribute, connect are nearly always in the passive form although their passive percentages have dropped. In contrast, verbs such as help, reveal, agree, enter, imply are rarely in the passive form. The research data have updated the figures about the occurrences and passive percentages of these verbs in the previous two corpora and also showed that the above- mentioned phenomenon is largely confirmed in a corpus with much more recent texts. It is further suggested that at least in terms of transitive verbs passivization tendency, English research writing in science and engineering is relatively stable. The findings are of relevance for junior researchers with limited English language proficiency, for the attention to this grammatical item can help improve their reading and writing of research articles. Besides, this study has enriched the EAP research on a particular linguistic feature and also promotes a new sight to conduct EAP research.
Keywords: academic writing; transitive verbs; corpus; passivization
Identifying the linguistic features affecting text difficulty in English reading comprehension test: a comparative data mining study
Wang Ping Chongqing University
Reading material difficulty manipulation is of paramount importance for English teachers and test developers. According to Krashen’s i+1 theory (1985), manipulating the difficulty of English reading material (e.g. passages in textbooks, texts in English tests, reading comprehension quizzes, etc.) to an appropriate level helps learners read and understand the reading materials and enhances their comprehension skills in the long run. Therefore, English teachers need to select reading texts of proper difficulty level, that is not too easy nor too difficult to read, and test developers need to adjust and modify the difficulty of reading passages (a process called “text adaptation”). However, how to measure the difficulty of reading texts, how to do text adaptation or from which aspects, etc., are not very clear and relevant studies have not generated conclusive results.
The present research is about a study on English reading text difficulty from a data mining approach, a complement to traditional text difficulty research methods. The study aims to identify the linguistic features affecting text difficulty and explore the best-performing data mining method in text difficulty prediction. The following two research questions were addressed in this study:
(1) Among the three data mining methods (i.e. Decision tree, Logistic regression and Naïve
Bayes) used in this study, which one is best?
(2) What are the important linguistic features affecting English reading text difficulty?
In this study, 251 College English Test band 4 (hereafter “CET 4”) reading comprehension texts and 253 CET 6 reading comprehension texts were collected as the dataset of this study. 46 linguistic features motivated by a comprehensive literature review were computed by the automatic text analysis tool, Coh-Metrix. Three data mining methods, Decision tree, Logistic regression and
Naïve Bayes were used to do text classification on the basis of the aforementioned 46 linguistic
features and accordingly three types of models were trained and tested. As the final results show, the best-performing model is the Decision tree model, capable of correctly classifying 79.2% of the reading texts (Precision=79.2%, Recall=79.2%, F-measure=79.2%, AUC=0.81). Therefore, this study comes to the following conclusions: among the three data mining methods, Decision tree is the best-performing one in text difficulty prediction; the 46 linguistic features, especially Word length, Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level, Sentence length, Negative connectives incidence, Flesch Reading Ease, Temporal cohesion, Given/new ratio, Semantic overlap, Content word overlap and Temporality incidence) play an important role in English reading text difficulty prediction.
The present study is an attempt to incorporate data mining techniques into language testing research, and hopefully this research will bear some significance for future studies both theoretically and methodologically.
Keywords: language testing/assessment, text difficulty, linguistic features, data mining
Visual Analysis on Intercultural Communication Researches in ESP Context Based on CiteSpace
Dong Shixing, Cheng Li, Zeng Qiuyi 北京邮电大学
Intercultural communication is communication between people whose cultural perceptions and symbol systems are distinct enough to alter the communication event (Samovar, 2010).The purpose of this study is to explore the hotspots and trends of the current intercultural communication
researches in the context of teaching English for specific purposes (ESP)in China,analyze the issues worthy of attention in future researches. In total, 1104 articles were found on CNKI database from 2009-2018. CiteSpace software was used to for data analysis. With the visualize bibliometric method, the researchers analyzed the highly cited research articles, clusters of co-cited references keyword co-occurrence maps, burst keywords and terms, the clustering of hot words. Results shows that “ESP and intercultural communication ability training”, “ESP and intercultural communication teaching design” “intercultural communication and ESP Translation” are the three hot topics of intercultural communication researches in ESP. Moreover, intercultural communication researches in the context of “Belt and Road” have become the latest trend. It is suggested that further investigations focus on the cross-displinary cooperation education. And it is hoped that this bibliometric analysis will provide ideas and references for intercultural communication researches in ESP context.
Keywords: CiteSpace, visual analysis, ESP, intercultural communication
COCA-Based Text Analyzer for Writing
Wang Xingfu Chongqing University
This paper introduces the new text analyzer website out of the top 60000 lemmas in the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). The interface could be used to assist students’ writing by focusing mainly on words’ dispersion in different genres, synonyms from WordNet, collocates and concordance lines. This website is also good to judge students’ writing by their words ranges.
Keywords: COCA; text; collocate; writing
Business English Teachers' Professional Development through Coaching Practice Contests: From the Perspective of Professional Learning Community (PLC)
Xia Beibei, Lei Chunlin Zhou Qinqin
Shanghai University of International Business and Economics
Business English teachers are exposed to quite a number of opportunities to coach various practice contests at different levels, which not only enhance students’ knowledge and skills inbusiness field, but also promote teachers ’ professional development. However, this type of teacher development through a coaching community is currently under-documented. Based on the data arising from questionnaires, reflections and in-depth interviews, this study examined the characteristics and effectiveness of Business English teachers’ professional development through the coaching community. It is found that such a coaching community has much of the PLC
characteristics proposed by Dufour & Eaker (1998) in respects of shared mission and goals; collective inquiry; data-driven collaboration; continuous improvement; and action and results orientation. The results also show that the coaching community empowers Business English teachers, updates their knowledge structure, enhances their practical skills, thus benefiting their classroom teaching and scientific research. All these are conducive to Business English teachers’ professional development and in correspondence with the new National Standards for Business English Majors. The study discusses and concludes that coaching practice contests is a new, unneglectable and effective approach for Business English teachers’ professional development in the new era.