A CROSS-LINGUISTIC AND CROSS-CULTURAL STUDY OF STANCE MARKERS IN RESEARCH ARTICLES IN ENGLISH AND KOREAN

Ph.D

What is Needed the Most in MT-Supported Paper Writing

PACLIC / The University of the Philippines Visayas Cebu College Cebu City, Philippines / November 20-22, 200

Semi-Automatic Annotation Tool to Build Large Dependency Tree-Tagged Corpus

PACLIC 21 / Seoul National University, Seoul, Korea / November 1-3, 200

Interference for 'new' versus 'similar' vowels in Korean speakers of English

This paper tests Flege's (1987) Speech Learning Model and Bohn and Flege's (in press) hypothesis about the 'deflected' realization rule of a 'similar' L2 vowel. It is shown that Korean-English bilinguals' production of new English vowels, /I, U/, conforms to Flege's prediction. However, their production of similar English vowels, /i, u, U/, conformed to neither Flege's model nor to Bohn and Flege's hypothesis. We especially examined the interference between Korean and English high vowels, /i, I, U, u/, and /U/ based on 8 Korean-English bilinguals with different years of residence in the States, 4 English monolinguals and 3 Korean monolinguals. Formant values of English vowels produced by Korean-English bilinguals with different years of residence in America were compared with those of English monolinguals. For the vowel /i/, Flege's notion of 'similar' L2 vowels needs be redefined to distinguish similar and identical vowels. He may need either some continuous measures or more systematic criteria to categorize whether a phone in L2 is new or similar to phones in L1

The Effects of Foreign Accent and Language on Reaction Time and Accuracy in an Air Traffic Control Task

The present study examines the effect of foreign accent interference with the ability to execute commands presented in speech format. The objective of this study was to demonstrate that a foreign accent influences performance. Participants were between 18 and 40 years of age. Half of the participants were native speakers of Spanish who began learning English as a second language via the classroom setting. The other half were native English-speaking with little or no exposure to the Spanish language. The experimental design was similar to an aviation scenario where participants listened to simulated ATC procedural commands and execute them on a simulated control panel. Response time (in milliseconds) and accuracy were recorded. Accuracy was measure by incorrect responses and false starts. Incorrect responses were measured when participants pressed an arrow key different from the commanded direction. False starts occurred when the participant pressed a key before the command was presented. The results of this study did not reveal an effect of language for reaction time. However, the false start data indicated a significant effect on accent for native English speakers, but not an effect on accent for non-native English speakers. On the contrary, the data from incorrect responses does not show a significant effect of accent for native English speakers but a significant difference in effect of accent on non-native English speakers. Therefore, the accuracy hypotheses were not supported

Rehearsing L2 academic vocabulary with cloze exercises: a computer-assisted language learning intervention

Choosing appropriate methods and levels of scaffolding (see, e.g., Wood, Bruner, & Ross, 1976) is a crucial skill in second language instruction. The observation that too little or too much scaffolding for a task leads to an inferior learning outcome, known as the assistance dilemma (Koedinger & Aleven, 2007), has resisted quantitative analysis. However, it is now possible to take advantage of computerized tutors’ ability to precisely measure response latencies and accuracy rates to provide quantitative data to analyze the merits of different methods of scaffolding with regard to students’ performance on individual tasks. The present study describes a computer-aided language learning intervention in which 46 intermediate-level adult ESL speakers used a web-based vocabulary rehearsal program several times over the course of nine weeks. The tutor led participants in completing cloze exercises of the target words, with half of the exercises being presented with a hint in the form of a short definition of the target word and half of the exercises being presented without a hint. The results of the experiment indicate that the presence of the hint significantly increased participants’ accuracy on the task, but also significantly increased time on task. These results suggest that the form of support selected was an appropriate scaffold. However, L1 speakers of Arabic (N = 29) proved exceptional in a few ways: they expressed negative attitudes toward L2 writing tasks in general and did not show any increase in accuracy in the scaffolded condition, despite the fact that speakers of other L1s showed a very large and statistically significant improvement in accuracy in that condition. These issues may relate to Arabic speakers’ exceptional difficulties processing English orthography (Martin, 2011) and warrant future study