A Content-Integrated Translingual Literature Curriculum for Chinese-Speaking University-Level EFL Learners

The purpose of this paper was to outline a new translingual model of post-secondary EFL curriculum for Chinese-speaking English language learners. The curricular guide presents a content-integrated literature syllabus aimed at building competence in both communicative and critical-creative domains. A translingual coursework, which may involve code-switching, translanguaging, translation in language teaching (TILT), and World Englishes contact literature, is argued to uniquely benefit Chinese-speaking EFL learners on the road toward English and higher-order thinking competence. The curriculum utilizes the Tang-era poetry of Du Fu, and the modern prose of Ha Jin as content for lessons on the English article system, phrasal verbs, and critical thinking

Detecting grammatical errors with treebank-induced, probabilistic parsers

Today's grammar checkers often use hand-crafted rule systems that define acceptable language. The development of such rule systems is labour-intensive and has to be repeated for each language. At the same time, grammars automatically induced from syntactically annotated corpora (treebanks) are successfully employed in other applications, for example text understanding and machine translation. At first glance, treebank-induced grammars seem to be unsuitable for grammar checking as they massively over-generate and fail to reject ungrammatical input due to their high robustness. We present three new methods for judging the grammaticality of a sentence with probabilistic, treebank-induced grammars, demonstrating that such grammars can be successfully applied to automatically judge the grammaticality of an input string. Our best-performing method exploits the differences between parse results for grammars trained on grammatical and ungrammatical treebanks. The second approach builds an estimator of the probability of the most likely parse using grammatical training data that has previously been parsed and annotated with parse probabilities. If the estimated probability of an input sentence (whose grammaticality is to be judged by the system) is higher by a certain amount than the actual parse probability, the sentence is flagged as ungrammatical. The third approach extracts discriminative parse tree fragments in the form of CFG rules from parsed grammatical and ungrammatical corpora and trains a binary classifier to distinguish grammatical from ungrammatical sentences. The three approaches are evaluated on a large test set of grammatical and ungrammatical sentences. The ungrammatical test set is generated automatically by inserting common grammatical errors into the British National Corpus. The results are compared to two traditional approaches, one that uses a hand-crafted, discriminative grammar, the XLE ParGram English LFG, and one based on part-of-speech n-grams. In addition, the baseline methods and the new methods are combined in a machine learning-based framework, yielding further improvements

Gil's Article Maker. An interactive tool for teaching English article use to Polish gimnazjum students: development and evaluation

Wydział AnglistykiPodstawowym celem pracy było zbadanie skuteczności e-learningu w nauczaniu poprawnego użycia przedimków w języku angielskim na poziomie zdań, akapitów i krótkich tekstów przez polskich uczniów uczących się języka angielskiego. Przegląd literatury sugeruje, że badania ilościowe z wykorzystaniem e-learningu w nauczaniu angielskich struktur gramatycznych nie są wystarczające. W szczególności brakuje badań porównujących skuteczność e-learningu z tradycyjnymi metodami nauczania (Huong 2005; Król-Markefka 2010). Dalszym celem niniejszej pracy była ocena skuteczności schematu binarnego Mastera (Master 1988, 1990, 1996, 1997, 2002, 2003a) w nauczaniu wzorców użycia przedimków w języku angielskim. Badanie właściwe poprzedzono tygodniowym pilotażem w prywatnej szkole językowej. W badaniu pilotażowym udział brało pięciu uczniów, których poproszono o udział w testowaniu oprogramowania e-learningowego przez pięć 30- minutowych sesji w celu oceny: • czy pojęcia w narzędziu e-learningowym były odpowiednie dla polskich uczniów uczących się języka angielskiego w wieku od 11 do 14 lat; • aspektów technicznych narzędzia e-learningowego na serwerze internetowym, w celu zidentyfikowania ewentualnych problemów natury technicznej i usunięcia ich. Wyniki badania pilotażowego sugerują, że pojęcia edukacyjne zawarte w narzędziu e-learningowym były odpowiednie dla polskich uczniów uczących się języka angielskiego w wieku od 11 do 14 lat. Dalej stwierdzono, że narzędzie e-learningowe spełnia wymogi techniczne niezbędne do głównego badania, za wyjątkiem wady platformy Moodle LMS uniemożliwiającej logiczne powiązania niezbędne do stworzenia bardziej zindywidualizowanej informacji zwrotnej. Oznaczało to, że nie można przeprowadzić części badania dotyczącej zindywidualizowanej informacji zwrotnej. Drugi etap to badanie główne, które przeprowadzono na 12 jednostkach lekcyjnych w okresie dziesięciu tygodni na przełomie lat 2016 i 2017 na próbie 30 uczniów dwóch gimnazjów . Próba składała się z dwóch grup: grupę eksperymentalną (grupa Gil) i grupę kontrolną. Dla obu grup procedura składała się z: a) etapu poprzedzającego egzamin oceniającego umiejętności korzystania z przedimków przy użyciu formalnych środków, b) fazy nauczania, a na koniec (c) etapu post-testu oceniającego zmiany w poprawności użycia przedimków przy użyciu tych samych formalnych środków, jak w etapie testów wstępnych. Grupa Gil korzystała z narzędzia e-learningowego (Gillian 2015a), natomiast grupa kontrolna otrzymała instruktaż dotyczący zasad użycia przedimków angielskich w formie tradycyjnej. Wyniki badań wskazują, że narzędzie e-learningowe było bardziej skuteczne niż tradycyjna metoda nauczania. Biorąc pod uwagę wyniki zagregowane, grupa eksperymentalna (Gil) osiągnęła istotnie lepsze wyniki niż grupa kontrolna. Grupa eksperymentalna osiągnęła także istotnie lepsze wyniki w podziale na zadania testujące rozumienie pojęć policzalności rzeczowników oraz identyfikujące użycia przedimków. W przypadku zadań testujących klasyfikujące użycia przedimków również zaobserwowano przewagę w grupie eksperymentalnej, ale nie była ona istotna statystycznie. Wyniki badania stanowią istotny wkład w dydaktykę nauczania języka angielskiego w zakresie użycia przedimków, dostarczając dowodów ilościowych na skuteczność e-learningu w nauczaniu angielskich struktur gramatycznych takich jak przedimki.The primary aims of this research were to investigate the effectiveness of e-learning in teaching appropriate English article usage at the sentence, paragraph, and short text level to Polish learners of English. A review of the literature suggested that quantitative research with the usage of e-learning to teach English grammatical structures is in its infancy. In particular, little research has been carried out to compare the effectiveness of e-learning to traditional teaching methods (Huong 2005; Król-Markefka 2010). Also, this research examined the effectiveness of Master’s binary schema (Master 1988, 1990, 1996, 1997, 2002, 2003a) in teaching English article usage patterns. The first stage of the research was a pilot study conducted in 2016 at an English private school for a period of one week. Five students were asked to participate in testing the e-learning software for five 30 minute sessions to assess: • whether the educational concepts in the e-learning tool were appropriate for Polish speakers of English between the ages of 11 and 14; • the technological requirements of the e-learning tool on a web-based server in order to observe and mediate any technological problems. The results of the pilot study suggested that the educational concepts contained in the e-learning tool were appropriate for Polish speakers of English between the ages of 11 and 14. The e-learning tool was found to meet the technological requirements needed for the main study except for the major flaw of the Moodle LMS to maintain the logic links needed to create more individualised feedback. This meant the research element about more individualised feedback could not be carried out. The second stage was the main study which was conducted in 2016-2017 with 30 students at two high schools for 12 lessons over a period of ten weeks. Participants were stratified into two study groups: a teaching group (Gil group) and a control group. Each group undertook (a) a pre-test stage evaluating article usage skills using formal measures, (b) a teaching phase, and finally (c) a post-test stage evaluating changes in article usage skills using the same formal measures as in the pre-test stage. The Gil group learned English article usage patterns using the e-learning tool (Gillian 2015a) and the control group learned English article usage patterns using traditional teaching methods. The main study results indicated that the e-learning tool was more effective than the traditional teaching method employed in this research. For the overall results by stage and group, the Gil group achieved significantly better results than the control group. For the noun concept and identifying concept results by stage and group, the Gil group also achieved significantly better results than the control group. For the classifying concept results by stage and group, the Gil group also achieved better results than the control group, but the difference was not statistically significant. The main study results may provide valuable contributions to English pedagogy in terms of article usage teaching and the body of quantitative evidence for the effectiveness of e-learning in the teaching of English grammatical structures such as articles

I just doesn’t know : Agreement Errors in English Texts by Norwegian L2 Learners: Causes and Remedies

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Post-editing machine translated text in a commercial setting: Observation and statistical analysis

Machine translation systems, when they are used in a commercial context for publishing purposes, are usually used in combination with human post-editing. Thus understanding human post-editing behaviour is crucial in order to maximise the benefit of machine translation systems. Though there have been a number of studies carried out on human post-editing to date, there is a lack of large-scale studies on post-editing in industrial contexts which focus on the activity in real-life settings. This study observes professional Japanese post-editors’ work and examines the effect of the amount of editing made during post-editing, source text characteristics, and post-editing behaviour, on the amount of post-editing effort. A mixed method approach was employed to both quantitatively and qualitatively analyse the data and gain detailed insights into the post-editing activity from various view points. The results indicate that a number of factors, such as sentence structure, document component types, use of product specific terms, and post-editing patterns and behaviour, have effect on the amount of post-editing effort in an intertwined manner. The findings will contribute to a better utilisation of machine translation systems in the industry as well as the development of the skills and strategies of post-editors

Shell nouns : in a systemic functional linguistics perspective

Tese de doutoramento, Linguística (Análise do Discurso), Universidade de Lisboa, Faculdade de Letras, 2015Shell nouns in a Systemic Functional Linguistics perspective. The aim of this thesis is to develop an account of shell nouns (Schmid, 2000) in a Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) perspective. Using a parallel corpus comprising five article submissions by Portuguese academics in the field of economics and five published articles on comparable topics, the ideational, interpersonal and textual functions of shell nouns are tagged at the strata of the lexicogrammar and discourse semantics using Corpus Tool version 2.7.4 (O’Donnell, 2008). The systems networks used to tag the corpus are grounded in SFL theory. The analysis shows that shell nouns constitute an important systemic resource for the writers of research articles, who need to build an argument, positioning themselves and their study to convince the discourse community that their paper makes a contribution to knowledge in their disciplinary field. They enable a text to unfold by compacting information realised as a clause or more elsewhere in the text. Thus they can help scaffold a text through hyper-Themes, hyper-News and internal conjunction. At the stratum of the lexicogrammar, anaphorically referring nominal groups with a shell noun as Head often compose Theme, where they constitute a shared point of departure for the clause. In a decoding relational clause whose Process is realised by a verb such as reveal, confirm, or suggest, an anaphorically referring shell noun that construes Token helps to explicitly build the writer’s argument. Shell nouns that construe the field of research, such as results and findings are common in this function. Mental, linguistic and factual shell nouns contribute to construing dialogic position, and coupling between interpersonal systems and textual systems enables the writer to align the reader with certain positions and disalign with others. Although most shell nouns are not field specific, because they can project a figure that instantiates an entity, they contribute to construing field, for example instantiating entities as the object of study of the empirical research. The capacity of shell nouns to function as described above derives from their status as semiotic abstractions, which can refer to text as fact or report and are grammatical metaphors. They can be seen as lying at the intersection of modality and the logico-semantic relations of projection and expansion, brought into being by the semogenic process of nominalisation. The writers of the published articles and article submissions are found to use shell nouns in all of the functions above, but there are differences in the relative shares of the functions, which may affect reader reactions to the text