Creating a Web-Based Platform for English Language Teaching and Learning

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The English language plays a very important role in the National Curriculum (NC). Great demands are made of teachers at secondary schools to teach complex linguistic and grammatical concepts, as laid down in the NC. They have understandable difficulties with this, given the very limited linguistic training they have received at teacher training college. Regarding the lack of expertise in grammar teaching Hudson&Walmsley write:'Most younger teachers know very little grammar and are suspicious of explicit grammar teaching. Not surprisingly, therefore, new recruits entering teacher-training courses typically either know very little grammar (Williamson&Hardman 1995) or have no confidence in their knowledge, presumably because they have picked it up in an unsystematic way (Cajkler&Hislam 2002). This situation raises obvious problems for the implementation of the official programme.' (Hudson&Walmsley 2005)The pupils also have difficulties with learning complex grammatical concepts, because typically, in the tradition of grammar teaching, invented examples are used. They find these difficult to relate to real linguistic settings and almost impossible to apply to their own language production. In this context a recent coursebook notes that:'Invented sentences like the ones so often used in textbooks are just sterile fragments of that wonderfully rich language they are supposed to be identifying' (Börjars&Burridge 2001)In order to address these problems for teachers and students we wish to create specific tools for the teaching and learning of the English language based on the existing high quality research of the Survey of English Usage at University College London.The proposed project will result in a dynamic web-based platform for the teaching and learning of the English language, specifically grammar. Examples of English language phenomena will be sourced dynamically from an underlying collection of English language materials (a 'corpus'). This corpus is fully grammatically analysed, and contains a very wide range of real contemporary English, both written and spoken. The spoken material has been transcribed word-for-word, and the audio data will be available from the same web database. Hitherto our resources have only been used for academic research. We now wish to make our research output available to a wider audience, specifically secondary schools in the London Borough of Camden, but also, at a later stage, schools and libraries nationwide.Our partner is the School Improvement Service (SIS) of the London Borough of Camden. Its aims are to raise standards and improve the quality of teaching and learning in English in an ethnically and socially diverse inner-London community. The UCL and SIS teams will establish a focus group which will meet twice early on during the project to discuss the problems teachers face in delivering the National Curriculum programme and their Continuous Professional Development needs. The aim will be to determine the content requirements of the envisaged teaching and learning platform. The discussions will inform the content of the course modules that the UCL team will develop. At a later stage the SIS will establish links with five secondary schools in Camden, such that the team can test the resulting platform in a classroom setting. The feedback will inform the final stage of the project during which the UCL team will implement the suggested changes and enhancements. At the end of the project the partners convene, together with school teachers, to review and evaluate the completed platform and documentation.