Search results for: French language

Authors: Saqib Rasool, Adnan N. Mian

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Web components are introduced as the latest standard of HTML5 for writing modular web interfaces for ensuring maintainability through the isolated scope of web components. Reusability can also be achieved by sharing plug-and-play web components that can be used as off-the-shelf components by other developers. A web component encapsulates all the required HTML, CSS and JavaScript code as a standalone package which must be imported for integrating a web component within an existing web interface. It is then followed by the integration of web component with the web services for dynamically populating its content. Since web components are reusable as off-the-shelf components, these must be equipped with some mechanism for ensuring their proper integration with web services. The consistency of a service behavior can be verified through type-checking. This is one of the popular solutions for improving the quality of code in many programming languages. However, HTML does not provide type checking as it is a markup language and not a programming language. The contribution of this work is to introduce a new extension of HTML called Service Type-checking Markup Language (STML) for adding support of type checking in HTML for JSON based REST services. STML can be used for defining the expected data types of response from JSON based REST services which will be used for populating the content within HTML elements of a web component. Although JSON has five data types viz. string, number, boolean, object and array but STML is made to supports only string, number and object. This is because of the fact that both object and array are considered as string, when populated in HTML elements. In order to define the data type of any HTML element, developer just needs to add the custom STML attributes of st-string, st-number and st-boolean for string, number and boolean respectively. These all annotations of STML are used by the developer who is writing a web component and it enables the other developers to use automated type-checking for ensuring the proper integration of their REST services with the same web component. Two utilities have been written for developers who are using STML based web components. One of these utilities is used for automated type-checking during the development phase. It uses the browser console for showing the error description if integrated web service is not returning the response with expected data type. The other utility is a Gulp based command line utility for removing the STML attributes before going in production. This ensures the delivery of STML free web pages in the production environment. Both of these utilities have been tested to perform type checking of REST services through STML based web components and results have confirmed the feasibility of evaluating service behavior only through HTML. Currently, STML is designed for automated type-checking of integrated REST services but it can be extended to introduce a complete service testing suite based on HTML only, and it will transform STML from Service Type-checking Markup Language to Service Testing Markup Language.

Keywords: REST, STML, type checking, web component

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Authors: Mohammad Reza Haji Babai, Sepideh Ahmadkhan Beigi

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Internationalization and modernization of the globe have played their roles in the process of cultural interaction between globalized societies and, consequently, found their way to the world of literature under the name of ‘imagology’. Imagology has made it possible for the reader to understand the author’s thoughts and judgments of others. The present research focuses on the intercultural images portrayed in the novel of a popular Turkish-French writer, Elif Shafak, about the lifestyle, traditions, habits, and social norms of Turkish, Americans, and Armenians. The novel seeks to articulate a more intricate multicultural memory of Turkishness by grieving over the Armenian massacre. This study finds that, as a mixture of multiple lifestyles and discourses, The Bastard of Istanbul reflects not only images of oriental culture but also occidental cultures. This means that the author has attempted to maintain selfhood through historical and cultural recollection, which resulted in constructing the self and another identity.

Keywords: imagology, Elif Shafak, The Bastard of Istanbul, self-image, other-image

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Authors: Bahloul Amel

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This study is an attempt to raise the awareness of the stakeholders and the authorities on the sensitivity of Algerian secondary school teachers of English as a Foreign Language about the students’ loss of English language skills learned during formal schooling with effort and at expense and the supposed measures to arrest that loss. Data was collected from secondary school teachers of EFL and analyzed quantitatively using a questionnaire containing open-ended and close-ended questions. The results advocate a consensus about the need for actions to be adopted to make assessment techniques outcome-oriented. Most of the participants were in favor of including curricular activities involving contextualized learning, problem-solving learning critical self-awareness, self and peer-assisted learning, use of computers and internet so as to make learners autonomous.

Keywords: lifelong learning, EFL, contextualized learning, Algeria

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Authors: Tahira Zaman

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The paper intends to discover the utility of hybrid teaching methods to aid undergraduate students to improve their English academic writing skills. A total of 45 undergraduate students were selected randomly from three classes from varying language abilities, with the research design of monitoring and rubrics evaluation as a means of measure. Language skills of the students were upgraded with the help of experiential learning methods using reflective writing technique, guided method in which students were merely directed to correct form of writing techniques along with self-guided method for the students to produce a library research-based article measured through a standardized rubrics provided. The progress of the students was monitored and checked through rubrics and self-evaluation and concluded that a change was observed in the students’ writing abilities.

Keywords: self evaluation, hybrid, self evaluation, reflective writing

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Authors: Aniekan James Akpan

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The use of signs and symbols to represent cardinal information is inalienable among African communities. It has been the tenable instrument of cultural transmission for decades, but in the current transposal of Western values, a good number of communicating codes and symbolic images have been gradually relegated to the background. This paper discusses the regeneration of cultural artifacts and sign languages in Nigerian films using Johnpaul Rebecca and Ayamma as models in a qualitative research based on Charles Sanders Pierce's Semiotics as well as quantitative methods of survey using questionnaire and focus group discussion as instruments to obtain data. With a population of 2,343 viewers of the movies used for the study and a sample size of 322 respondents using Philip Meyer’s guide, findings show that cultural relics can stabilise the subject matter of a film. Artifacts can stimulate curiosity and invoke nostalgia. Sign languages encode deeper information that ordinary speech may not properly convey in films. It concludes that the use of non-verbal codes in filmmaking deserves deep research into the culture portrayed and that non-verbal cues communicate deeper information about a people's cosmos in a film than dialogue. It recommends that adequate research should be made before producing a film and the idea of cultural values represented in artifacts and sign language should be ingrained in the courses for students to acquaint themselves with.

Keywords: cultural artifact, Nollywood films, non-verbal communication, sign language

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Authors: Mairo Musa Galadima

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This paper examines the impact of Mother tongue interference on students’ performance in English Language in Bauchi State. It is observed that the students of Bauchi district share the same problem with Hausa native speakers of Kano dialect which is the standard form. It is observed that there are some phonemes which are present in English but absent in Hausa so the Hausa speakers of Bauchi district also replace these sounds with similar ones present in Hausa. Students in Bauchi district fail English language because they transfer features of their mother tongue (MT) into English. The data is obtained through unobtrusive observation of the English speech of about fifty Hausa native speakers of Bauchi district which is similar to Kano dialect from Abubakar Tatari Ali Polytechnic, Bauchi since only those who have had some good background of secondary education are used because uneducated Nigeria English of whatever geographical location is more likely to be unintelligible as cockney or uneducated African-American English. For instance /Ə:/ is absent in Hausa so the speakers find it difficult to distinguish between such pairs of words as /bƏ:d / and /bΛst/, /fa:st/ and /fƏ:st / hence /a:/ is generally used wherever /Ə:/ is present regardless of the spelling, that is why words like ‘work’, ‘first’ and ‘person’ all have / a:/. In Hausa most speakers use /P/ in place of, or in alternation with /f/, e.g. ‘few’ is pronounced as ‘pew’, or ‘pen’, as ‘fen’, /b/ for /v/, /s/ for /z/ and /z/ for /ᵹ/. Also the word vision/visn/ is pronounced as /vidzn/. Therefore, there is confusion in spellings and pronunciation of words. One solution out of the problem is having constant practice with a qualified consistent staff and making use of standard textbooks in the learning process.

Keywords: English, failure, mother tongue, interference, students

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Authors: Khenfer-Koummich Fatima, Mesbahi Larbi, Hendel Fatiha

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This paper presents a recognition system for isolated words like robot commands. It’s carried out by Time Delay Neural Networks; TDNN. To teleoperate a robot for specific tasks as turn, close, etc… In industrial environment and taking into account the noise coming from the machine. The choice of TDNN is based on its generalization in terms of accuracy, in more it acts as a filter that allows the passage of certain desirable frequency characteristics of speech; the goal is to determine the parameters of this filter for making an adaptable system to the variability of speech signal and to noise especially, for this the back propagation technique was used in learning phase. The approach was applied on commands pronounced in two languages separately: The French and Arabic. The results for two test bases of 300 spoken words for each one are 87%, 97.6% in neutral environment and 77.67%, 92.67% when the white Gaussian noisy was added with a SNR of 35 dB.

Keywords: TDNN, neural networks, noise, speech recognition

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Authors: Samiah H. Ghounaim

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The topic of this paper is significant because of the increasing need for intercultural training for foreign language teachers due to the continuous challenges they face in their diverse classrooms. First, the structure of the intercultural training program designed will be briefly described, and the structure of a 3D vignette and its intended purposes will be elaborated on. This was the first stage where the program was designed and implemented on the period of three months with a group of local and expatriate foreign language teachers/practitioners at a university in the Middle East. After that, a set of primary data collected during the first stage of this research on the design and co-construction process of a 3D vignette will be reviewed and analysed in depth. Each practitioner designed a personal incident into a 3D vignette where each dimension of the vignette viewed the same incident from a totally different perspective. Finally, the results and the implications of having participant construct their personal incidents into a 3D vignette as a reflective practice will be discussed in detail as well as possible extensions for the research. This process proved itself to be an effective reflective practice where the participants were stimulated to view their incidents in a different light. Co-constructing one’s own critical incidents –be it a positive experience or not– into a structured 3D vignette encouraged participants to decentralise themselves from the incidents and, thus, creating a personal reflective space where they had the opportunity to see different potential outcomes for each incident, as well as prepare for the reflective discussion of their vignette with their peers. This provides implications for future developments in reflective writing practices and possibilities for educators’ continuous professional development (CPD).

Keywords: 3D vignettes, intercultural competence training, reflective practice, teacher training

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Authors: Leila Najeh

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This study investigates the motivational factors influencing Tunisian university students learning English through online platforms. Using a mixed-methods approach, data were collected from 112 undergraduate students of English across universities in Tunisia. The study employed an online questionnaire to measure intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, incorporating the Learning Motivation Questionnaire (FFLLM-Q) developed by Gonzales in 2001 and semi-structured interviews to explore students’ perspectives on their online learning experiences. Quantitative analysis revealed a significant correlation between intrinsic motivation and interactive features such as gamification and adaptive content delivery, while extrinsic motivation was strongly linked to career aspirations and academic requirements. Qualitative findings highlighted challenges such as limited interaction with peers and teachers, technical constraints, and a lack of immediate feedback as demotivating factors. Participants expressed a preference for blended learning models, combining the flexibility of online education with the collaborative environment of traditional classrooms. This study underscores the need for tailored online learning solutions to enhance the motivational landscape for Tunisian students, emphasizing the importance of culturally relevant content, accessible platforms, and supportive learning communities. Further research is recommended to evaluate the long-term impact of these interventions on language proficiency and learner autonomy.

Keywords: motivational factor, online foreign language learnig, tunsian students of english, online learning platforms

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Authors: Akemi Nasu, Keiko Matsumoto

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Rehabilitation for cancer requires setting up individual goals for each patient and an approach that properly fits the stage of cancer when putting into practice. In order to cope with the daily changes in the patients' condition, the establishment of a good cooperative relationship between the nurses and the physiotherapists, occupational therapists, and speech-language-hearing therapists (therapists) becomes essential. This study will focus on the present situation of the cooperation between nurses and therapists, especially the speech-language-hearing therapists, and aim to elucidate what develops there. A semi-structured interview was conducted targeted at a physical therapist having practical experience in working in collaboration with nurses. The contents of the interview were transcribed and converted to data, and the data was encoded and categorized with sequentially increasing degrees of abstraction to conduct a qualitative explorative factor analysis of the data. When providing ethical explanations, particular care was taken to ensure that participants would not be subjected to any disadvantages as a result of participating in the study. In addition, they were also informed that their privacy would be ensured and that they have the right to decline to participate in the study. In addition, they were also informed that the results of the study would be announced publicly at an applicable nursing academic conference. This study has been approved following application to the ethical committee of the university with which the researchers are affiliated. The survey participant is a female speech-language-hearing therapist in her forties. As a result of the analysis, 6 categories were extracted consisting of 'measures to address appetite and aspiration pneumonia prevention', 'limitation of the care a therapist alone could provide', 'the all-inclusive patient- supportive care provided by nurses', 'expand the beneficial cooperation with nurses', 'providing education for nurses on the swallowing function utilizing videofluoroscopic examination of swallowing', 'enhancement of communication including conferences'. In order to improve the team performance, and for the teamwork competency necessary for the provision of safer care, mutual support is essential. As for the cooperation between nurses and therapists, this survey indicates that the maturing of the cooperation between professionals in order to improve nursing professionals' knowledge and enhance communication will lead to an improvement in the quality of the rehabilitation for cancer.

Keywords: cancer rehabilitation, nurses, speech-language-hearing therapists, interprofessional work

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Authors: Mireille Canal-Raffin, Nadege Lepage, Antoine Villa

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Context: Most antineoplastic drugs (AD) have a potential carcinogenic, mutagenic and/or reprotoxic effect and are classified as 'hazardous to handle' by National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health Their handling increases with the increase of cancer incidence. AD contamination from workers who handle AD and/or care for treated patients is, therefore, a major concern for occupational physicians. As part of the process of evaluation and prevention of chemical risks for professionals exposed to AD, Biological Monitoring of Occupational Exposure (BMOE) is the tool of choice. BMOE allows identification of at-risk groups, monitoring of exposures, assessment of poorly controlled exposures and the effectiveness and/or wearing of protective equipment, and documenting occupational exposure incidents to AD. This work aims to make proposals for the practical implementation of the BMOE for AD. The proposed strategy is based on the French good practice recommendations for BMOE, issued in 2016 by 3 French learned societies. These recommendations have been adapted to occupational exposure to AD. Results: AD contamination of professionals is a sensitive topic, and the BMOE requires the establishment of a working group and information meetings within the concerned health establishment to explain the approach, objectives, and purpose of monitoring. Occupational exposure to AD is often discontinuous and 2 steps are essential upstream: a study of the nature and frequency of AD used to select the Biological Exposure Indice(s) (BEI) most representative of the activity; a study of AD path in the institution to target exposed professionals and to adapt medico-professional information sheet (MPIS). The MPIS is essential to gather the necessary elements for results interpretation. Currently, 28 urinary specific BEIs of AD exposure have been identified, and corresponding analytical methods have been published: 11 BEIs were AD metabolites, and 17 were AD. Results interpretation is performed by groups of homogeneous exposure (GHE). There is no threshold biological limit value of interpretation. Contamination is established when an AD is detected in trace concentration or in a urine concentration equal or greater than the limit of quantification (LOQ) of the analytical method. Results can only be compared to LOQs of these methods, which must be as low as possible. For 8 of the 17 AD BEIs, the LOQ is very low with values between 0.01 to 0.05µg/l. For the other BEIs, the LOQ values were higher between 0.1 to 30µg/l. Results restitution by occupational physicians to workers should be individual and collective. Faced with AD dangerousness, in cases of workers contamination, it is necessary to put in place corrective measures. In addition, the implementation of prevention and awareness measures for those exposed to this risk is a priority. Conclusion: This work is a help for occupational physicians engaging in a process of prevention of occupational risks related to AD exposure. With the current analytical tools, effective and available, the (BMOE) to the AD should now be possible to develop in routine occupational physician practice. The BMOE may be complemented by surface sampling to determine workers' contamination modalities.

Keywords: antineoplastic drugs, urine, occupational exposure, biological monitoring of occupational exposure, biological exposure indice

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Authors: Ani Kojoyan

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Linguistic studies have been investigating a connection between gender and linguistic development since 1970s. Scholars claim that gender differences in first and second language learning are socially constructed. Recent studies to language learning and gender reveal that second language acquisition is also a social phenomenon directly influencing one’s gender identity. Those responsible for designing language learning-teaching materials should be encouraged to understand the importance of and address the gender sensitivity accurately in textbooks. Writing or compiling a textbook is not an easy task; it requires strong academic abilities, patience, and experience. For a long period of time Armenia has been involved in the compilation process of a number of foreign language textbooks. However, there have been very few discussions or evaluations of those textbooks which will allow specialists to theorize that practice. The present paper focuses on the analysis of gender sensitivity issues and policy aspects involved in an EFL textbook. For the research the following material has been considered – “A Basic English Grammar: Morphology”, first printed in 2011. The selection of the material is not accidental. First, the mentioned textbook has been widely used in university teaching over years. Secondly, in Armenia “A Basic English Grammar: Morphology” has considered one of the most successful English grammar textbooks in a university teaching environment and served a source-book for other authors to compile and design their textbooks. The present paper aims to find out whether an EFL textbook is gendered in the Armenian teaching environment, and whether the textbook compilers are aware of gendered messages while compiling educational materials. It also aims at investigating students’ attitude toward the gendered messages in those materials. And finally, it also aims at increasing the gender sensitivity among book compilers and educators in various educational settings. For this study qualitative and quantitative research methods of analyses have been applied, the quantitative – in terms of carrying out surveys among students (45 university students, 18-25 age group), and the qualitative one – by discourse analysis of the material and conducting in-depth and semi-structured interviews with the Armenian compilers of the textbook (interviews with 3 authors). The study is based on passive and active observations and teaching experience done in a university classroom environment in 2014-2015, 2015-2016. The findings suggest that the discussed and analyzed teaching materials (145 extracts and examples) include traditional examples of intensive use of language and role-modelling, particularly, men are mostly portrayed as active, progressive, aggressive, whereas women are often depicted as passive and weak. These modeled often serve as a ‘reliable basis’ for reinforcing the traditional roles that have been projected on female and male students. The survey results also show that such materials contribute directly to shaping learners’ social attitudes and expectations around issues of gender. The applied techniques and discussed issues can be generalized and applied to other foreign language textbook compilation processes, since those principles, regardless of a language, are mostly the same.

Keywords: EFL textbooks, gender policy, gender sensitivity, qualitative and quantitative research methods

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Authors: Youmen Chaaban

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The study examined the influence of a situated professional development program (PD) aimed at enhancing English language teachers’ knowledge and skills and improving their instructional practices. The PD model under examination was developed upon sound theoretical underpinnings, taking into consideration research-based principles of effective PD. However, the implementation of the PD model within several school contexts required further investigation from the perspectives of the teachers, who were receiving the PD activities, and the instructional coaches, who were providing them. The paper, thus, presents the results of a qualitative study examining the perceptions of seventeen English language teachers and nineteen instructional coaches about the strengths of the PD program, the challenges they faced in the implementation of the program, and their suggestions for the improvement of the program’s implementation and outcomes. Comparisons were further made between the two groups of participants to uncover agreements and contradictions in their perceptions. Data were collected from the teachers through in-depth interviews and observations, while the data collected from the instructional coaches were open-ended surveys followed by focus group interviews. The findings of the study confirm the necessity of structuring PD activities around sound theoretical underpinnings. However, practical considerations specific to the contexts where the PD activities take place should be considered when evaluating the PD’s effectiveness. Finally, the study provides several recommendations for maximizing the influence of the PD program on teachers’ practices and beliefs.

Keywords: English language teachers, situated professional development, teacher beliefs, teacher practices

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Authors: Indira Kothalanka

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For individuals born with a cleft palate (CP), there is no separation between the nasal cavity and the oral cavity, due to which they cannot build up enough air pressure in the mouth for speech. Therefore, it is common for them to have speech problems. Common cleft type speech errors include abnormal articulation (compensatory or obligatory) and abnormal resonance (hyper, hypo and mixed nasality). These are generally resolved after palate repair. However, in some individuals, articulation problems do persist even after the palate repair. Such individuals develop variant articulations in an attempt to compensate for the inability to produce the target phonemes. A spectrographic analysis is used to investigate the compensatory articulatory behaviours of pressure consonants in the speech of 10 Telugu speaking individuals aged between 7-17 years with a history of cleft palate. Telugu is a Dravidian language which is spoken in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana states in India. It is a language with the third largest number of native speakers in India and the most spoken Dravidian language. The speech of the informants is analysed using single word list, sentences, passage and conversation. Spectrographic analysis is carried out using PRAAT, speech analysis software. The place and manner of articulation of consonant sounds is studied through spectrograms with the help of various acoustic cues. The types of compensatory articulation identified are glottal stops, palatal stops, uvular, velar stops and nasal fricatives which are non-native in Telugu.

Keywords: cleft palate, compensatory articulation, spectrographic analysis, PRAAT

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Authors: Mona Kamel Hassan

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Teaching a class of diverse learners poses a great challenge not only for foreign and second language teachers, but also for teachers in different disciplines as well as for curriculum designers. Thus, to contribute to previous research tackling language diversity, the current paper shares the experience of teaching a reading, writing and vocabulary building course to diverse Arabic as a Foreign Language learners in their advanced language proficiency level. Diversity is represented in students’ motivation, their prior knowledge, their various needs and interests, their level of anxiety, and their different learning styles and skills. While teaching this course the researcher adopted the universal design for learning (UDL) framework, which is a means to meet the various needs of diverse learners. UDL stresses the importance of enabling the entire diverse students to gain skills, knowledge, and enthusiasm to learn through the employment of teaching methods that respond to students' individual differences. Accordingly, the educational curriculum developed for this course and the teaching methods employed is modified. First, the researcher made the language curriculum vivid and attractive to inspire students' learning and to keep them engaged in their learning process. The researcher encouraged the entire students, from the first day, to suggest topics of their interest; political, social, cultural, etc. The authentic Arabic texts chosen are those that best meet students’ needs, interests, lives, and sociolinguistic issues, together with the linguistic and cultural components. In class and under the researcher’s guidance, students dig into these topics to find solutions for the tackled issues while working with their peers. Second, to gain equal opportunities to demonstrate learning, role-playing was encouraged to give students the opportunity to perform different linguistic tasks, to reflect and share their diverse interests and cultural backgrounds with their peers. Third, to bring the UDL into the classroom, students were encouraged to work on interactive, collaborative activities through technology to improve their reading and writing skills and reinforce their mastery of the accumulated vocabulary, idiomatic expressions, and collocations. These interactive, collaborative activities help to facilitate student-student communication and student-teacher communication and to increase comfort in this class of diverse learners. Detailed samples of the educational curriculum and interactive, collaborative activities developed, accompanied by methods of teaching employed to teach these diverse learners, are presented for illustration. Results revealed that students are responsive to the educational materials which are developed for this course. Therefore, they engaged in the learning process and classroom activities and discussions effectively. They also appreciated their instructor’s willingness to differentiate the teaching methods to suit students of diverse background knowledge, learning styles, level of anxiety, etc. Finally, the researcher believes that sharing this experience in teaching diverse learners will help both language teachers and teachers in other disciplines to develop a better understanding to meet their students' diverse needs. Results will also pave the way for curriculum designers to develop educational material that meets the needs of diverse learners.

Keywords: teaching, language, diverse, learners

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Authors: Heba Mustafa Abdullah

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The research aimed at examining the effect of a using a quest based learning strategy on developing EFL Pre-Master Students. The study adopted the quasi-experimental design. The sample of the research consists of a group of 30 students enrolled in Pre-Master program, Curriculum and EFL Instruction Department, Faculty of Graduate Studies in Education Tools of the study included a EFL research skills checklist and EFL research skills test. Results revealed that there were statistically significant differences at 0.01 levels with regard to some research skills. Results were discussed in relation to several factors that affected the language learning process. Finally, the research provided beneficial contributions in relation to manipulating e-learning technologies in general and Quest based learning strategy in particular with respect to EFL research skills.

Keywords: English as foreign language, e-Learning, research skills, quest based learning

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Authors: Adi Gielgun-Katz, Alina S. Rusu

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In the last two decades, education systems worldwide have integrated new pedagogical methods and strategies in lesson plans, such as innovative technologies, social-emotional learning (SEL), gamification, mixed learning, multiple literacies, and many others. Visual language, such as photographs, is known to transcend cultures and languages, and it is commonly used by youth to express positions and affective states in social networks. Therefore, visual language needs more educational attention as a linguistic and communicative component that can create connectedness among the students and their teachers. Nowadays, when SEL is gaining more and more space and meaning in the area of academic improvement in relation to social well-being, and taking and sharing pictures is part of the everyday life of the majority of people, it becomes natural to add the visual language to SEL approach as a reinforcement strategy for connecting education to the contemporary culture and language of the youth. This article presents a program conducted in a high school class in Israel, which combines the five SEL with photography techniques, i.e., Social-Emotional Learning Visual Empowerments (SELVEs) program (experimental group). Another class of students from the same institution represents the control group, which is participating in the SEL program without the photography component. The SEL component of the programs addresses skills such as: troubleshooting, uncertainty, personal strengths and collaboration, accepting others, control of impulses, communication, self-perception, and conflict resolution. The aim of the study is to examine the effects of programs on the level of the five SEL aspects in the two groups of high school students: Self-Awareness, Social Awareness, Self-Management, Responsible Decision Making, and Relationship Skills. The study presents a quantitative assessment of the SEL programs’ impact on the students. The main hypothesis is that the students’ questionnaires' analysis will reveal a better understanding and improvement of the five aspects of the SEL in the group of students involved in the photography-enhanced SEL program.

Keywords: social-emotional learning, photography, education program, adolescents

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Authors: Julio Cesar Torres Rocha

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The present study is a three-stage action research that aims at raising EFL teachers’ awareness of World Englishes (WE) within a critical perspective of inquiry. Through a taught module on English and its varieties, a survey, a reflection paper, and a semi-structured interview were used to collect the data. The results of the study showed that there was a clear change of conception, at the theoretical level, in teachers’ papers. However, WE was regarded as future possibility for action. On the one hand, all of the participants said the module changed their conception of other varieties of English different from British and American ones. They all went from identifying themselves with either American or British variety, a celebratory perspective, to acknowledging and accepting other English varieties, a critical perspective of English as an international language (EIL).

Keywords: teachers’ s awareness, English as an international language, introducing world Englishes, critical applied linguistics

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Authors: Sultan Ahmed Arishi

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The objective of the study was to investigate the attitude of the Saudi students attending the English Language programmes of the Royal Commission for Jubail towards using CALL, as well as to discover whether computer-assisted teaching is useful and valuable for students in learning English. Data were collected with the help of interviews and survey questionnaires. The outcomes of the investigation showed that students had a positive attitude towards CALL. Moreover, the listening skills of the students had the most substantial effect on students learning English through CALL. Unexpectedly, the teaching staff, equipment, curriculum, or even a student's poor English background was a distinct barrier that attributed to any weaknesses of using CALL, or in other words, all these factors were of a similar attitude.

Keywords: CALL, teaching aids, teaching technology, teaching English with technology, teaching English in Saudi Arabia

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Authors: Premvadee Na Nakornpanom

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Language mixing in spontaneous speech has been widely discussed, but not in virtual situations; especially in context of the third language learning students. Thus, this study was an attempt to explore the characteristics of the mixing of Japanese, English and Thai in a mobile chat room by students with their background of Japanese, English, and Thai. The result found that Insertion of Thai and English content words was a very common linguistic phenomenon embedded in the utterances. As chatting is to be ‘relational’ or ‘interactional’, it affected the style of lexical choices to be speech-like, more personal and emotional-related. A Japanese sentence-final question particle“か”(ka) was added to the end of the sentence based on Thai grammar rule. Moreover, some unique characteristics were created. The non-verbal cues were represented in personal, Thai styles by inserting textual representations of images or feelings available on the websites into streams of conversations.

Keywords: code-mixing, Japanese, English, Thai, line chat

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Authors: A. Shoiynbek, K. Kozhakhmet, P. Menezes, D. Kuanyshbay, D. Bayazitov

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Speech emotion recognition has received increasing research interest all through current years. There was used emotional speech that was collected under controlled conditions in most research work. Actors imitating and artificially producing emotions in front of a microphone noted those records. There are four issues related to that approach, namely, (1) emotions are not natural, and it means that machines are learning to recognize fake emotions. (2) Emotions are very limited by quantity and poor in their variety of speaking. (3) There is language dependency on SER. (4) Consequently, each time when researchers want to start work with SER, they need to find a good emotional database on their language. In this paper, we propose the approach to create an automatic tool for speech emotion extraction based on facial emotion recognition and describe the sequence of actions of the proposed approach. One of the first objectives of the sequence of actions is a speech detection issue. The paper gives a detailed description of the speech detection model based on a fully connected deep neural network for Kazakh and Russian languages. Despite the high results in speech detection for Kazakh and Russian, the described process is suitable for any language. To illustrate the working capacity of the developed model, we have performed an analysis of speech detection and extraction from real tasks.

Keywords: deep neural networks, speech detection, speech emotion recognition, Mel-frequency cepstrum coefficients, collecting speech emotion corpus, collecting speech emotion dataset, Kazakh speech dataset

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Authors: Malephole Philomena Sefotho

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Nowadays, it is a fact that the majority of people, worldwide, are bilingual rather than monolingual due to the surge of globalisation and mobility. Consequently, bilingual education is a topical issue of discussion among researchers. Several studies that have focussed on it have highlighted the importance and need for incorporating learners’ linguistic repertoires in multilingual classrooms and move away from the colonial approach which is a monolingual bias – one language at a time. Researchers pointed out that a systematic approach that involves the concurrent use of languages and not a separation of languages must be implemented in bilingual classroom settings. Translanguaging emerged as a systematic approach that assists learners to make meaning of their world and it involves allowing learners to utilize all their linguistic resources in their classrooms. The South African language policy also room for diverse languages use in bi/multilingual classrooms. This study, therefore, sought to explore how teachers apply translanguaging in bilingual classrooms in incorporating learners’ linguistic repertoires. It further establishes teachers’ perspectives in the use of more than one language in teaching and learning. The participants for this study were language teachers who teach at bilingual primary schools in Johannesburg in South Africa. Semi-structured interviews were conducted to establish their perceptions on the concurrent use of languages. Qualitative research design was followed in analysing data. The findings showed that teachers were reluctant to allow translanguaging to take place in their classrooms even though they realise the importance thereof. Not allowing bilingual learners to use their linguistic repertoires has resulted in learners’ negative attitude towards their languages and contributed in learners’ loss of their identity. This article, thus recommends a drastic change to decolonised approaches in teaching and learning in multilingual settings and translanguaging as a decolonial move where learners are allowed to translanguage freely in their classroom settings for better comprehension and making meaning of concepts and/or related ideas. It further proposes continuous conversations be encouraged to bring eminent cultural and linguistic genocide to a halt.

Keywords: bilingualism, decolonisation, linguistic repertoires, translanguaging

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Authors: Saleem Abuleil, Khalid S. Alsamara

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Events represent a significant source of information on the web; they deliver information about events that occurred around the world in all kind of subjects and areas. These events can be collected and organized to provide valuable and useful information for decision makers, researchers, as well as any person seeking knowledge. In this paper, we discuss an ongoing research to target stock markets domain to observe and record changes (events) when they happen, collect them, understand the meaning of each one of them, and organize the information along with meaning in a well-structured format. By using Semantic Role Labeling (SRL) technique, we identified four factors for each event in this paper: verb of action and three roles associated with it, entity name, attribute, and attribute value. We have generated a set of rules and techniques to support our approach to analyze and understand the meaning of the events taking place in stock markets.

Keywords: natuaral language processing, Arabic language, event extraction and understanding, sematic role labeling, stock market

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Authors: Maryvone Cunha de Morais, Lilian Cristine Hübner

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Based on a translanguaging theoretical approach, which considers language not as separate entities but as an entire repertoire available to bilingual individuals, this systematic review aimed at analyzing the methods (aims, samples investigated, type of stimuli, and analyses) adopted by studies on translanguaging practices associated with written and oral tasks (separately or integrated) in bilingual education. The PRISMA criteria for systematic reviews were adopted, with the descriptors "translanguaging", "bilingual education" and/or “written and oral tasks" to search in Pubmed/Medline, Lilacs, Eric, Scopus, PsycINFO, and Web of Science databases for articles published between 2017 and 2021. 280 registers were found, and after following the inclusion/exclusion criteria, 24 articles were considered for this analysis. The results showed that translanguaging practices were investigated on four studies focused on written production analyses, ten focused on oral production analysis, whereas ten studies focused on both written and oral production analyses. The majority of the studies followed a qualitative approach, while five studies have attempted to study translanguaging with quantitative statistical measures. Several types of methods were used to investigate translanguaging practices in written and oral production, with different approaches and tools indicating that the methods are still in development. Moreover, the findings showed that students’ interactions have received significant attention, and studies have been developed not just in language classes in bilingual education, but also including diverse educational and theoretical contexts such as Content and Language Integrated Learning, task repetition, Science classes, collaborative writing, storytelling, peer feedback, Speech Act theory and collective thinking, language ideologies, conversational analysis, and discourse analyses. The studies, whether focused either on writing or oral tasks or in both, have portrayed significant research and pedagogical implications, grounded on the view of integrated languages in bi-and multilinguals.

Keywords: bilingual education, oral production, translanguaging, written production

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Authors: Felipa M. Rico

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Linguistic oral competence plays a vital role in attaining effective communication. Since the English language is considered as universally used language and has a high demand skill needed in the work-place, mastery is the expected output from learners. To achieve this, learners should be given integrated differentiated tasks which help them develop and strengthen the expected skills. This study aimed to develop speaking instructional supplementary material to enhance the English linguistic competence of Grade 9 students in areas of pronunciation, intonation and stress, voice projection, diction and fluency. A descriptive analysis was utilized to analyze the speaking level of performance of the students in order to employ appropriate strategies. There were two sets of respondents: 178 Grade 9 students selected through a stratified sampling and chosen at random. The other set comprised English teachers who evaluated the usefulness of the devised teaching materials. A teacher conducted a speaking test and activities were employed to analyze the speaking needs of students. Observation and recordings were also used to evaluate the students’ performance. The findings revealed that the English pronunciation of the students was slightly unclear at times, but generally fair. There were lapses but generally they rated moderate in intonation and stress, because of other language interference. In terms of voice projection, students have erratic high volume pitch. For diction, the students’ ability to produce comprehensible language is limited, and as to fluency, the choice of vocabulary and use of structure were severely limited. Based on the students’ speaking needs analyses, the supplementary material devised was based on Nunan’s IM model, incorporating context of daily life and global work settings, considering the principle that language is best learned in the actual meaningful situation. To widen the mastery of skill, a rich learning environment, filled with a variety instructional material tends to foster faster acquisition of the requisite skills for sustained learning and development. The role of IM is to encourage information to stick in the learners’ mind, as what is seen is understood more than what is heard. Teachers say they found the IM “very useful.” This implied that English teachers could adopt the materials to improve the speaking skills of students. Further, teachers should provide varied opportunities for students to get involved in real life situations where they could take turns in asking and answering questions and share information related to the activities. This would minimize anxiety among students in the use of the English language.

Keywords: diction, fluency, intonation, instructional materials, linguistic competence

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Authors: Rufus Olufemi Adebayo, Sylvia Phiwani Zulu

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Interpreting in the setting of diverse language and multicultural congregants, is often understood as integrating the content of the message. Preaching, similar to any communication, takes seriously people’s multiple contexts. The one who provides the best insight into understanding “the other”, traditionally speaking could be an interpreter in a multilingual context. Nonetheless, there are reflections in the loss of spiritual communication, translation and interpretive dialogue. No matter how eloquent the preacher is, an interpreter can make or mere the sermon (speech). The sermon that the preacher preaches is not always the one the congregation hears from the interpreter. In other occurrences, however, interpreting can lead not only to distort messages but also to dissatisfied audiences and preacher being overshadowed by the pranks of the interpreter. Using qualitative methodology, this paper explores the challenges and the conventional assumptions about preachers’ interpreter as influenced by spirituality, culture, and language in empirical and theoretical perspectives. An emphasis on the bias translation and the basis of reality that suppresses or devalues the spiritual communication is examined. The result indicates that interpretation of the declaration of guilt, history of congregation, spirituality, attitudes, morals, customs, specific practices of a preacher, education, and the environment form an entangled and misinterpretation. The article concludes by re-examining these qualities and rearticulating them into a preliminary theory for practice, as distinguished from theory, which could possibly enhance the development of more sustainable multilingual interpretation in the South African Pentecostal churches.

Keywords: congregants, divergences, interpreting/translation, language & communication, sermon/preaching

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Authors: John Lorenzo Bautista, Yoon-Joong Kim

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This paper presents the development of a Filipino speech recognition tool using the HTK System. The system was trained from a subset of the Filipino Speech Corpus developed by the DSP Laboratory of the University of the Philippines-Diliman. The speech corpus was both used in training and testing the system by estimating the parameters for phonetic HMM-based (Hidden-Markov Model) acoustic models. Experiments on different mixture-weights were incorporated in the study. The phoneme-level word-based recognition of a 5-state HMM resulted in an average accuracy rate of 80.13 for a single-Gaussian mixture model, 81.13 after implementing a phoneme-alignment, and 87.19 for the increased Gaussian-mixture weight model. The highest accuracy rate of 88.70% was obtained from a 5-state model with 6 Gaussian mixtures.

Keywords: Filipino language, Hidden Markov Model, HTK system, speech recognition

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Authors: Chuyu Huang, Itsuki Minemi, Kuanlin Chen, Yuki Hirose

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It remains unclear how language speakers are able to perceive phonological contrasts that do not exist on their own. This experiment uses the vowel-length distinction in Japanese, which is phonologically contrastive and co-occurs with tonal change in some cases. For speakers whose first language does not distinguish vowel length, contrastive duration is usually misperceived, e.g., Mandarin speakers. Two alternative hypotheses for how Mandarin speakers would perceive a phonological contrast that does not exist in their language make different predictions. The stress parameter model does not have a clear prediction about the impact of tonal type. Mandarin speakers will likely be not able to perceive vowel length as well as Japanese native speakers do, but the performance might not correlate to tonal type because the prosody of their language is distinctive, which requires users to encode lexical prosody and notice subtle differences in word prosody. By contrast, cue-based phonetic models predict that Mandarin speakers may rely on pitch differences, a secondary cue, to perceive vowel length. Two groups of Mandarin speakers, including naive non-Japanese speakers and beginner learners, were recruited to participate in an AX discrimination task involving two Japanese sound stimuli that contain a phonologically contrastive environment. Participants were asked to indicate whether the two stimuli containing a vowel-length contrast (e.g., maapero vs. mapero) sound the same. The experiment was bifactorial. The first factor contrasted three syllabic positions (syllable position; initial/medial/final), as it would be likely to affect the perceptual difficulty, as seen in previous studies, and the second factor contrasted two pitch types (accent type): one with accentual change that could be distinguished with the lexical tones in Mandarin (the different condition), with the other group having no tonal distinction but only differing in vowel length (the same condition). The overall results showed that a significant main effect of accent type by applying a linear mixed-effects model (β = 1.48, SE = 0.35, p < 0.05), which implies that Mandarin speakers tend to more successfully recognize vowel-length differences when the long vowel counterpart takes on a tone that exists in Mandarin. The interaction between the accent type and the syllabic position is also significant (β = 2.30, SE = 0.91, p < 0.05), showing that vowel lengths in the different conditions are more difficult to recognize in the word-final case relative to the initial condition. The second statistical model, which compares naive speakers to beginners, was conducted with logistic regression to test the effects of the participant group. A significant difference was found between the two groups (β = 1.06, 95% CI = [0.36, 2.03], p < 0.05). This study shows that: (1) Mandarin speakers are likely to use pitch cues to perceive vowel length in a non-native language, which is consistent with the cue-based approaches; (2) an exposure effect was observed: the beginner group achieved a higher accuracy for long vowel perception, which implied the exposure effect despite the short period of language learning experience.

Keywords: cue-based perception, exposure effect, prosodic perception, vowel duration

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Authors: Viet-Hung Truong, Seung-Eock Kim

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This paper presents a robust software package for practical advanced analysis of space steel framed structures. The pre- and post-processors of the presented software package are coded in the C++ programming language while the solver is written by using the FORTRAN programming language. A user-friendly graphical interface of the presented software is developed to facilitate the modeling process and result interpretation of the problem. The solver employs the stability functions for capturing the second-order effects to minimize modeling and computational time. Both the plastic-hinge and fiber-hinge beam-column elements are available in the presented software. The generalized displacement control method is adopted to solve the nonlinear equilibrium equations.

Keywords: advanced analysis, beam-column, fiber-hinge, plastic hinge, steel frame

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Authors: Mohammad Hadi Mahmoodi, Soroor Zekrati

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The aim of this study was to investigate the relationship between hemispheric dominance and intonation learning of Iranian EFL students. In order to gain this goal, 52 female students from three levels of beginner, elementary and intermediate in Paradise Institute, and 18 male university students at Bu-Ali Sina University constituted the sample. In order to assist students learn the correct way of applying intonation to their everyday speech, the study proposed an interactive approach and provided students with visual aid through which they were able to see the intonation pattern on computer screen using 'Speech Analyzer' software. This software was also used to record subjects’ voice and compare them with the original intonation pattern. Edinburg Handedness Questionnaire (EHD), which ranges from –100 for strong left-handedness to +100 for strong right-handedness was used to indicate the hemispheric dominance of each student. The result of an independent sample t-test indicated that girls learned intonation pattern better than boys, and that right brained students significantly outperformed the left brained ones. Using one-way ANOVA, a significant difference between three proficiency levels was also found. The posthoc Scheffer test showed that the exact difference was between intermediate and elementary, and intermediate and beginner levels, but no significant difference was observed between elementary and beginner levels. The findings of the study might provide researchers with some helpful implications and useful directions for future investigation into the domain of the relationship between mind and second language learning.

Keywords: intonation, hemispheric dominance, visual aid, language learning, second language learning

Procedia PDF Downloads 519