Investigating Chinese HE EFL Classrooms: Using Collaborative Learning to Enhance Learning

✍ Scribed by Lin Lin (auth.)

• Publisher: Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
• Year: 2015
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 321
• Edition: 1
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

​This book presents a study on corpus-driven distribution as the main method of prediction, concentrating on individual semantic features to predict the senses of non-defined words by using corpora and tools, such as the Chinese Gigaword Corpus, HowNet, Chinese Wordnet, and XianDai HanYu CiDian (Xian Han). With the help of these corpora, the study determines the collocation clusters of four target words: chi1 “eat,” wan2 “play,” huan4 “change” and shao1 “burn” through character and concept similarities. The results of this sense prediction study demonstrate that it was able to use off-line tasks to test some participants’ intuition, which supports the theory that different clusters can represent different senses when pursuing a corpus-based, computational approach.

✦ Table of Contents

Front Matter....Pages i-xxvii
Background to Collaborative Learning and Chinese EFL Education....Pages 1-10
Exploring Collaborative Learning: Theoretical and Conceptual Perspectives....Pages 11-28
Tenets and Practices of Collaborative Learning in Classrooms: Empirical Supports....Pages 29-42
The Collaborative Learning Research Project: From Theory to Practice....Pages 43-69
Research Instruments....Pages 71-101
Evaluating the Use and Effectiveness of Collaborative Learning: Students’ Interactional Behaviors and Engagement....Pages 103-134
Collaboration as Conducive to Learning: Students’ Preferences for Learning and Attainments....Pages 135-152
Collaborative Learning in Practice: Toward a Pedagogy....Pages 153-180
Attitudes and MotivationMotivation ....Pages 181-195
Conclusions: Toward a Broader Pedagogy....Pages 197-208
Back Matter....Pages 209-310

✦ Subjects

Language Education