ABSTRACT
Learning analytics promises both insight and, in the absence of theory and context, obfuscation. In this chapter, we develop an argument for teachers to re-conceptualise the text they produce (e.g. course materials) and the text their students produce (e.g. essays or short-answer assessments) as a rich, relevant and largely untapped data source to directly inform their teaching. We introduce theories that focus on the relationship between language and learning in higher education, and present a brief survey of text analytic tools currently used in higher education settings. We offer evidence of the dialogic relationship between teacher- and student-generated text, and demonstrate the potential to illuminate this relationship through the analysis of teacher-learner texts. Finally, we illustrate how basic text analytic approaches can be adopted in the classroom in order to derive actionable insights.
