Flexible Language Acquisition (FLAX) is a virtual library containing various authentic language collections from corpus data. FLAX is open source with powerful built-in tools for exploring language patterns. It has user-friendly interfaces and is designed for learners and teachers. This article focuses particularly on the British Academic Written English Collections. These collections offer rich resources for developing academic English. Evidence from recent empirical research has demonstrated the effectiveness of corpus tools in improving students’ lexicogrammatical knowledge (e.g., Luo, 2016; Nurmukhamedov, 2016). Such linguistic resources provide students with access to words and their “associated lexical and grammatical patterns in different contexts [which as a result] allows learners to develop a greater sense of…form, meaning and use” (Wu, Li, Witten, & Yu, 2016, p. 18). Students can navigate FLAX’s collections independently to practice and explore language patterns, such as collocations (i.e., words that tend to co-occur) and lexical bundles (i.e., three or more recurrent word sequences). Teachers can also make use of these resources to develop language materials and exercises.

What Are the British Academic Written English Collections?

The British Academic Written English Collections are among the language collections in the FLAX virtual library. The materials that make up these collections come from the British Academic Written English (BAWE) corpus. There are five collections within the BAWE collections: social sciences, arts and humanities, physical sciences, life sciences, and useful words for academic writing. The first four collections have similar interfaces and tools (see Figure 1).

Figure 1. Browsing options. Click to enlarge.

Each has the following browsing options:

• About: Describes what the collection contains and where the text comes from.

• Search: Contains a search engine to search the collection for specific word(s).

• Browse by Genre: Lists the titles of all the articles in the collection. The articles can be browsed by genre (e.g., critique, essay, case study, proposal, research report).

• Browse by Discipline: Lists the titles of the articles in the collection. The articles can be browsed by discipline (see Table 1).

• Collocations: Lists all the words from the collection. Clicking on a word takes the user to a list of collocations associated with the word.

• Wordlist: Lists all the words from the collection that are among the top 1,000 most frequent words, the top 2,000 most frequent words, and words that are academic (users select from the drop-down menu which wordlist they want to view). Words are clickable and can be sorted alphabetically or by frequency. Clicking on a certain word shows multiple examples of the word in context.

• Lexical Bundles: Provides lists of word sequences that typically occur together either at the beginning of a sentence or in the middle and other useful bundles. Clicking on a certain lexical bundle shows multiple examples of the bundle in context.

• My Cherry Basket: Users can save words, collocations, and lexical bundles to “My Cherry Basket” by clicking on the cherry icon that follows a word. Users can categorize the saved vocabulary by creating categorical names. They can also print or save the stored words to their computers.

What Do These Resources Offer for Teaching and Learning?

FLAX’s BAWE collections offer rich resources for intermediate and advanced ESL learners, nonnative English speakers pursuing undergraduate and graduate degrees in English, or anyone who wants to develop his or her academic English. Students can navigate these resources directly. English language teachers can also use these resources to create activities and materials.

Authentic Academic Text

Students have access to full authentic academic texts from different disciplines and types of writing such case studies, literature reviews, proposals, problem-solution papers, essays, and so on. They can read and explore the language and format used in a specific writing genre and discipline. Here is a list of the disciplines in each collection:

• Social Sciences: anthropology, business, economics, hospitality, leisure and tourism management, law, politics, sociology

• Arts and Humanities: archaeology, classics, comparative American studies, English, history, linguistics, philosophy (and other)

• Physical Sciences: architecture, chemistry, computer science, cybernetics and electronic engineering, engineering, mathematics, meteorology, physics, planning

• Life Sciences: agriculture, biological sciences, food sciences, health, medicine, psychology

Each collection has a list of papers that can be sorted by genre or discipline. For example, if a student is writing a proposal, he or she can look at some samples from a particular collection that is related to his or her major. While reading an article, students can choose a specific part of speech (adjective, noun, or verb) or a wordlist from the drop-down menu (top 1,000/2,000 most frequent words, academic words, topic-specific words, or keywords) to have it highlighted in the reading (see Figure 2). These highlighted words can be saved to “My Cherry Basket” by right clicking on the word.

Figure 2. A sample text with academic words highlighted. Click to enlarge.

Collocations

Students can learn about collocations by searching the collection and typing in a word(s) (see Figure 3) or by browsing the words that occurred in the collection through the “Collocations” page (see Figure 4).

Figure 4. Browsing the “Collocations” page for the collection. Click to enlarge.

Figure 5. Examples of a word collocation. Click to enlarge.

By clicking on abandon from Figure 4, for example, the student will be directed to the collocational patterns of the word (see Figure 5). Clicking on these patterns takes students to another collection in FLAX called Learning Collocations, which has more extensive collocation lists and activities.

Wordlist

Through “Wordlist,” students can access high-frequency words or academic words that occurred in the collection (see Figure 6). Clicking on a word on the list directs students to examples of the word in context (see Figure 7).

Figure 6. Academic wordlist in a collection. Click to enlarge.

Figure 7. Examples of a word from the wordlist in context.Click to enlarge.

Lexical Bundles

The “Lexical Bundles” option provides information about frequent sequences used by writers of a specific discipline at the beginning or in the middle of a sentence, including a list of “Useful Bundles”. Some examples of lexical bundles from the list are: It is interesting to note, It can be seen that, and The aim of this experiment.

Useful Words for Academic Writing

Another powerful resource in the BAWE collections is the “Useful Words for Academic Writing,” a subhead beneath the British Academic Written English Collections header on the homepage. Students can explore different language usages, such as how pronouns are used in written discourse, including common reporting verbs, shell nouns, useful adjectives, and common adverbs (by clicking on the plus icon).

The “common reporting verbs” option is particularly useful to students in learning about various reporting verbs and their functions. They can also learn about the degree of reporting verbs (e.g., neutral or evaluative) by clicking on a certain verb and analyzing how it is used in a sentence.

Students can also learn about shell nouns, which are cohesive devices frequently used in academic writing (e.g. the + N + of) like the effects of.

Finally, students can explore and learn about useful adjectives to, for example, describe importance or probability and adverbs that are common in academic writing and see examples of how they are used.

To conclude, FLAX’s BAWE collections offer valuable resources for academic language. They can equip students with vocabulary and academic expressions that would help them improve their written language production. Teachers can use these resources to inform their teaching of academic language and to develop materials.

For more information about FLAX, see

Witten, I. H., Wu, S., Li, L., & Whisler, J. L. (2013).The book of FLAX: A new approach to computer-assisted language learning. New Zealand: University of Waikato. Retrieved from http://flax.nzdl.org/BOOK_OF_FLAX/BookofFLAX 2up.pdf

References

Luo, Q. (2016). The effects of data-driven learning activities on EFL learners’ writing development. SpringerPlus, 5(1255), 1-13.

Nurmukhamedov, U. (2016). The contribution of collocation tools to collocation correction in second language writing. International Journal of Lexicography. doi: 10.1093/ijl/ecw031.

Wu, S., Li, L., Witten, I., & Yu, A. (2016). Constructing a collocation learning system from the Wikipedia corpus. International Journal of Computer-Assisted Language Learning and Teaching, 6(3),18–35.

Eman Elturki received a PhD in language, literacy and technology from Washington State University and a master’s in TESOL from the University of Southern California. She teaches ESL at the Intensive American Language Center of Washington State University.