Search results for: English first additional language learners

Authors: Siew Ming Thang, Wong Hoo Keat, Chee Hao Sue, Fung Lan Loo, Ahju Rosalind

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There are numerous studies that explored young learners’ literacy skills in Malaysia but none that uses the eye-tracking device to track their cognitive processes when reading picture storybooks. This study used this method to investigate two groups of prereaders’ cognitive processes in four conditions. (1) A congruent picture was presented, and a matching narration was read aloud by a recorder; (2) Children heard a narration telling about the same characters in the picture but involves a different scene; (3) Only a picture with matching text was present; (4) Students only heard the reading aloud of the text on the screen. The two main objectives of this project are to test which content of pictures helps the prereaders (i.e., young children who have not received any formal reading instruction) understand the narration and whether children try to create a coherent mental representation from the oral narration and the pictures. The study compares two groups of children from two different kindergartens. Group1: 15 Chinese children; Group2: 17 Malay children. The medium of instruction was English. An eye-tracker were used to identify Areas of Interest (AOI) of each picture and the five target elements and calculate number of fixations and total time spent on fixation of pictures and written texts. Two mixed factorial ANOVAs with the storytelling performance (good, average, or weak) and vocabulary level (low, medium, high) as between-subject variables, and the Areas of Interests (AOIs) and display conditions as the within-subject variables were performedon the variables.

Keywords: eye-tracking, cognitive processes, literacy skills, prereaders, visual attention

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Authors: Cina Mosito, Toyin Mary Adewumi, Charlene Nissen

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One of the goals of inclusive education is to provide learners with suitable learning environments and prospects to best attain their potential. This study sought to determine the experiences of studying inclusive education on pre-service teachers’ teaching within the South African education context. A purposeful sample comprising 6 pre-service teachers was selected from a university of technology located in the Western Cape South Africa. Data were collected using open-ended questionnaires, which were exploratory in nature and analyzed thematically. The findings supported significant proportions of experiences as self-reported by pre-service teachers. The pre-service teachers’ experiences of studying inclusive education included inclusive education as an “eye-opener” to the fact that learners experiencing various barriers to learning can be accommodated in the regular classrooms, exposure to some aspects of inclusive education, such as diversity, learners’ rights, and curriculum differentiation. It was also revealed that studying inclusive education made pre-service teachers love and enjoy teaching more. The study shows that awareness of inclusive education has influenced pre-service teachers in South African schools.

Keywords: experience, inclusive education, pre-service teacher, South Africa

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Authors: Aicha Zohbie

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The purpose of this paper is to critically compare two teaching methods: the communicative method and the grammar-translation method. The paper presents the importance of language awareness as an approach to teaching and learning language and some challenges that language teachers face. In addition, the paper strives to determine whether the adoption of communicative teaching methods or the grammar teaching method would be more effective to teach a language. A variety of features are considered for comparing the two methods: the purpose of each method, techniques used, teachers’ and students’ roles, the use of L1, the skills that are emphasized, the correction of students’ errors, and the students’ assessments. Finally, the paper includes suggestions and recommendations for implementing an approach that best meets the students’ needs in a classroom.

Keywords: language teaching methods, language awareness, communicative method grammar translation method, advantages and disadvantages

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Authors: Leonardo Alfredo Mendoza, Cristian Munoz, Marco Aurelio Pacheco, Manoela Kohler, Evelyn Batista, Rodrigo Moura

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Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques are increasingly more powerful to be able to interpret the feelings and reactions of a person to a product or service. Sentiment analysis has become a fundamental tool for this interpretation but has few applications in languages other than English. This paper presents a classification of sentiment analysis in Portuguese with a base of comments from social networks in Portuguese. A word embedding's representation was used with a 50-Dimension GloVe pre-trained model, generated through a corpus completely in Portuguese. To generate this classification, the bidirectional long short-term memory and bidirectional Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU) models are used, reaching results of 99.1%.

Keywords: natural processing language, sentiment analysis, bidirectional long short-term memory, BI-LSTM, gated recurrent unit, GRU

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Authors: Hina Javed

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This study investigated the different strategies used by Pakistani students learning English as a second language at secondary level school. The basic premise of the study is that ESL students face tremendous difficulty while they are reading a text in English. It also purports to dig into the different causes of their slow reading. They might range from word reading accuracy, mental translation, lexical density, cultural gaps, complex syntactic constructions, and back skipping. Sixty Grade 7 students from two secondary mainstream schools in Lahore were selected for the study, thirty being boys and thirty girls. They were administered reading-related and reading speed pre and post-tests. The purpose of the tests was to gauge their performance on different reading tasks so as to be able to see how they used strategies, if any, and also to ascertain the causes hampering their performance on those tests. In the pretests, they were given simple texts with considerable lexical density and moderately complex sentential layout. In the post-tests, the reading tasks contained comic strips, texts with visuals, texts with controlled vocabulary, and an evenly distributed varied range of simple, compound, and complex sentences. Both the tests were timed. The results gleaned through the data gathered corroborated the researchers’ basic hunch that they performed significantly better than pretests. The findings suggest that the morphological structure of words and lexical density are the main sources of reading comprehension difficulties in poor ESL readers. It is also confirmed that if the texts are accompanied by pictorial visuals, it greatly facilitates students’ reading speed and comprehension. There is no substantial evidence that ESL readers adopt any specific strategy while reading in English.

Keywords: slow ESL reading speed, mental translation, complex syntactic constructions, back skipping

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Authors: Kadidiatou Toure

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Mali has started experimentation of teaching the national languages at school through the convergent pedagogy in 1987. Then, it is in 1994 that it will become widespread with eleven of the thirteen former national languages used at primary school. The aim was to improve the Malian educational system because the use of French as the only medium of instruction was considered a contributing factor to the significant number of student dropouts and the high rate of repetition. The Convergent pedagogy highlights the knowledge acquired by children at home, their vision of the world and especially the knowledge they have of their mother tongue. That pedagogy requires the use of a specific medium only during classroom practices and teachers have been trained in this sense. The specific medium depends on the learning content, which sometimes is French, other times, it is the national language. Research has shown that bilingual learners do not only use the required medium in their learning activities, but they code switch. It is part of their learning processes. Currently, many scholars agree on the importance of CS in bilingual classes, and teachers have been told about the necessity of integrating it into their classroom practices. One of the challenges of the Malian bilingual education curriculum is the question of ‘effective languages management’. Theoretically, depending on the classrooms, an average have been established for each of the involved language. Following that, teachers make use of CS differently, sometimes, it favors the learners, other times, it contributes to the development of some linguistic weaknesses. The present research tries to fill that gap through a tentative model of didactization of CS, which simply means the practical management of the languages involved in the bilingual classrooms. It is to know how to use CS for effective learning. Moreover, the didactization of CS tends to sensitize the teachers about the functional role of CS so that they may overcome their own weaknesses. The overall goal of this research is to make code switching a real tool for bilingual education. The specific objectives are: to identify the types of CS used during classroom activities to present the functional role of CS for the teachers as well as the pupils. to develop a tentative model of code-switching, which will help the teachers in transitional classes of bilingual schools to recognize the appropriate moment for making use of code switching in their classrooms. The methodology adopted is a qualitative one. The study is based on recorded videos of teachers of 3rd year of primary school during their classroom activities and interviews with the teachers in order to confirm the functional role of CS in bilingual classes. The theoretical framework adopted is the typology of CS proposed by Poplack (1980) to identify the types of CS used. The study reveals that teachers need to be trained on the types of CS and the different functions they assume and on the consequences of inappropriate use of language alternation.

Keywords: bilingual curriculum, code switching, didactization, national languages

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Authors: Hans Schumann, Colin Domnauer, Louis Rosenberg

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In this study, machine learning techniques were deployed on real-time human swarm data to forecast the likelihood of outcomes for English Premier League matches in the 2020/21 season. These techniques included ensemble models in combination with neural networks and were tested against an industry standard of Vegas Oddsmakers. Predictions made from the collective intelligence of human swarm participants managed to achieve a positive return on investment over a full season on matches, empirically proving the usefulness of a new artificial intelligence valuing human instinct and intelligence.

Keywords: artificial intelligence, data science, English Premier League, human swarming, machine learning, sports betting, swarm intelligence

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Authors: Min Kyeong Cha, Ju Yeon Mun, Seong Baeg Kim

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Recently, ‘play of learning’ became important and is emphasized as a useful learning tool. Therefore, interest in edutainment contents is growing. Storytelling is considered first as a method that improves the transmission of information and learner's interest when planning edutainment contents. In this study, we designed edutainment contents in the form of an adventure game that applies the storytelling method. This content provides questions and items constituted dynamically and reorganized learning contents through analysis of test results. It allows learners to solve various questions through effective iterative learning. As a result, the learners can reach mastery learning.

Keywords: storytelling, edutainment, mastery learning, computer operating principle

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Authors: Ben-Fred Ohia

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Code-switching and code-mixing are linguistic behaviours that arise in a bilingual situation. They limit speakers in a conversation to decide which code they should use to utter particular phrases or words in the course of carrying out their utterance. Every human society is characterized by the existence of diverse linguistic varieties. The speakers of these varieties at some points have various degrees of contact with the non-speakers of their variety, which one of the outcomes of the linguistic contact is code-switching or code-mixing. The work discusses the nature of code-switching and code-mixing in Ogba-English bilinguals’ speeches. It provides a detailed explanation of the concept of code-switching and code-mixing and explains the typology of code-switching and code-mixing and their manifestation in Ogba-English bilingual speakers’ speeches. The findings reveal that code-switching and code-mixing are functionally motivated and being triggered by various conversational contexts.

Keywords: bilinguals, code-mixing, code-switching, Ogba

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Authors: Juliet Udoudom

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Inappropriate complement selection constitutes one of the major features of non-standard complementation in the Nigerian users of English output of sentence construction. This paper investigates complement clause choice in Written Educated Nigerian English (ENE) and offers some results. It aims at determining preferred and dispreferred patterns of complement clause selection in respect of verb heads in English by selected Nigerian users of English. The complementation data analyzed in this investigation were obtained from experimental tasks designed to elicit complement categories of Verb – Noun -, Adjective – and Prepositional – heads in English. Insights from the Government – Binding relations were employed in analyzing data, which comprised responses obtained from one hundred subjects to a picture elicitation exercise, a grammaticality judgement test, and a free composition task. The findings indicate a general tendency for clausal complements (CPs) introduced by the complementizer that to be preferred by the subjects studied. Of the 235 tokens of clausal complements which occurred in our corpus, 128 of them representing 54.46% were CPs headed by that, while whether – and if-clauses recorded 31.07% and 8.94%, respectively. The complement clause-type which recorded the lowest incidence of choice was the CP headed by the Complementiser, for with a 5.53% incident of occurrence. Further findings from the study indicate that semantic features of relevant embedding verb heads were not taken into consideration in the choice of complementisers which introduce the respective complement clauses, hence the that-clause was chosen to complement verbs like prefer. In addition, the dispreferred choice of the for-clause is explicable in terms of the fact that the respondents studied regard ‘for’ as a preposition, and not a complementiser.

Keywords: complement, complement clause complement selection, complementisers, government-binding

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Authors: Hoi Yan Lau

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In Hong Kong, most families have working parents, and the primary caregivers of young children are helpers. This leads to a lack of interaction and language expression in children’s home environment, which affects their language development. This study aims to explore the effectiveness of parent-child reading in improving young children’s language skills. A 4-year-old girl and her mother are recruited to a 3 months’ parent-child reading program. There is a total of 26 reading sessions which target to enhance the parent’s skill of parent-child reading and to assess the child’s language ability. At the same time, the child’s use of language in normal classroom settings is analyzed by anecdotal records. It is shown that the parent is able to use more and better guiding questions during parent-child reading after this program, which in turn leads to more and longer response of the child during the reading sessions. The child also has an increase in Mean Length of Utterance and has a higher frequency of using complete sentences when interacting with other classmates in the classroom. It is worthwhile to further investigate the inclusion of promoting parent-child reading to enhance children’s language development in preschool curriculum planning.

Keywords: Hong Kong, language skills, parent-child reading, preschoolers

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Authors: Abeer Heider

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This paper explores and classifies the different kinds of avoidances that students commonly make in the acquisition of Arabic as a second/foreign language, and suggests specific strategies to help students lessen their avoidance trends in hopes of streamlining the learning process. Students most commonly use avoidance strategies in grammar, and word choice. These different types of strategies have different implications and naturally require different approaches. Thus the question remains as to the most effective way to help students improve their Arabic, and how teachers can efficiently utilize these techniques. It is hoped that this research will contribute to understand the role of avoidance in the field of the second language acquisition in general, and as a type of input. Yet some researchers also note that similarity between L1 and L2 may be problematic as well since the learner may doubt that such similarity indeed exists and consequently avoid the identical constructions or elements (Jordens, 1977; Kellermann, 1977, 1978, 1986). In an effort to resolve this issue, a case study is being conducted. The present case study attempts to provide a broader analysis of what is acquired than is usually the case, analyzing the learners ‘accomplishments in terms of three –part framework of the components of communicative competence suggested by Michele Canale: grammatical competence, sociolinguistic competence and discourse competence. The subjects of this study are 15 students’ 22th year who came to study Arabic at Qatar University of Cairo. The 15 students are in the advanced level. They were complete intermediate level in Arabic when they arrive in Qatar for the first time. The study used discourse analytic method to examine how the first language affects students’ production and output in the second language, and how and when students use avoidance methods in their learning. The study will be conducted through Fall 2015 through analyzing audio recordings that are recorded throughout the entire semester. The recordings will be around 30 clips. The students are using supplementary listening and speaking materials. The group will be tested at the end of the term to assess any measurable difference between the techniques. Questionnaires will be administered to teachers and students before and after the semester to assess any change in attitude toward avoidance and selectivity methods. Responses to these questionnaires are analyzed and discussed to assess the relative merits of the aforementioned strategies to avoidance and selectivity to further support on. Implications and recommendations for teacher training are proposed.

Keywords: the second language acquisition, learning languages, selectivity, avoidance

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Authors: Jun Gao

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This paper combines the corpus-based and contrastive approaches, seeking to provide a systematic account of cataphora in English and Chinese natural conversations. Based on spoken corpus data, the first part of the paper examines a range of characteristics of cataphora in the two languages, including frequency of occurrence, patterns, and syntactic features. On the basis of this exploration, cataphora in the two languages are contrasted in a structured way. The analysis shows that English and Chinese share a similar distribution of cataphora in natural conversations in terms of frequency of occurrence, with repeat identification cataphora higher than first mention cataphora and intra-sentential cataphora much higher than inter-sentential cataphora. In terms of patterns, three types are identified in English, i.e. P+N, Ø+N, and it+Clause, while in Chinese, two types are identified, i.e., P+N and Ø+N. English and Chinese are similar in terms of syntactic features, i.e., cataphor and postcedent in the intra-sentential cataphora mainly occur in the initial subject position of the same clause, with postcedent immediately followed or delayed, and cataphor and postcedent are mostly in adjacent sentences in inter-sentential cataphora. In the second part of the paper, the motivations of cataphora are investigated. It is found that cataphora is primarily motivated by the speaker and hearer’s different knowledge states with regard to the referent. Other factors are also involved, such as interference, word search, and the tension between the principles of Economy and Clarity.

Keywords: cataphora, contrastive study, motivation, pattern, syntactic features

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Authors: Saif Bareq, Vivek Mirgane

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The present paper seeks to explicate the pronunciation of the ‘-s’ and ‘-ed’ suffixes when applied in their relative places in word endings. It attempts to investigate the problems faced by Yemenis in the pronunciation of these suffixes in all occurrences and realizations. It discusses the realization of ‘s’ in the four areas of plural, 3rd person singular and genitive markers, and contraction of ‘has’ and ‘is’ as in he’s, it’s ..,etc. and shows how they are differently represented by three different sounds /s/, /z/ and /z/ based on the phonological structure of the words in which they occur. Similarly, it explains the realization of the ‘-ed’ suffix of the past and past participle marker and how it is realized differently by three sounds governed by the phonological structure of these words. Besides, it tries to shed some light on the English morphophonemic and phonological rules that govern the pronunciation of such troublesome endings. It is hypothesized that the absence of such phenomenon in the mother tongue pronunciation of these suffixes.

Keywords: Suffixes' Pronunciation, Phonological Structure, Phonological Rules, Morpho-Phonemics, Yemeni English

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Authors: Chin-Wen Chien

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Protocols are tools that help teachers inquire into the teaching and professional learning during the professional dialogue. This study focused on the integration of protocols into elementary school English teachers’ professional dialogue and discussed the influence of protocols on teachers’ teaching and learning. Based on the analysis of documents, observations, and interviews, this study concluded that with the introduction of protocols to elementary school English teachers, three major protocols were used during their professional dialogue. These protocols led the teachers to gain professional learning in content knowledge and pedagogical content knowledge. However, the facilitators’ lack of experience in using protocols led to interruptions during the professional dialogue. Suggestions for effective protocol-based professional dialogue are provided.

Keywords: protocols, professional learning, professional dialogue, classroom practice

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Authors: Waleed Mandour

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This study presents multidimensional scrutiny of Benson et al.’s seven-category taxonomy of lexical collocations used by Egyptian medical authors and their peers of native-English speakers. It investigates 212 medical papers, all published during a span of 6 years (from 2013 to 2018). The comparison is held to the medical research articles submitted by native speakers of English (25,238 articles in total with over 103 million words) as derived from the Directory of Open Access Journals (a 2.7 billion-word corpus). The non-native speakers compiled corpus was properly annotated and marked-up manually by the researcher according to the standards of Weisser. In terms of statistical comparisons, though, deployed were the conventional frequency-based analysis besides the relevant criteria, such as association measures (AMs) in which LogDice is deployed as per the recommendation of Kilgariff et al. when comparing large corpora. Despite the terminological convergence in the subject corpora, comparison results confirm the previous literature of which the non-native speakers’ compositions reveal limited ranges of lexical collocations in terms of their distribution. However, there is a ubiquitous tendency of overusing the NS-high-frequency multi-words in all lexical categories investigated. Furthermore, Egyptian authors, conversely to their English-speaking peers, tend to embrace more collocations denoting quantitative rather than qualitative analyses in their produced papers. This empirical work, per se, contributes to the English for Academic Purposes (EAP) and English as a Lingua Franca in Academic settings (ELFA). In addition, there are pedagogical implications that would promote a better quality of medical research papers published in Egyptian universities.

Keywords: corpus linguistics, EAP, ELFA, lexical collocations, medical discourse

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Authors: Emad A. S. Abu-Ayyash

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Cohesive devices, the linguistic tools that are usually employed to hold the different parts of the text together, have been the focus of a significant number of discourse analysis studies. These linguistic tools have grabbed the attention of researchers since the inception of the first and most comprehensive model of cohesion in 1976. However, it was noticed that some cohesive devices (e.g., endophoric reference, conjunctions, ellipsis, substitution, and lexical ties) – being thought of as more popular than others (e.g., exophoric reference) – were over-researched. The present paper explores the usage of two cohesive devices that have been evidently almost absent from discourse analysis studies. These cohesive devices are exophoric and homophoric references, the linguistic items that can be interpreted in terms of the physical and cultural contexts of discourse. The significance of the current paper, therefore, stems from the fact that it attempts to fill a gap in the research conducted so far on cohesive devices. This study provides an explanation of the concepts of the cohesive devices that have been employed in a plethora of research on cohesion and elucidates the relevant context-related concepts. The paper also identifies the gap in cohesive devices research. Exophora and homophora, the least visited cohesive devices in previous studies, were qualitatively and quantitatively explored in six opinion articles, four produced by eight postgraduate English as a Foreign Language (EFL) students in a university in the United Arab Emirates and two by professional NS writers in the Independent and the Guardian. The six pieces were about the United Kingdom Independent Party (UKIP) leader’s call to ban the burqa in the UK and were analysed vis-a-vis the employment and function of homophora and exophora. The study found that both EFL students and native speakers employed exophora and homophora considerably in their writing to serve a variety of functions, including building assumptions, supporting main ideas, and involving the readers among others.

Keywords: cohesive devices, context, culture, exophoric reference, homophoric reference

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Authors: Christine Demaecker

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Many researchers have underlined the importance of metaphors in specialised language. Their use of specific domains helps us understand the conceptualisations used to communicate new ideas or difficult topics. Within the wide area of specialised discourse, wine tasting is a very specific example because it is almost exclusively metaphoric. Wine tasting metaphors express various conceptualisations. They are not linguistic but rather conceptual, as defined by Lakoff & Johnson. They correspond to the linguistic expression of a mental projection from a well-known or more concrete source domain onto the target domain, which is the taste of wine. But unlike most specialised terminologies, the vocabulary is never clearly defined. When metaphorical terms are listed in dictionaries, their definitions remain vague, unclear, and circular. They cannot be replaced by literal linguistic expressions. This makes it impossible to transfer them into another language with the traditional linguistic translation methods. Qualitative research investigates whether wine tasting metaphors could rather be translated with the cognitive translation process, as well described by Nili Mandelblit (1995). The research is based on a corpus compiled from two high-profile wine guides; the Parker’s Wine Buyer’s Guide and its translation into French and the Guide Hachette des Vins and its translation into English. In this small corpus with a total of 68,826 words, 170 metaphoric expressions have been identified in the original English text and 180 in the original French text. They have been selected with the MIPVU Metaphor Identification Procedure developed at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. The selection demonstrates that both languages use the same set of conceptualisations, which are often combined in wine tasting notes, creating conceptual integrations or blends. The comparison of expressions in the source and target texts also demonstrates the use of the cognitive translation approach. In accordance with the principle of relevance, the translation always uses target language conceptualisations, but compared to the original, the highlighting of the projection is often different. Also, when original metaphors are complex with a combination of conceptualisations, at least one element of the original metaphor underlies the target expression. This approach perfectly integrates into Lederer’s interpretative model of translation (2006). In this triangular model, the transfer of conceptualisation could be included at the level of ‘deverbalisation/reverbalisation’, the crucial stage of the model, where the extraction of meaning combines with the encyclopedic background to generate the target text.

Keywords: cognitive translation, conceptual integration, conceptual metaphor, interpretative model of translation, wine tasting metaphor

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Authors: Carmela Perta

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Among the studies flourished in the field of historical sociolinguistics, mainly in the strand devoted to English history, during its Medieval and early modern phases, multilingual texts had been analysed using theories and models coming from contact linguistics, thus applying synchronic models and approaches to the past. This is true also in the case of contact phenomena which would transcend the writing level involving the language systems implicated in contact processes to the point of perceiving a new variety. This is the case for medieval administrative-commercial texts in which, according to some Scholars, the degree of fusion of Anglo-Norman, Latin and middle English is so high a mixed code emerges, and there are recurrent patterns of mixed forms. Interesting is a collection of multilingual business writings by John Balmayn, an Englishman overseeing a large shipment in Tuscany, namely the Cantelowe accounts. These documents display various analogies with multilingual texts written in England in the same period; in fact, the writer seems to make use of the above-mentioned patterns, with Middle English, Latin, Anglo-Norman, and the newly added Italian. Applying an atomistic yet dynamic approach to the study of contact phenomena, we will investigate these documents, trying to explore the nature of the switching forms they contain from an intra-writer variation perspective. After analysing the accounts and the type of multilingualism in them, we will take stock of the assumed mixed code nature, comparing the characteristics found in this genre with modern assumptions. The aim is to evaluate the possibility to consider the switching forms as core elements of a mixed code, used as professional variety among merchant communities, or whether such texts should be analysed from a switching perspective.

Keywords: historical sociolinguistics, historical code switching, letters, medieval england

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Authors: Xiuying Wang, Changliang Li, Bo Xu

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A fixed-length feature vector is required for many machine learning algorithms in NLP field. Word embeddings have been very successful at learning lexical information. However, they cannot capture the compositional meaning of sentences, which prevents them from a deeper understanding of language. In this paper, we introduce a novel hierarchical tree long short-term memory (HTLSTM) model that learns vector representations for sentences of arbitrary syntactic type and length. We propose to split one sentence into three hierarchies: short phrase, long phrase and full sentence level. The HTLSTM model gives our algorithm the potential to fully consider the hierarchical information and long-term dependencies of language. We design the experiments on both English and Chinese corpus to evaluate our model on sentiment analysis task. And the results show that our model outperforms several existing state of the art approaches significantly.

Keywords: deep learning, hierarchical tree long short-term memory, sentence representation, sentiment analysis

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Authors: Khaled M. Alhawiti

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Natural Language Processing (NLP) is an effective approach for bringing improvement in educational setting. This involves initiating the process of learning through the natural acquisition in the educational systems. It is based on following effective approaches for providing the solution for various problems and issues in education. Natural Language Processing provides solution in a variety of different fields associated with the social and cultural context of language learning. It is based on involving various tools and techniques such as grammar, syntax, and structure of text. It is effective approach for teachers, students, authors, and educators for providing assistance for writing, analysis, and assessment procedure. Natural Language Processing is widely integrated in the large number of educational contexts such as research, science, linguistics, e-learning, evaluations system, and various other educational settings such as schools, higher education system, and universities. Natural Language Processing is based on applying scientific approach in the educational settings. In the educational settings, NLP is an effective approach to ensure that students can learn easily in the same way as they acquired language in the natural settings.

Keywords: natural language processing, education, application, e-learning, scientific studies, educational system

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Authors: Valdênia Carvalho e Almeida

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The goal of the present study is to investigate the semantic preference of the most frequent adjectives in research articles through a corpus-based analysis of texts published in journals in Applied Linguistics (AL). The corpus used in this study contains texts published in the period from 2014 to 2018 in the three journals: Language Learning and Technology; English for Academic Purposes, and TESOL Quaterly, totaling more than one million words. A corpus-based analysis was carried out on the corpus to identify the most frequent adjectives that co-occurred in the three journals. By observing the concordance lines of the adjectives and analyzing the words they associated with, the semantic preferences of each adjective were determined. Later, the AL corpus analysis was compared to the investigation of the same adjectives in a corpus of Chemistry. This second part of the study aimed to identify possible differences and similarities between the two corpora in relation to the use of the adjectives in research articles from both areas. The results show that there are some preferences which seem to be closely related not only to the academic genre of the texts but also to the specific domain of the discipline and, to a lesser extent, to the context of research in each journal. This research illustrates a possible contribution of Corpus Linguistics to explore the concept of semantic preference in more detail, considering the complex nature of the phenomenon.

Keywords: applied linguistics, corpus linguistics, chemistry, research article, semantic preference

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Authors: Mohammad K. Abedin, Mohammad Shahjahan, Zeenat Sultana, Tawfique Jahan, Jesmin Akter

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To strengthen social and behavior change communication (SBCC) capacity of Ministry of Health and Family Welfare (MoHFW) of the Government of Bangladesh, BCCP/BKMI developed two eLearning courses providing opportunities for professional development of SBCC Program Managers who have no access to training or refreshers training. The two eLearning courses – Message and Material Development (MMD) and Monitoring and Evaluation (MandE) of SBCC programs – went online in September 2015, where all users could register their participation so results could be monitored. Methodology: To assess the uses of these courses a randomly selected sample was collected to run a pre and post-test analyses and a phone survey were conducted. Systematic random sampling was used to select a sample of 75 MandE and 25 MMD course participants from a sampling frame of 179 and 51 respectively. Results: As of September 2016, more than 179 learners have completed the MandE course, and 49 learners have completed the MMD course. The users of these courses are program managers, university faculty members, and students. Encouraging results were revealed from the analysis of pre and post-test scores and a phone survey three months after course completion. Test scores suggested a substantial increase in knowledge. The pre-test scores findings suggested that about 19% learners scored high on the MandE. The post-test scores finding indicated a high score (92%) of the sample across 4 modules of MandE. For MMD course in pre-test scoring, 30% of the learners scored high, and 100% scored high at the post-test. It was found that all the learners in the phone survey have discussed the courses. Most of the sharing occurred with colleagues and friends, usually through face to face (70%) interaction. The learners reported that they did recommend the two courses to concerned people. About 67% MandE and 76% MMD learners stated that the concepts that they had to learn during the course were put into practice in their work settings. The respondents for both MandE and MMD courses have provided a valuable set of suggestions that would further strengthen the courses. Conclusions: The study showed that the initiative offered ample opportunities to build capacity in various ways in which the eLearning courses were used. It also highlighted the importance of scaling up these efforts to further strengthen the outcomes.

Keywords: e-learning course, message & material development, monitoring & evaluation, social and behavior change communication

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Authors: Chidiebere Samuel Ijeoma

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The impact and importance of technology in all domains of existence cannot be overemphasized. It is like a double-edged sword which can be both constructive and destructive. The paper, therefore, tends to evaluate the impact of technology so far in the teaching and learning of French language in Nigeria. According to the study, the traditional methods of teaching French as a Foreign Language and recognized as our cultural methods of knowledge transfer are being fast replaced by digitalization in teaching. This, the research tends to portray and suggest the best way forward. In the Nigerian Primary Education System, the use of some local and cultural Instructional materials (teaching aids) is now almost history which the paper frowns at. Consequently, the study has these questions to ask?; Where are the chalks and blackboards? Where are the ‘Handworks’ (local brooms) submitted by school children as part of their Continuous Assessment? Finally, the research is in no way against the application of technology in the Nigerian French Language Teaching System but tries to draw a curtain between Technological methods of teaching French as a Foreign Language and the Original Nigerian System of teaching the language before the arrival of technology.

Keywords: French language teaching, future, impact, importance of technology

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Authors: Youmen Chaaban, Maha Ellili-Cherif

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The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of teachers’ individual characteristics and perceptions of environmental factors that impact their technology integration into their EFL (English as a Foreign Language) classrooms. To this end, a national survey examining EFL teachers’ perceptions was conducted at Qatari Independent schools. 263 EFL teachers responded to the survey which investigated several factors known to impact technology integration. These factors included technology availability and support, EFL teachers’ perceptions of importance, obstacles facing technology integration, competency with technology use, and formal technology preparation. The impact of these factors on teachers’ and students’ educational technology use was further measured. The analysis of the data included descriptive statistics and a chi-square analysis test in order to examine the relationship between these factors. The results revealed important cultural factors that impact teachers’ practices and attitudes towards technology in the Qatari context. EFL teachers were found to integrate technology most prominently for instructional delivery and preparation. The use of technology as a learning tool received less emphasis. Teachers further revealed consistent perceptions about obstacles to integration, high levels of confidence in using technology, and consistent beliefs about the importance of using technology as a learning tool. Further analyses of the factors impacting technology integration can assist with Qatar’s technology advancement and development efforts by indicating the areas of strength and areas where additional efforts are needed. The results will lay the foundation for conducting context-specific professional development suitable for the needs of EFL teachers in Qatari Independent Schools.

Keywords: educational technology integration, Qatar, EFL, independent schools, ICT

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Authors: Ukhtie Nantika Mena, Ahmad Juntika Nurihsan, Ilfiandra

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This study aims to explore perspective on Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety (FLCA) of an international student. Descriptive narrative is used to discover written and spoken responses from the student. An online survey was employed as a secondary data to identify the level of FLCA among six UPI international students. A student with the highest score volunteered to be interviewed. Several symptoms were found; lack of concentration, excessive worry, fear, unwanted thoughts, and sweating. The results showed that difficulties to understand lecturers' correction, presentation, and fear of getting left behind are three major causes of his anxiety.

Keywords: foreign language classroom anxiety, FLCA, international students, language anxiety

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Authors: Shehroz Mukhtar, Maqsood Ahmed, Abdullah Mukhtar, Choudhry Shahid, Waqar Javaid

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Code switching is a common phenomenon, generally observed in multilingual communities across the globe. A critical look at code switching literature reveals that mostly code switching has been studied in classroom in learning and teaching context while code switching outside classroom in settings such as café, hostel and so on have been the least explored areas. Current research investigated the reasons for code switching in the interactive practices of students and their perceptions regarding the same outside the classroom settings. This paper is the study of the common practice that prevails in the Universities of Sialkot that bilinguals mix two languages when they speak in different class room situations. In Pakistani classrooms where Multilingual are in abundance i.e. they can speak two or more than two languages at the same time, the code switching or language combination is very common. The teachers of Sialkot switch from one language to another consciously or unconsciously while teaching English in the class rooms. This phenomenon has not been explored in the Sialkot’s teaching context. In Sialkot private educational institutes does not encourage code-switching whereas the public or government institutes use it frequently. The crux of this research is to investigate and identify the importance of code switching by taking its users in consideration. Survey research method and survey questionnaire will be used to get exact data from teachers and students. We will try to highlight the functions and importance of code switching in foreign language classrooms of Sialkot and will explore why this trend is emerging in Sialkot.

Keywords: code switching, bilingual context, L1, L2

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Authors: Marilei Amadeu Sabino

Abstract:

Idiomatic expressions are linguistic phraseologisms present in natural languages. Known to be metaphorical linguistic combinations, a good majority of them provide elements that reveal important cultural aspects of their linguistic community through their metaphors. With the advent of Cognitive Linguistics (more specifically of Cognitive Semantics), the metaphor ceased to be related to poetic language and rhetorical embellishment and came to be seen as part of simple everyday language, reflecting the way human beings think, act and conceive reality, i. e., a fundamental mechanism of human conceptualizations of the world. In this sense, it came to be conceived as an inevitable mechanism for representing the nature of thought and language. The speakers, in conceptualizing reality, often use metaphorically parts of the body in expressions known as somatic. Several conceptual metaphors appear to be potentially universal or near-universal, because people across the world share certain bodily experiences. In these terms, many linguistic metaphors may be identical or very similar in several languages. These similarities, according to the Theory of Conceptual Metaphor, derive from universal aspects of the human body. Thus, this research aims to investigate the nature of some metaphors underlying somatic idiomatic expressions of Portuguese, Italian and English languages, establishing a pattern of similarities and differences among them from a trilingual perspective. The analysis shows that much of the studied expressions are really structurally, semantically and metaphorically identical or similar in the three languages. These findings incite relevant discussions concerning mother and foreign language learning and aim to contribute to the teaching of phraseological Lexicon as well as to materials development in mono and multilingual perspectives.

Keywords: idiomatic expressions, materials development, metaphors, phraseological lexicon, teaching and learning

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Authors: Sulistyaningtyas

Abstract:

Examining the role of Middle Eastern freedom activists’ speech based on gender perspective is considered noteworthy because the society in the Middle East is patriarchal. This research aims to examine the language use of the Middle Eastern freedom activists’ speeches through gender perspective. The data sources are from male and female Middle Eastern freedom activists’ speech videos. In analyzing the data, the theories employed are about Language Style from Gender Perspective and The Language for Speech. The result reveals that there are sets of spoken language differences between male and female speakers. In using the language for speech, both male and female speakers produce metaphor, euphemism, the ‘rule of three’, parallelism, and pronouns in random frequency of production, which cannot be separated by genders. Moreover, it cannot be concluded that one gender is more potential than the other to influence the audience in delivering speech. There are other factors, particularly non-verbal factors, existing to give impacts on how a speech can influence the audience.

Keywords: gender perspective, language use, Middle Eastern freedom activists, speech

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Authors: Kholoud Sheba

Abstract:

Women refugees expectedly are physical, socially and mentally vulnerable due to their past traumatic experiences and their novel circumstances in their receiving countries. They may have a wide range of general, mental, and reproductive health problems, but reportedly avoid visiting health care facilities owing to complex elements. Women refugees are usually unfamiliar with their new country health system and unable to navigate it efficiently. They have limited English language skills, which makes it even harder to access culturally insensitive health services. This study examines barriers to health care for refugee women in Ottawa and offers suggestions to address these challenges. Drawing from culturally congruent health care models in Canada, the United Kingdom, and some parts of the United States, this study highlights the importance of cultivating compassion in the provision of health care for women refugees as a way of addressing some of the disparities in health care in Canada. To address the study purpose, a survey questionnaire was designed and pretested questionnaire and was administrated using SurveyMonkey, a paid source survey application, over a period of two weeks. Snowballing sampling procedures were used to recruit the participants. Data was measured using frequencies, percentages, t-test, ANOVA, and chi-square. The test of significance is set at p < .05. The study asked how refugees perceive their experience in accessing and navigating public health services in Ottawa; what challenges refugees face with healthcare in Canada, and, if gender is related to refugees’ perceptions of the health care system they are forced to use? Results show refugees perceived their experience accessing the healthcare services in Canada to be a positive experience and the health providers to be culturally sensitive and allowing enough time listening to their complaints. The language stood tall in their barriers accessing the services due to low English proficiency and the need for interpretation services to encourage them attending the services.

Keywords: women refugee, access barriers, Ottawa, resettlement

Procedia PDF Downloads 139