Mining and Teaching Design of Civics Topics in English Courses Based on LDA Topic Modeling

Incorporating Civic and Political Education in the English classroom can both enrich the content of English teaching and innovate the form of Civic and Political Education, however, it is often difficult to grasp the status of students’ attention to Civic and Political Topics and their experience of instructional design in teaching. The article uses the NLPIR system to perform lexing of teaching text and calculate the TF-IDF weights of word frequencies, and utilizes the collapsed Gibbs sampling method to estimate the parameters of the LDA topic model, which is used to mine Civics and Politics topics. In the MOOC English teaching sample, it was found that ideological and political topics such as “patriotic education”, “civic consciousness”, “advanced socialist culture” and “cultural industry” showed an increasing trend of popularity over time. The frequency of “explanation” in the positive and negative evaluation groups was 8100 and 74 times respectively, which shows that the teaching design should be optimized by improving the explanation strategy in the integrated education of English and Civics.