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

英语在国家课程中占有非常重要的地位。对中学教师提出了很高的要求，要求他们教授《国民法典》规定的复杂的语言和语法概念。他们在这方面有困难是可以理解的，因为他们在师范学院接受的语言培训非常有限。关于缺乏语法教学的专业知识，哈德逊和沃尔姆斯利写道：“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（威廉姆森和哈德曼，1995），要么对自己的知识没有信心，这可能是因为他们是以非系统的方式学习的（Cajkler和Hislam，2002）。这种情况对执行正式方案提出了明显的问题。（哈德逊&Walmsley 2005）学生在学习复杂的语法概念时也有困难，因为通常，在语法教学的传统中，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，几乎不可能应用到他们自己的语言生产中。在这种情况下，最近的一本教科书指出：“像教科书中经常使用的那些发明的句子只是他们应该识别的那种奇妙丰富的语言的无菌片段”（Börjars&Burridge 2001）为了解决教师和学生的这些问题，我们希望在伦敦大学学院英语使用调查现有的高质量研究的基础上，为英语的教学和学习创造特定的工具。拟议的项目将产生一个动态的基于网络的英语教学平台，特别是语法。英语语言现象的例子将动态地从英语语言材料的基础集合（“语料库”）中获取。这个语料库是充分的语法分析，并包含了非常广泛的真实的当代英语，无论是书面和口语。口头材料已逐字转录，音频数据将从同一网络数据库提供。我们的资源一直只用于学术研究。我们现在希望将我们的研究成果提供给更广泛的受众，特别是伦敦卡姆登自治市的中学，而且在稍后阶段，全国的学校和图书馆。我们的合作伙伴是伦敦卡姆登自治市的学校改善服务（SIS）。它的目标是提高标准，提高英语教学和学习的质量，在一个种族和社会多元化的内伦敦社区。UCL和SIS团队将建立一个焦点小组，该小组将在项目早期举行两次会议，讨论教师在提供国家课程计划时面临的问题及其持续专业发展需求。目的是确定设想的教学平台的内容要求。讨论将告知UCL团队将开发的课程模块的内容。在稍后阶段，SIS将与卡姆登的五所中学建立联系，以便该团队可以在课堂环境中测试由此产生的平台。反馈将通知项目的最后阶段，在此期间，UCL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开会，审查和评估完成的平台和文件。

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.