Oral Presentation in IVACS 2018

1. Linguistic Resources for facilitating the
Discussion Forums in MOOCs
Shi Min Chua
Institute of Educational Technology (IET)
Centre for Research in Education and Educational Technology (CREET).
Faculty of Wellbeing, Education and Language Studies
The Open University
The 9th Inter-Varietal Applied Corpus Studies (IVACS) Conference, 14 Jun 2018

2. MOOCs
CoursesOpen OnlineMassive
Large number of learners
-registered learners: up to 40000
-learners who take part in the
discussion: up to 5000
-Free
-No pre-requisite
-No face-to-face
-Asynchronous
-various subjects
-evolving learning
design

4. Post
Reply

5. Online Discussion as a Space
Technological
Affordance
Learning
Content
● Dialogic Spaces (Wegerif, 2010): Promote reflection and thinking skills
● Cybernetic Space (Krippendorff, 2011): Artefacts and Recurrent Practices
● Space for Learning (Walsh & Li, 2013): Positive and Focused
● Mental Space in Discourse (Fauconnier,1994): Contextual and situational factors
● Affinity space (Gee, 2004): All people could shape and reshape
Language

6. Learners’ Perception on MOOC
Discussions (Khe, 2018)
● Interaction with teaching staff
● Most common or up-voted questions
● Interaction with peers
● Sharing information
● Arrogant, oppressive and impolite comments
● Overwhelming
Online Discussion (Cavanagh, 2007)
● Fragmented, more posts rather than threaded replies

7. Methods
Corpus
Driven
Corpus
Based
To
Create
Expand
Join
Close down
How Facilitators Use
Linguistic Resources
Dialogic space
Keywords
Analysis

8. Corpus
Abbreviation
Number of
Social
Learners
Number of
Learners'
Comments
Number of
words
contributed by
learners
Number of
Facilitators
Number of
Facilitators'
Comments
Number of
words
contributed by
facilitators
Technology 609 7848 444440 13 571 28446
History 994 23108 1357658 5 1379 56555
Technology 1968 10310 418999 6 1018 43014
Linguistics 2199 14949 1103306 21 7164 342405
Social Sciences 5722 41175 2325367 11 2988 123806
Finances 637 10033 820829 5 363 32427
Management 934 8415 444294 6 691 16373
Astronomy 1986 24084 929592 8 1339 54180
Health 3788 30923 1443443 5 260 10364
Sciences 1344 8408 419278 5 735 56297
Healthcare 1320 10518 706377 7 391 8872
Geography 2004 14344 792637 7 809 43319
Sum 23505 204115 11206220 99 17708 816058

9. Keyword Analysis
Reference corpus: Learners’ comments
Cut-off criteria
● p-value for the log-likelihood ratio test is < 0.000000000001 (Flowerdew, 2015)
● Keyness indicator: Bayes Factor > 10 (Wilson, 2013)
● Normalized frequency > 5 per 100,000 (McEnery, 2016)
● Dispersion Measure, Gries’ Deviation of Proportion (Gries’ DP, Gries, 2008; Lijffijt & Gries,
2012) < 0.30
137 Keywords found
● functional grouping
● individual keywords

10. Interactivity
● you, your, yourself, we, us
Names
Discourse Particles ● hi, yes, thanks, please, sorry
Thanks for all your thoughtful comments this week!
Thank you for sharing this link on colour illusions!
thanks for your thoughts, it is great to read personal
insight. Sugar is an ingredient in food that does not <…>
Pronouns

11. ● point, points, pointing, comment, comments, question,
discussion, post, feedback, answer, questions, pointing,
reply, discussed, posted
● click, check, button, materials, download, page, link,
videos, section, text, pdf, fixed, sections, website
Meta-language
Conceptual Objects
Referential
Discussion-related
Logistics and
Learning Materials
Course and MOOCs ● mooc, futurelearn
● issue, issues, topic, case, research, researchers
● week, weeks, later, next, coming
Hopefully you will see in the last part of week 4 how the ‘skilled jobs’ issue and technological change
can be dealt with in different ways.
<…> we 'll keep coming back to this question of who was more healthy <…>

12. Stance Expression
● might, 'll, can, will, want, 'd
Speech Act
Positive Evaluation
Modality
Hedging Expression
Booster
Emotions
● suggest, mean, ask, suggestion,
referring, asking
● sounds, sure, thoughts, find
● indeed, just, exactly, directly
● right, fine, good, great, interesting
● glad, worry, afraid
Uncertainty  welcoming alternatives
Expanding dialogic space
Certainty  no alternatives
Contracting dialogic space

13. ● if, e.g., example, examples, terms, i.e., meantime, then,,
dependsConnectors
Punctuation ● ),'(-:!?"
Grammatical
Particles
Uncategorized
● here, this, that, there, the, these, are, is, be, 's, do, on, for
● let, hear, hope, note, see, look, using, try, collect, uses,
option, b, different, what, two, available, free

14. Questions
● 3901 instances of ?
● 95% in the replies
● Types of Questions (Athanasiadou, 1990; Kleinke, 2012)
● Keywords: question, what
● Lexical Bundles
● do you think that, 49 instances ~ 60 per million words
● what do you think, 47 instances ~ 58 per million words
do you think…? ● 262 instances ~ 321 per million words
● 246 in their reply to learners’ posts

15. Learner A: ….
Learner B: My comment to Learner A is the same regarding the
TV. Why on earth can we not have one device to include all
functions. My thoughts are money.
Facilitator: What kind of features do you think such a remote
control should have?
Learner B: Now you have put me in a corner. So I will have a
go. On, Off, Program Change, Volume, Menu all at the top……
Facilitator: A disappointing news item on the ALT mailing list
today, ….<url>… Sadly this will also set a US legal precedent,
so we'll probably see a great deal more free and open content
disappearing. So now its all completely inaccessible - to everyone
:-( So a question <...> Do you think such freely-provided 'open
content' should be taken down if it isn't captioned <…>?<...>
Learner A: <…>
Learner B: <…>

16. If-conditionals
● Pedagogic illustration, projecting, demonstration (O’Keeffe & Walsh, 2012)
There are browser extensions that support pop-up translations for specific languages. <…> If
you search for "Google Translate" on the Mozilla Addons site, you'll find extensions or add-ons
that use Google Translate.
● Relevance (Warchal, 2010)
If you are fascinated by votives, my colleagues at <…>run a blog which features information and
analysis from all around the world: <…>
Hi, if you have just joined the <…> MOOC I would like to extend a warm welcome to you all.
Please don't hesitate to get stuck in <…>
If you, 1907 instances
If !you, 2038 instances
Excluding “whether”

17. If-conditionals
● Arguments from multiple perspectives (Dancygier & Sweetser, 2009)
Learner A: How interesting! You would think that a nitrogen fixing plant would be beneficial.
Facilitator: Nitrogen fixation is useful for the plant itself if the soil is N poor and is useful for
rotations in cropland but less useful if its N fixing abilities mean that it can out-compete
native flora.
● Counter-arguments
<…>
Facilitator: <…>plus the interesting point that, if it was so bad, it's very odd that only
Thucydides mentioned it!
● Counter-factual
<…>
Facilitator: If it was clear that people were paying 32%, 42% or 47% I wonder if there would
be a lot more pressure to decrease tax rates.

18. Conclusion
● Interactivity – Name, pronoun,
discourse particles
● Meta-language – discussion,
course, conceptual objects, learning
materials, reference
● Stance Expression – modals,
hedges, speech acts, boosters,
emotion, positive evaluation
● Questions, if-conditionals
Intertextuality
Focused
Positive
Open up to other voices:
conversation space
Open up to other arguments
mental space

19. Acknowledgement
● Dr Caroline Tagg, Prof Mike Sharples, Prof Bart Rienties
● Leverhulme Trust
● Course Providers
● shimin.chua@open.ac.uk