111年 - 111 國立嘉義大學_碩士班招生考試試題_外國語言學系：英文寫作#146423

I. Critical Thinking and Writing (50%)
Below is an excerpt selected from Peter Wingrove's (2022) work published in English for Specific Purposes. Discuss (1)what the rationale(s) and goal(s) of this paper and (2)summarize the article in less than 150 words.
This research article contributes to the literature which characterises TED talks and academic lectures in terms of linguistic features, with the aim of informing pedagogy. The primary motivation for this research is the introduction of TED talks into educational settings, particularly within English for Academic Purposes (EAP), where TED talks are recommended for academic listening practice (De Chazal, 2014) and sometimes conflated with academic discourse within research (e.g. Abdulrahman, 2017; Elk, 2014; Takaesu, 2014). Moreover, TED talks feature prominently in contemporary textbooks marketed at university students, such as the Keynote (Dummet, Stephenson, Bohlke, & Lansford, 2016–2018), Perspectives (Barber, Dellar, Jeffries, & Lansford, 2018), and 21st Century Communication (Baker, Blass, Williams, Bonesteel, & Lee, 2017) series. The underlying presupposition is that TED talks are a form of academic discourse, or at least suitably similar to act as a substitute in EAP classes. This assumption is not unfounded as certain features of TED talks suggest at least overlap with academic discourses. For instance, TED hosts a range of speakers, including entrepreneurs, politicians, writers, artists, and notably, a number of academics (Cassidy et al., 2013). In terms of topic, the TED website uses a series of content tags to organise the talks, listing six main tags: technology, entertainment, design, business, science, and global issues; and over 400 minor tags, a set of which denote academic content such as chemistry, biology, math, history, and philosophy.
Academic lexis is a crucial component of academic language, linked to successful academic listening and performance. Interview and survey data has found that many L2 students struggle to understand academic lectures in English (Mulligan & Kirkpatrick, 2000), with limited vocabulary knowledge reported to cause comprehension difficulties (Ali, 2020; Yeh, 2014). Moreover, prior studies have demonstrated a correlation between vocabulary knowledge and academic performance (Masrai & Milton, 2018; Roche & Harrington, 2013) and the use of academic vocabulary has been found to increase in student writing as they progress through academia, suggesting they are an important feature (Durrant, 2016). Therefore, academic vocabulary knowledge appears to be important for academic listening, academic writing, and academic performance overall. Comparing TED talks and academic lectures in terms of academic lexis gives an indication of how useful TED talks are for preparing students for the academic vocabulary demands of lectures. Prior research has made some progress in this direction. A previous study found that the Academic Vocabulary List (AVL; Gardner & Davies, 2014) covered 6.56% of TED talks on average, compared to 9.35% of academic lectures (Wingrove, 2017). However, this research was limited in terms of corpus size (49 talks), scope (only technology, design, and entertainment talks) and in the measure of academic content, which only considered written academic vocabulary. As the use of AVL items has been found to vary substantially across disciplines (Durrant, 2016), the limited number of topics in this study is a notable limitation. Moreover, academic lexis has been captured in a number of ways, using differing criteria and aims.
Therefore, in order to inform the suitable use of TED Talks in ESP contexts, the current study analyses the coverage of three lists of academic lexis across two corpora, which were designed for this study: the TED Talk Corpus (TTC; n = 2,483, tokens = 5,068,781) and the Open Yale Courses Lecture Corpus (OYCLC; n = 2,483, tokens = 5,068,781). The TTC includes over 400 topic tags and the OYCLC covers a broad range of academic disciplines. Academic lexis is defined by the Academic Word List (AWL; Coxhead, 2000), the Academic Vocabulary List (AVL; Gardner & Davies, 2014), and the Academic Spoken Word List levels 2–4 (ASWL; Dang, Coxhead & Webb 2017). To investigate the extent and the ways in which TED talks are different from OYCLC lectures in terms of academic lexis, a corpus-based approach (see Tognini-Bonelli, 2001) is taken to answer the following research questions: (1) Do TED talks differ from OYCLC lectures in terms of academic lexis? (2) To what extent are these differences present across the different disciplinary categories? and (3) Which academic lexes are frequent in TED talks and how does this compare with frequent academic lexes in lectures?

II. Essay Writing (50%)
In the last two years, the Covid-19 pandemic has willy-nilly forced us to enter a new era for distant learning wherein teachers and students alike have been faced with challenges and changes in schooling. While many may have embraced the new way of schooling they have encountered, relishing the freedom and flexibility offered by online learning, others may have suffered a lot from the losses of real contacts with teachers and peers in a classroom setting, which are essential parts of all face-to-face meetings. Write an essay in which you depict the effects of the Covid-19 outbreak in education, either focusing on the positive, or the negative outcomes of distant learning during or after the pandemic.