Teaching the Right Letter Pronunciation in Reciting the Holy Quran Using Intelligent Tutoring System

An Intelligent Tutoring System (ITS) is a computer system that offers an instant, adapted instruction and customized feedback to students without human teacher interference. Reciting "Tajweed" the Holy Quran in the appropriate way is very important for all Muslims and is obligatory in Islamic devotions such as prayers. In this paper, the researchers introduce an intelligent tutoring system for teaching Reciting "Tajweed". Our "Tajweed" tutoring system is limited to "Tafkhim and Tarqiq in TAJWEED" the Holy Quran, Rewaya: Hafs from ‘Aasem. The system was evaluated by reciting teachers and students, and the results were auspicious

Theoretical perspectives on mobile language learning diaries and noticing for learners,teachers and researchers

This paper considers the issue of 'noticing' in second language acquisition, and argues for the potential of handheld devices to: (i) support language learners in noticing and recording noticed features 'on the spot', to help them develop their second language system; (ii) help language teachers better understand the specific difficulties of individuals or those from a particular language background; and (iii) facilitate data collection by applied linguistics researchers, which can be fed back into educational applications for language learning. We consider: theoretical perspectives drawn from the second language acquisition literature, relating these to the practice of writing language learning diaries; and the potential for learner modelling to facilitate recording and prompting noticing in mobile assisted language learning contexts. We then offer guidelines for developers of mobile language learning solutions to support the development of language awareness in learners

Using Online Grammar Lessons for Student Fluency in American Sign Language

American Sign Language (ASL) is offered as a foreign language at many universities across the United States. Most research on ASL acquisition focuses on Deaf and Hard of Hearing (DHH) children and first language (L1) acquisition. In this quantitative experimental study, a sample of undergraduate hearing students in intermediate ASL classes were given ASL grammar lessons that accompanied traditional language lessons. It was hypothesized that ASL students exposed to explicit written grammar lessons would show an increase in fluency. Participants were given a pre-test and post-test consisting of 20 English sentences and were asked to translate them into written ASL gloss. The treatment group was given one explicit ASL grammar lesson a week for a period of five weeks. Independent t-tests were run on the post-test results and no statistical differences occurred between the treatment and control groups. However, the treatment group improved at twice the rate of the control group which leads to a partial acceptance of the hypothesis. These results reinforce the need for further research on hearing ASL students given explicit ASL grammar instruction in language-only programs. These data will serve as a preliminary foundation for further research in the field of ASL acquisition in hearing students

The Academic english literacy acquisition experiences of deaf college students

The purpose of this dissertation was to describe deaf college students’ perceptions of their experiences learning academic English literacy. The study examined the narrated academic English literacy acquisition experiences and practices of 11 deaf and hard-ofhearing students at a hearing university with a large deaf student population. Through paradigmatic analysis of narrative data, the study located common themes that revealed their perceptions of academic English literacy acquisition. The study was conducted with deaf students attending a college for deaf and hardof- hearing students, which is one of eight colleges at a major northeastern university. Methods employed in the study were phenomenological interviewing and recursive analysis. The primary data sources were participant interviews and a focus group. Analysis was conducted through recursive interaction with the data, in which repeated reviews served to first elicit themes and meanings and then confirm interpretation of same. First, the study identified pre-college literacy experiences and beliefs about literacy learning, activities that took place in college English courses, and obstacles perceived to limit participants’ progress through the academic English system. Second, the study examined assistive and collaborative learning experiences discussed by participants as well as the roles of their deaf peers in these experiences. Third, the study examined participants’ perceptions of instructors, expectations, and teaching methods. The study resulted in the following findings: 1) participants struggled to find the right balance between working with assistance and working independently; 2) participants’ experiences resulted in a preference for highly competent communicators for instructors, and these tended to be deaf instructors; 3) participants observed a difference in the kind of assistance they received within their own college and the larger university; 4) they expressed a preference for learning environments that they perceived to be more visually accessible to them, such as group discussions with peers who also signed; and 5) they encountered conflicts that restricted their learning, which ranged from communication to unclear or rigid expectations to internal contradictions between challenge and remediation. The dissertation concluded by showing how understanding deaf college students’ perceptions of academic English literacy acquisition may inform and improve teaching practices with this population, especially with regard to promoting proficiency with the dominant literacies of school and work

Teaching the right letter pronunciation in reciting the holy Quran using ITS

An Intelligent Tutoring System (ITS) is a computer system that offers an instant, adapted instruction and customized feedback to students without human teacher interference. Reciting "Tajweed" the Holy Quran in the appropriate way is very important for all Muslims and is obligatory in Islamic devotions such as prayers. In this paper, the researchers introduce an intelligent tutoring system for teaching Reciting "Tajweed". Our "Tajweed" tutoring system is limited to "Tafkhim and Tarqiq in TAJWEED" the Holy Quran, Rewaya: Hafs from ‘Aasem. The system was evaluated by reciting teachers and students, and the results were auspicious

RoboTalk - Prototyping a Humanoid Robot as Speech-to-Sign Language Translator

Information science mostly focused on sign language recognition. The current study instead examines whether humanoid robots might be fruitful avatars for sign language translation. After a review of research into sign language technologies, a survey of 50 deaf participants regarding their preferences for potential reveals that humanoid robots represent a promising option. The authors also 3D-printed two arms of a humanoid robot, InMoov, with special joints for the index finger and thumb that would provide it with additional degrees of freedom to express sign language. They programmed the robotic arms with German sign language and integrated it with a voice recognition system. Thus this study provides insights into human–robot interactions in the context of sign language translation; it also contributes ideas for enhanced inclusion of deaf people into society

Modeling second language learners' interlanguage and its variability: a computer-based dynamic assessment approach to distinguishing between errors and mistakes

Despite a long history, interlanguage variability research is a debatable topic as most paradigms do not distinguish between competence and performance. While interlanguage performance has been proven to be variable, determining whether interlanguage competence is exposed to random and/or systematic variations is complex, given the fact that distinction between competence-dependent errors and performance-related mistakes should be established to best represent the interlanguage competence. This thesis suggests a dynamic assessment model grounded in sociocultural theory to distinguish between errors and mistakes in texts written by learners of French, to then investigate the extent to which interlanguage competence varies across time, text types, and students. The key outcomes include: 1. An expanded model based on dynamic assessment principles to distinguish between errors and mistakes, which also provides the structure to create and observe learners’ zone of proximal development; 2. A method to increase the accuracy of the part-of-speech tagging procedure whose reliability correlates with the number of incorrect words contained in learners’ texts; 3. A sociocultural insight into interlanguage variability research. Results demonstrate that interlanguage competence is as variable as performance. The main finding shows that knowledge over time is subject to not only systematic, but also unsystematic variations