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

英语在《国家课程标准》中占有非常重要的地位。全国人大常委会对中学教师提出了很高的要求，要求他们教授复杂的语言和语法概念。考虑到他们在师范学院接受的语言培训非常有限，他们在这方面的困难是可以理解的。对于缺乏语法教学专业知识的问题，Hudson&Walmsley写道：“大多数年轻教师对语法知之甚少，对明确的语法教学持怀疑态度。因此，毫不奇怪，进入教师培训课程的新员工通常要么对语法知之甚少(Williamson&Hardman，1995)，要么对自己的知识没有信心，这可能是因为他们以一种不系统的方式学习(Cajkler&Hislam 2002)。这种情况给官方课程的实施带来了明显的问题。”(Hudson&Walmsley 2005)小学生在学习复杂的语法概念方面也有困难，因为在语法教学的传统中，通常会使用虚构的例子。他们发现这些很难与真实的语言环境联系起来，几乎不可能应用于他们自己的语言产出。在这方面，最近的一本教科书指出：“像教科书中经常使用的那些虚构的句子，只是他们应该识别的丰富语言的无菌片段。”(Börjars&Burrid2001)为了解决教师和学生的这些问题，我们希望在现有的伦敦大学学院英语使用调查的高质量研究的基础上，为英语的教学和学习创造专门的工具。拟议中的项目将产生一个动态的基于网络的英语语言教学和学习平台，特别是语法。英语语言现象的例子将动态地来自英语语言材料的基础集合(语料库)。这个语料库经过了充分的语法分析，包含了非常广泛的真正的当代英语，包括书面和口头的。口头材料已经逐字转录，音频数据将从同一个网络数据库中获得。到目前为止，我们的资源仅用于学术研究。我们现在希望将我们的研究成果提供给更广泛的受众，特别是伦敦卡姆登区的中学，但在以后的阶段，也会向全国的学校和图书馆提供。我们的合作伙伴是伦敦卡姆登区的学校改善服务(SIS)。它的目的是在一个种族和社会多元化的伦敦内城社区提高英语教学的标准和质量。UCL和SIS团队将成立一个焦点小组，在项目初期举行两次会议，讨论教师在实施国家课程计划时面临的问题和他们的持续专业发展需求。目的是确定设想的教学平台的内容要求。讨论将告知伦敦大学学院团队将开发的课程模块的内容。在稍后的阶段，SIS将与卡姆登的五所中学建立联系，这样团队就可以在教室环境中测试产生的平台。反馈将通知项目的最后阶段，在此期间，伦敦大学学院团队将实施建议的更改和增强。在项目结束时，合作伙伴与学校教师一起召开会议，审查和评估已完成的平台和文件。

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.