Academic Literacies Seminar Series

05/04/2011

Adjunct and full-time faculty of the Academic Literacies Program (ALP) held their regular professional seminar on 31st March 2011. Dr Christine Zaher presented her research on extending students’ academic lexical knowledge and usage by drawing upon analyses of online corpora. She surveyed the work that has been done in recent years using computer generated corpora to identify and classify academic vocabulary with specific reference to the Academic Word List (Coxhead 2000) and the General Service List (West 1953; Baumann and Culligan 1995). She presented examples of online learning resources developed by Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Nottingham University et al., and showed how concordancing can be a powerful tool for analysing lexical collocations and syntactic functions. The group reviewed and evaluated the learning resources that are now available in relation to the specific needs of Richmond students, and started the discussion of how this could positively impact pedagogy in the ALP. This topic will be the ALP Seminar focus until the end of the semester.

Link to this page: http://www.richmond.ac.uk/n/1118.aspx