School of Languages at XJTLU Conference 2024

In the context of XJTLU students settling into EMI learning in their degree programs, learning difficulties in understanding English lectures, completing reading/writing coursework, and achieving successful academic communication have long been a concern for students, content lecturers, and language lecturers. For the Design School (DES) students, the corresponding EAP curriculum is always keen on providing better language support, content lecturers often share their insights with language lecturers, and students have attempted to find their resolutions. However, one of the key challenges revolving around those listed learning difficulties is the growing demand for disciplinary literacy, which still needs to be dealt with systematically. Therefore, a corpus-based approach was taken to uncover evidence-informed lexical items and salient language patterns in teaching materials from DES degree programs. With the Prime Machine (tPM), four XJTLU DES Corpora have been established for the disciplines of Architecture (ARC), Civil Engineering (CEN), Industrial Design (IND), and Urban Planning (UPD). Corpus-induced wordlists, teaching/learning materials, and activities can be produced and tailored for our XJTLU DES students to further support their language and content learning when they are progressing through the degree programs. This workshop will be divided into two parts. In the first part, the lead presenter will introduce the project of XJTLU DES Corpora, which includes the background and purposes, methods and steps of corpora construction, and the development of pedagogical resources and activities. This part will end with a summary of benefits, limitations, and future directions. In the second part, the presenters will facilitate the audience to have 1) a group discussion with guiding questions about corpus applications in EAP; 2) hands-on experience with the sample corpus for guided and free exploration; and 3) Q&A regarding practicality and technicality.