Search results for: Japanese learners of English

Authors: Nomataru P. Gontse, Lavanithum Joseph

Abstract:

Deafness coupled with a lack of support and resources in developing countries poses a serious threat to the well- being of children. The mismatch between the needs of persons with disabilities and the resources available to them is a key factor in service provision in resource constrained contexts. Furthermore, deafness in children is the most common childhood sensory disorder in developing countries, and as such seriously affected with regard to resource constraints. This paper discusses the issues and research protocol for a Ph.D. study that aims to develop a practice guideline that is contextually sensitive and includes an interdisciplinary approach that will improve the outcomes of learners and the relationships in hearing households with deaf learners in rural areas of the Eastern Cape, one of the poorest provinces in South Africa. The guideline developed will consider the lived experiences of deaf children and their hearing families on the impact deafness has on their relationships and communication at home. Ethical clearance for the study has been obtained. The methodology is a mixed-methods approach in the form of a survey using questionnaires and semi-structured interviews with deaf learners in primary and high school and their hearing parents to get their perspective on the impact deafness has on their relationships and communication at home. The study is conducted using adolescent learners from Grades 7 to 12 (excluding learners younger than 12 years and older than 21 years). An audiologist, teachers, and support staff will also give their views on how the intervention is currently done and possible suggestions on how management can be done differently. Data collection will be conducted in isiXhosa by the researcher, as isiXhosa is dominant in this region. The interviews will be conducted in South African Sign Language by the sign language interpreter for deaf learners and educational professionals. An expected outcome for this study is the development of recommendations and a practice guideline for deaf children diagnosed late from rural or under-resourced environments. To ensure the implementation of the findings, in the end, professionals will be given feedback on the outcomes of the study so that they can identify areas within their practices that require updated knowledge. The developed guideline is expected to have an impact on the Department of Education policies both regionally and nationally, providing recommendations for a strategic management plan and practice guidelines for this vulnerable and marginalized population. The IsiXhosa specific context could be generalized to other similar contexts.

Keywords: Deafness, family-centred approach, early identification, rural communities.

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Authors: M. Athar Hussain, N.B. Jumani, Munazza Sultana., M. Zafar Iqbal

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Language Reforms and potential use of ICTs has been a focal area of Higher Education Commission of Pakistan. Efforts are being accelerated to incorporate fast expanding ICTs to bring qualitative improvement in language instruction in higher education. This paper explores how university teachers are benefitting from ICTs to make their English class effective and what type of problems they face in practicing ICTs during their lectures. An in-depth qualitative study was employed to understand why language teachers tend to use ICTs in their instruction and how they are practicing it. A sample of twenty teachers from five universities located in Islamabad, three from public sector and two from private sector, was selected on non-random (Snowball) sampling basis. An interview with 15 semi-structured items was used as research instruments to collect data. The findings reveal that business English teaching is facilitated and improved through the use of ICTs. The language teachers need special training regarding the practices and implementation of ICTs. It is recommended that initiatives might be taken to equip university language teachers with modern methodology incorporating ICTs as focal area and efforts might be made to remove barriers regarding the training of language teachers and proper usage of ICTs.

Keywords: Information and communication technologies, internet assisted learning, teaching business English, online instructional content.

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Authors: Y. T. Gee, I. N. Umar

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Students’ achievement and motivation in learning English in Malaysia is a worrying trend as it is lagging behind several other countries in Asia. Thus, necessary actions have to be taken by the parties concerned to overcome this problem. The purpose of this research was to study the effects of drill and practice courseware on students’ achievement and motivation in learning English language. A multimedia courseware was developed for this purpose. The independent variable was the drill and practice courseware while the dependent variables were the students’ achievement and motivation. Their achievement was measured using pre-test and post-test scores, while motivation was measured using a questionnaire. A total of 60 students from three vernacular primary schools in a northern state in Malaysia were randomly selected in this study. The findings indicate: (1) a significant difference between the students’ pre-test and posttest scores after using the courseware, (2) no significant difference in the achievement score between male and female students after using the courseware, (3) a significant difference in motivation score between the female and the male students, and (4) while the female students scored significantly higher than the male students in the aspects of relevance, confidence and satisfaction, no significant difference in terms of attention was observed between them. Overall, the findings clearly indicate that although the female students are significantly more motivated than their male students, they are equally good in terms of achievement after learning from the courseware. Through this study, the drill and practice courseware is proven to influence the students’ learning and motivation.

Keywords: Courseware, drill and practice, English learning, motivation.

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Authors: Conradie, P.W., Lombard, A., Moller, M.

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The dramatic effect of information technology on society is undeniable. In education, it is evident in the use of terms like active learning, blended learning, electronic learning and mobile learning (ubiquitous learning). This study explores the perceptions of 54 learners in a higher education institution regarding the use of mobile devices in a third year module. Using semi-structured interviews, it was found that mobile devices had a positive impact on learner motivation, engagement and enjoyment. It also improved the consistency of learning material, and the convenience and flexibility (anywhere, anytime) of learning. User-interfacelimitation, bandwidth and cognitive overload, however, were of concern. The use of cloud based resources like Youtube and Google Docs, through mobile devices, positively influenced learner perceptions, making them prosumers (both consumers and producers) of education content.

Keywords: Active learning, education, mobile learning, pedagogy.

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Authors: Seyyed Yasser Hashemi, Khalil Monfaredi

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Automatic transformation of paper documents into electronic documents requires document segmentation at the first stage. However, some parameters restrictions such as variations in character font sizes, different text line spacing, and also not uniform document layout structures altogether have made it difficult to design a general-purpose document layout analysis algorithm for many years. Thus in most previously reported methods it is inevitable to include these parameters. This problem becomes excessively acute and severe, especially in Persian/Arabic documents. Since the Persian/Arabic scripts differ considerably from the English scripts, most of the proposed methods for the English scripts do not render good results for the Persian scripts. In this paper, we present a novel parameter-free method for segmenting the Persian/Arabic document images which also works well for English scripts. This method segments the document image into maximal homogeneous regions and identifies them as texts and non-texts based on a pyramidal image structure. In other words the proposed method is capable of document segmentation without considering the character font sizes, text line spacing, and document layout structures. This algorithm is examined for 150 Arabic/Persian and English documents and document segmentation process are done successfully for 96 percent of documents.

Keywords: Persian/Arabic document, document segmentation, Pyramidal Image Structure, skew detection and correction.

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Authors: Subramaniam Chandran

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This paper presents an assessment study conducted among the distance learners in India. Open and distance learning systems have traveled a long way since its inception and its journey has witnessed the evolution and adoption of different generations of technology. This study focuses on the distant learners in India. Sampling for this study has been derived from the mass enrollment from Tamil Nadu area, a southern state of India. Learners were chosen from dual mode universities, private universities, Tamil Nadu Open University and IGNOU. The main focus of the study is to examine the coverage and appropriation of students support services and learning aids. It explores two aspects: the facilities available and the awareness and use of such services. It includes, self-learning materials, face-to-face counseling, multimedia learning materials, website, e-learning, radio and television services etc. While exploring the student-s perspective on these learning aspects, it is important to understand the perspectives of the teachers. Two different interests are visible among the teachers. Majority of the teachers support faceto- face counseling. However, the young teachers are in favour of online learning and multimedia supports in teaching. Through the awareness is somewhat high, the actual participation in online is very low. This is due to the inadequate infrastructure as well as the traditional attitudes of the teachers. Still the face-to-face sessions remain popular than online.

Keywords: Face-to-face session, online session, distance learning, multimedia

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Authors: Chinh Trong Nguyen, Dang Tuan Nguyen

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In this paper, we propose a new model of English- Vietnamese bilingual Information Retrieval system. Although there are so many CLIR systems had been researched and built, the accuracy of searching results in different languages that the CLIR system supports still need to improve, especially in finding bilingual documents. The problems identified in this paper are the limitation of machine translation-s result and the extra large collections of document to be found. So we try to establish a different model to overcome these problems.

Keywords: Bilingual Information Retrieval, Cross-lingual Information Retrieval, Bilingual Web sites.

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Authors: Vahid Parvaresh, Zohre Kassaian, Saeed Ketabi, Masoud Saeedi

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This case study investigates the effects of reactive focus on form through negotiation on the linguistic development of an adult EFL learner in an exclusive private EFL classroom. The findings revealed that in this classroom negotiated feedback occurred significantly more often than non-negotiated feedback. However, it was also found that in the long run the learner was significantly more successful in correcting his own errors when he had received nonnegotiated feedback than negotiated feedback. This study, therefore, argues that although negotiated feedback seems to be effective for some learners in the short run, it is non-negotiated feedback which seems to be more effective in the long run. This long lasting effect might be attributed to the impact of schooling system which is itself indicative of the dominant culture, or to the absence of other interlocutors in the course of interaction.

Keywords: error, feedback, focus on form, interaction, schooling.

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Authors: Rajneesh Rani, Renu Dhir, G. S. Lehal

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Script identification is one of the challenging steps in the development of optical character recognition system for bilingual or multilingual documents. In this paper an attempt is made for identification of English numerals at word level from Punjabi documents by using Gabor features. The support vector machine (SVM) classifier with five fold cross validation is used to classify the word images. The results obtained are quite encouraging. Average accuracy with RBF kernel, Polynomial and Linear Kernel functions comes out to be greater than 99%.

Keywords: Script identification, gabor features, support vector machines.

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Authors: Haiyan Wang

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Constructivism, the latest teaching and learning theory in western countries which is based on the premise that cognition (learning) is the result of "mental construction", lays emphasis on the learner's active learning. Guided by constructivism, this thesis discusses the teaching plan and its application in extensive reading course. In extensive reading classroom, emphasis should be laid on the activation of students' prior knowledge, grasping the skills of fast reading and the combination of reading and writing to check extracurricular reading. With three factors supplementing each other, students' English reading ability can be improved effectively.

Keywords: Constructivism, extensive reading, constructivist teaching.

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Authors: Talar Agopian

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Teaching English as a Second Language (ESL) is a common practice in many Lebanese schools. However, ESL teaching is done in traditional ways. Methods such as constructivism are seldom used, especially in villages. Here lies the significance of this research which joins constructivism and Piaget’s theory of cognitive development in ESL classes in Lebanese villages. The purpose of the present study is to explore the effects of applying constructivist student-centered strategies in teaching grammar, reading comprehension, and poetry on students in elementary ESL classes in two villages in Lebanon, Zefta in South Lebanon and Boqaata in Mount Lebanon. 20 English teachers participated in a training titled “Teaching English with Fun”, which focused on strategies that create a student-centered class where active learning takes place and there is increased learner engagement and autonomy. The training covered three main areas in teaching English: grammar, reading comprehension, and poetry. After participating in the training, the teachers applied the new strategies and methods in their ESL classes. The methodology comprised two phases: in phase one, practice-based research was conducted as the teachers attended the training and applied the constructivist strategies in their respective ESL classes. Phase two included the reflections of the teachers on the effects of the application of constructivist strategies. The results revealed the educational benefits of constructivist student-centered strategies; the students of teachers who applied these strategies showed improved engagement, positive attitudes towards poetry, increased motivation, and a better sense of autonomy. Future research is required in applying constructivist methods in the areas of writing, spelling, and vocabulary in ESL classrooms of Lebanese villages.

Keywords: Active learning, constructivism, learner engagement, student-centered strategies.

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Authors: M. D. Nghiteke, A. Mji, G. T. Molepo

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Inclusive education stems from a philosophy and vision, which argues that all children should learn together at school. It is not only about treating all pupils in the same way. It is also about allowing all children to attend school without any restrictions. Ten primary school teachers in a circuit in Namibia volunteered to participate in face-to-face interviews about inclusive education. The teachers responded to three questions about their (i) understanding of inclusive education; (ii) whether inclusive education was implemented in primary schools; and (iii) whether they were able to work with learners with special needs. Findings indicated that teachers understood what inclusive education entailed; felt that inclusive education was not implemented in their primary schools, and they were unable to work with learners with special needs in their classrooms. Further, the teachers identified training and resources as important components of inclusive education. It is recommended that education authorities should perhaps verify the findings reported here as well as ensure that the concerns raised by the teachers are addressed.

Keywords: Classrooms and schools, inclusive education, resources, training.

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Authors: Hazem M. El-Bakry, Ahmed A. Saleh, Taghreed T. Asfour

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Adaptive e-learning today gives the student a central role in his own learning process. It allows learners to try things out, participate in courses like never before, and get more out of learning than before. In this paper, an adaptive e-learning model for logic design, simplification of Boolean functions and related fields is presented. Such model presents suitable courses for each student in a dynamic and adaptive manner using existing database and workflow technologies. The main objective of this research work is to provide an adaptive e-learning model based learners' personality using explicit and implicit feedback. To recognize the learner-s, we develop dimensions to decide each individual learning style in order to accommodate different abilities of the users and to develop vital skills. Thus, the proposed model becomes more powerful, user friendly and easy to use and interpret. Finally, it suggests a learning strategy and appropriate electronic media that match the learner-s preference.

Keywords: Adaptive learning, Learning styles, Teaching strategies.

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Authors: Sid-Ahmed. Selouani, Tang-Ho Lê, Chadia Moghrabi, Benoit Lanteigne, Jean Roy

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A Web-based learning tool, the Learn IN Context (LINC) system, designed and being used in some institution-s courses in mixed-mode learning, is presented in this paper. This mode combines face-to-face and distance approaches to education. LINC can achieve both collaborative and competitive learning. In order to provide both learners and tutors with a more natural way to interact with e-learning applications, a conversational interface has been included in LINC. Hence, the components and essential features of LINC+, the voice enhanced version of LINC, are described. We report evaluation experiments of LINC/LINC+ in a real use context of a computer programming course taught at the Université de Moncton (Canada). The findings show that when the learning material is delivered in the form of a collaborative and voice-enabled presentation, the majority of learners seem to be satisfied with this new media, and confirm that it does not negatively affect their cognitive load.

Keywords: E-leaning, Knowledge Network, Speech recognition, Speech synthesis.

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Authors: Khaled Hamdan, Abid Amorri, Fatima Hamdan

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Involving students in English language learning process and achieving an adequate English language proficiency in the target language can be a great challenge for both teachers and students. This can prove even a far greater challenge to engage students with special needs (Dyslexia) if they have physical impairment and inadequate mastery of basic communicative language competence/proficiency in the target language. From this perspective, technology like robots can probably be used to enhance learning process for the special needs students who have extensive communication needs, who face continuous struggle to interact with their peers and teachers and meet academic requirements. Robots, precisely NAO, can probably provide them with the perfect opportunity to practice social and communication skills, and meet their English academic requirements. This research paper aims to identify to what extent robots can be used to improve students’ social interaction and communication skills and to understand the potential for robotics-based education in motivating and engaging UAEU dyslexic students to meet university requirements. To reach this end, the paper will explore several factors that come into play – Motion Level-involving cognitive activities, Interaction Level-involving language processing, Behavior Level -establishing a close relationship with the robot and Appraisal Level- focusing on dyslexia students’ achievement in the target language.

Keywords: Dyslexia, robot technology, motion, interaction, behavior and appraisal levels, social and communication skills.

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Authors: Salina Budin, Shaira Ismail

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Students learn effectively in a learning environment with a suitable teaching approach that matches their learning preferences. The main objective of the study is to examine the learning preferences amongst the students in the Science and Technology (S&T), and Social Science (SS) fields of study at the Universiti Teknologi Mara (UiTM), Pulau Pinang. The measurement instrument is based on the Dunn and Dunn Learning Styles which measure five elements of learning styles; environmental, sociological, emotional, physiological and psychological. Questionnaires are distributed amongst undergraduates in the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering and Faculty of Business Management. The respondents comprise of 131 diploma students of the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering and 111 degree students of the Faculty of Business Management. The results indicate that, both S&T and SS students share a similar learning preferences on the environmental aspect, emotional preferences, motivational level, learning responsibility, persistent level in learning and learning structure. Most of the S&T students are concluded as analytical learners and the majority of SS students are global learners. Both S&T and SS students are concluded as visual learners, preferred to be in an active mobility in a relaxing and enjoying mode with some light of refreshments during the learning process and exhibited reflective characteristics in learning. Obviously, the S&T students are considered as left brain dominant, whereas the SS students are right brain dominant. The findings highlighted that both categories of students exhibited similar learning preferences except on psychological preferences.

Keywords: Learning preferences, Dunn and Dunn learning style, teaching approach, science and technology, social science.

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Authors: A.A.Andaleeb, Rozhan.M.Idrus, Issham Ismail

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This survey highlights a number of important issues which relate to the needs to counseling for distance learners studying at the School of Distance Education in University science Malaysia (DEUSM) according to their gender. Data were obtained by selfreport questionnaire that had been developed by the researchers in counseling and educational psychology and interviews were take place. 116 voluntary respondents complete the Questionnaire and returned it back during new student-s registration week.64% of the respondents were female and 52% were males that means 55%ofthem were females and 45% were males. The data was analyzed to find out the frequencies of respondents agreements of the items. The average of the female was 18 and the average of the male was 19.6 by using t- test there is no significant values between the genders. The findings show that respondents have needs for counseling. (22) Significant needs for mails (DEUSM) the highest was their families complain about the amount of time they spend at work. (11) Significant needs for females the highest was they convinced themselves that they only need 4 to 5 hours of sleep per night.

Keywords: Counseling, Needs, Distance Education, Malaysia.

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Authors: Shireen Panchoo

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The Internet and the ever growing applications enable communities to share and collaborate through common platforms. However, this growing pattern is not witnessed yet even for elearning. This paper is based on a doctoral research which aimed at researching the ways students interact in an online campus and the supports that they look for and require. Content analysis, based on the Panchoo/Jaillet methodology, was done on four synchronous meetings between a tutor and his ten students. The UNIV-Rct ecampus, analogical to a physical campus, was found to be user friendly and the students enrolled in a master-s course faced no difficulties in using it. In addition to the environmental aspects, the pedagogical implementation of the course has driven the students to interact and collaborate significantly and this has contributed to overcome the problems faced by the distance learners. This completely online model was found to be fruitful in helping distant learners fight their loneliness and brave their difficulties in a socioconstructivism approach.

Keywords: Content analysis, e-campus, interaction, online supports, pedagogy.

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Authors: Abdelkader Dekdouk

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In this paper we propose a novel approach for searching eCommerce products using a mobile phone, illustrated by a prototype eCoMobile. This approach aims to globalize the mobile search by integrating the concept of user multilinguism into it. To show that, we particularly deal with English and Arabic languages. Indeed the mobile user can formulate his query on a commercial product in either language (English/Arabic). The description of his information need on commercial products relies on the ontology that represents the conceptualization of the product catalogue knowledge domain defined in both English and Arabic languages. A query expressed on a mobile device client defines the concept that corresponds to the name of the product followed by a set of pairs (property, value) specifying the characteristics of the product. Once a query is submitted it is then communicated to the server side which analyses it and in its turn performs an http request to an eCommerce application server (like Amazon). This latter responds by returning an XML file representing a set of elements where each element defines an item of the searched product with its specific characteristics. The XML file is analyzed on the server side and then items are displayed on the mobile device client along with its relevant characteristics in the chosen language.

Keywords: Mobile computing, search engine, multilingualglobal eCommerce, ontology, XML.

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Authors: Y. Benjelloun Touimi, N. Faddouli, S. Bennani, M. Khalidi Idrissi

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The pedagogy project has been proven as an active learning method, which is used to develop learner-s skills and knowledge.The use of technology in the learning world, has filed several gaps in the implementation of teaching methods, and online evaluation of learners. However, the project methodology presents challenges in the assessment of learners online. Indeed, interoperability between E-learning platforms (LMS) is one of the major challenges of project-based learning assessment. Firstly, we have reviewed the characteristics of online assessment in the context of project-based teaching. We addressed the constraints encountered during the peer evaluation process. Our approach is to propose a meta-model, which will describe a language dedicated to the conception of peer assessment scenario in project-based learning. Then we illustrate our proposal by an instantiation of the meta-model through a business process in a scenario of collaborative assessment on line.

Keywords: Online project based learning, meta-model, peer assessment process.

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Authors: Ya-Hui Lee, Ching-Yi Lu, Hui-Chuan Wei

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The purpose of this research was to explore the relation between proactive coping and well-being of middle-aged adults. We conducted survey research that with t-test, one way ANOVA, Pearson correlation and stepwise multiple regression to analyze. This research drew on a sample of 395 participants from the senior learning centers of Taiwan. The results provided the following findings: 1.The participants from different residence areas associated significant difference with proactive coping, but not with well-being. 2. The participants’ perceived of financial level associated significant difference with both proactive coping and well-being. 3. There was significant difference between participants’ income and well-being. 4. The proactive coping was positively correlated with well-being. 5. From stepwise multiple regression analysis showed that two dimensions of proactive coping had positive predictability. Finally, these results of this study can be provided as references for designing older adult educational programs in Taiwan.

Keywords: Middle-age adults, learners, proactive coping, well-being.

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Authors: Nittaya Kerdprasop, Kittisak Kerdprasop

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The state of the art in instructional design for computer-assisted learning has been strongly influenced by advances in information technology, Internet and Web-based systems. The emphasis of educational systems has shifted from training to learning. The course delivered has also been changed from large inflexible content to sequential small chunks of learning objects. The concepts of learning objects together with the advanced technologies of Web and communications support the reusability, interoperability, and accessibility design criteria currently exploited by most learning systems. These concepts enable just-in-time learning. We propose to extend theses design criteria further to include the learnability concept that will help adapting content to the needs of learners. The learnability concept offers a better personalization leading to the creation and delivery of course content more appropriate to performance and interest of each learner. In this paper we present a new framework of learning environments containing knowledge discovery as a tool to automatically learn patterns of learning behavior from learners' profiles and history.

Keywords: Knowledge mining, Web-based learning, Learning environments.

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Authors: Kashif Bilal, Uzair Muhammad, Atif Khan, M. Nasir Khan

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Machine Translation, (hereafter in this document referred to as the "MT") faces a lot of complex problems from its origination. Extracting multiword expressions is also one of the complex problems in MT. Finding multiword expressions during translating a sentence from English into Urdu, through existing solutions, takes a lot of time and occupies system resources. We have designed a simple relational data approach, in which we simply set a bit in dictionary (database) for multiword, to find and handle multiword expression. This approach handles multiword efficiently.

Keywords: Machine Translation, Multiword Expressions, Urdulanguage processing, POS (stands for Parts of Speech) Tagging forUrdu, Expert Systems.

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Authors: Tharwat N. Hijjawi

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Learning oral skills in an Arabic speaking environment is challenging. A blended course (material, activities, and individual/ group work tasks …) was implemented in a module of level B1 for undergraduate students of French as a foreign language in order to increase their opportunities to practice listening and speaking skills. This research investigates the influence of this modality on enhancing active learning and examines the effectiveness of provided strategies. Moreover, it aims at discovering how it allows teacher to flip the traditional classroom and create a learner-centered framework. Which approaches were integrated to motivate students and urge them to search, analyze, criticize, create and accomplish projects? What was the perception of students? This paper is based on the qualitative findings of a questionnaire and a focus group interview with learners. Despite the doubled time and effort both “teacher” and “student” needed, results revealed that the NTIC allowed a shift into a learning paradigm where learners were the “chiefs” of the process. Tasks and collaborative projects required higher intellectual capacities from them. Learners appreciated this experience and developed new life-long learning competencies at many levels: social, affective, ethical and cognitive. To conclude, they defined themselves as motivated young researchers, motivators and critical thinkers.

Keywords: Active learning, critical thinking, inverted classroom, learning paradigm, problem-based.

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Authors: Reza Ebrahimpour, Samaneh Hamedi

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Classifier fusion may generate more accurate classification than each of the basic classifiers. Fusion is often based on fixed combination rules like the product, average etc. This paper presents decision templates as classifier fusion method for the recognition of the handwritten English and Farsi numerals (1-9). The process involves extracting a feature vector on well-known image databases. The extracted feature vector is fed to multiple classifier fusion. A set of experiments were conducted to compare decision templates (DTs) with some combination rules. Results from decision templates conclude 97.99% and 97.28% for Farsi and English handwritten digits.

Keywords: Decision templates, multi-layer perceptron, characteristics Loci, principle component analysis (PCA).

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Authors: John Tarus, Zhendong Niu, Bakhti Khadidja

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In recent years, e-learning recommender systems has attracted great attention as a solution towards addressing the problem of information overload in e-learning environments and providing relevant recommendations to online learners. E-learning recommenders continue to play an increasing educational role in aiding learners to find appropriate learning materials to support the achievement of their learning goals. Although general recommender systems have recorded significant success in solving the problem of information overload in e-commerce domains and providing accurate recommendations, e-learning recommender systems on the other hand still face some issues arising from differences in learner characteristics such as learning style, skill level and study level. Conventional recommendation techniques such as collaborative filtering and content-based deal with only two types of entities namely users and items with their ratings. These conventional recommender systems do not take into account the learner characteristics in their recommendation process. Therefore, conventional recommendation techniques cannot make accurate and personalized recommendations in e-learning environment. In this paper, we propose a recommendation technique combining collaborative filtering and ontology to recommend personalized learning materials to online learners. Ontology is used to incorporate the learner characteristics into the recommendation process alongside the ratings while collaborate filtering predicts ratings and generate recommendations. Furthermore, ontological knowledge is used by the recommender system at the initial stages in the absence of ratings to alleviate the cold-start problem. Evaluation results show that our proposed recommendation technique outperforms collaborative filtering on its own in terms of personalization and recommendation accuracy.

Keywords: Collaborative filtering, e-learning, ontology, recommender system.

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Authors: Amal M. Alrayes, Hayat M. Ali

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Since the beginning of distance education with the rapid evolution of technology, the social network plays a vital role in the educational process to enforce the interaction been the learners and teachers. There are many Web 2.0 technologies, services and tools designed for educational purposes. This research aims to investigate instructors’ acceptance towards web-based learning systems in higher educational institutes in Kingdom of Bahrain. Questionnaire is used to investigate the instructors’ usage of Web 2.0 and the factors affecting their acceptance. The results confirm that instructors had high accessibility to such technologies. However, patterns of use were complex. Whilst most expressed interest in using online technologies to support learning activities, learners seemed cautious about other values associated with web-based system, such as the shared construction of knowledge in a public format. The research concludes that there are main factors that affect instructors’ adoption which are security, performance expectation, perceived benefits, subjective norm, and perceived usefulness.

Keywords: Web 2.0, Higher education, Acceptance, Students’ perception.

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Authors: Miao Sabrina Wang

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This paper examines the impact of grammatical differences on simultaneous interpreting from English into Mandarin Chinese by drawing upon an empirical study of professional and student interpreters. The research focuses on the effects of three grammatical categories including passives, adverbial components and noun phrases on simultaneous interpreting. For each category, interpretations of instances in which the grammatical structures are the same across the two languages are compared with interpretations of instances in which the grammatical structures differ across the two languages in terms of content accuracy and delivery appropriateness. The results indicate that grammatical differences have a significant impact on the interpreting performance of both professionals and students.

Keywords: Grammatical differences, simultaneous interpreting, content accuracy, delivery appropriateness.

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Authors: M. Sarrab, M. Elbasir

Abstract:

The use of information technology in education have changed not only the learners learning style but also the way they taught, where nowadays learners are connected with diversity of information sources with means of knowledge available everywhere. The advantage of network wireless technologies and mobility technologies used in the education and learning processes lead to mobile learning as a new model of learning technology. Currently, most of mobile learning applications are developed for the formal education and learning environment. Despite the long history and large amount of research on mobile learning and instruction design model still there is a need of well-defined process in designing mobile learning applications. Based on this situation, this paper emphasizes on identifying instruction design phase’s considerations and influencing factors in developing mobile learning application. This set of instruction design steps includes analysis, design, development, implementation, evaluation and continuous has been built from a literature study, with focus on standards for learning, mobile application software quality and guidelines. The effort is part of an Omani-funded research project investigating the development, adoption and dissemination of mobile learning in Oman.

Keywords: Instruction design, mobile learning, mobile application.

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Authors: Robert F. Kenny, Glenda A. Gunter

Abstract:

Current technological advances pale in comparison to the changes in social behaviors and 'sense of place' that is being empowered since the Internet made it on the scene. Today-s students view the Internet as both a source of entertainment and an educational tool. The development of virtual environments is a conceptual framework that needs to be addressed by educators and it is important that they become familiar with who these virtual learners are and how they are motivated to learn. Massively multiplayer online role playing games (MMORPGs), if well designed, could become the vehicle of choice to deliver learning content. We suggest that these games, in order to accomplish these goals, must begin with well-established instructional design principles that are co-aligned with established principles of video game design. And have the opportunity to provide an instructional model of significant prescriptive power. The authors believe that game designers need to take advantage of the natural motivation player-learners have for playing games by developing them in such a way so as to promote, intrinsic motivation, content learning, transfer of knowledge, and naturalization.

Keywords: serious games, endogenous fantasy, intrinsic motivation, online learning.

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