Browsing by Department "Academic Skills Office"

Online academic skills support in higher education and the ways that students use such support is seldom researched. "Ask a Question" is part of one Australian university's online academic support service for students to upload assignment documents for review or to ask a specific question about their work. With a view to fine-tuning the online academic support service, this study investigated the types of questions students ask and the ways that students use and, at times, misuse such online academic support. A mixed method corpus analysis of 600 student questions showed frequency patterns in ten categories of question types. An Academic Skills staff survey identified three main challenges in meeting the needs of online student learning support. The findings revealed that students most sought general feedback about being on track for an assignment and secondly, referencing assistance. Academic Skills staff challenges related to time constraints as well as some students misusing the service through unrealistic expectations and repeated requests for assistance. One unanticipated finding was that some students voiced dissatisfaction with generic feedback from an outsourced after-hours online tutoring service and returned to Academic Skills for detailed in-depth, focused feedback. Further research may help to clarify the differences between generic and unit-based feedback in an online academic support environment provided for students. Recommendations to improve the in-house service include extending staff/student consultation time, limiting repeat appointment availability and promoting clearly the type of academic support services provided.

Linking adverbials are important for creating textual cohesion in both written and spoken English. While there are reference grammar books describing the usage patterns of linking adverbials and studies investigating learners' difficulties in using these cohesive devices, there is little discussion on how to effectively teach and learn them. By testing the adequacy of existing textbooks and drawing on corpus findings of the usage patterns of linking adverbials in English, this article suggests principles to guide the teaching and learning of linking adverbials in the English language classroom. The principles suggested in this article will also provide useful guidelines for EAP teachers in different stages of classroom teaching, from pre-class planning, in-class teaching to after-class learning.

English grammar reference books present a wide range of categorizations of linking adverbials according to semantic meaning. Different from this traditional semantic-only approach in previous grammar books, this study develops a new categorization system based on both semantic and pragmatic approaches. The proposed new meaning categorization system represents five registers: written academic prose, written news, academic lectures, broadcast news and conversation. Bearing in mind pedagogical implications in EAP/ESP contexts, this paper also presents a possible substitution test, types of linking adverbials and frequency of each of the types of each meaning category in each register. This study confirms that register-specific corpus studies based on manual analysis complement prevalent corpus-based pedagogical grammar studies and contribute to the understanding of the nature and meaning of linguistic items, especially multi-functional forms in spoken registers.

Introducing Pragmatics in Use is a reader-friendly introduction book. Pragmatics is a notoriously difficult linguistic concept: Ariel (2010) wrote a whole book on defining pragmatics. Instead of providing a thorough literature review on the definitions of pragmatics, which would remain inconclusive, authors of this book adopted a 'user-friendly definition' (p. 1) by Fasold (1990: 119): 'the study of the use of context to make inferences about meaning'. Difficulty in understanding this abstract concept has been further eased by examples of language data (pp. 1-2) and through detailed explanation of the difference between content meaning of a particular sentence and meaning in context. Useful information is helpfully presented in information boxes in each chapter, and further readings are recommended at the end of each chapter.

Many studies have found EFL/ESL learners over/under/misuse linking adverbials. Because their use is specific to genre and register (Biber et al., 1999), and news writing is a compulsory course for EFL journalism majors at many Chinese universities, this study investigates their usage patterns in news and suggests teaching material design for the ESP classroom. By qualitatively coding data from the Wellington Corpora of Spoken and Written New Zealand English and analyzing the results statistically, this study gives a detailed account of the usage patterns of the form, meaning and position of linking adverbials in news, which informs ESP English syllabus and teaching materials design. Suggestions for journalism teachers, as well as students and learners of English for general purposes in an EFL context, were made. An example of teaching materials design based on the corpus findings is also given.