5,943 research outputs found

    Collaborative translation by monolingual users

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    Own-language use in language teaching and learning: state of the art

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    Until recently, the assumption of the language-teaching literature has been that new languages are best taught and learned monolingually, without the use of the students’ own language(s). In recent years, however, this monolingual assumption has been increasingly questioned, and a re-evaluation of teaching that relates the language being taught to the students’ own language has begun. This article surveys the developing English language literature on the role of students’ own language(s) in the language classroom. After clarifying key terms, the paper charts the continuing widespread use of students’ own languages in classrooms around the world and the contemporary academic and societal trends which have led to a revival of support for this. It then explores key arguments which underpin this revival, and reviews a range of empirical studies which examine the extent and functions of own-language use within language classrooms. Next, the article examines the support for own-language use that a range of theoretical frameworks provide, including psycholinguistic and cognitive approaches, general learning theory and sociocultural approaches. Having explored the notion of ‘optimal’ in-class own-language use, the article then reviews research into teachers’ and students’ attitudes towards own-language use. It concludes by examining how a bilingual approach to language teaching and learning might be implemented in practice

    Observing Users - Designing clarity a case study on the user-centred design of a cross-language information retrieval system

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    This paper presents a case study of the development of an interface to a novel and complex form of document retrieval: searching for texts written in foreign languages based on native language queries. Although the underlying technology for achieving such a search is relatively well understood, the appropriate interface design is not. A study involving users (with such searching needs) from the start of the design process is described covering initial examination of user needs and tasks; preliminary design and testing of interface components; building, testing, and further refining an interface; before finally conducting usability tests of the system. Lessons are learned at every stage of the process leading to a much more informed view of how such an interface should be built

    The demands of users and the publishing world: printed or online, free or paid for?

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    Researching the Use of Dictionary by Students of English Literature Department at Jenderal Soedirman University

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    Dictionaries are recommnded as a useful tool when learning EFL because it gives information of the language about many aspects like, phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics. Nevertheless, EFL practionaires rarely pay attention to the dictionary used by the students. The article focuses on the investigation about types of dictionaries used, the frequency of dictionary use, and the lexical information examined. Respondents were students of English Literature Department, Jenderal Soedirman University. Data were taken from questionnaires. The result showed that students did not have any special instruction on how to make full use of the dictionaries. The respondents favored bilingual dictionaries over monolingual dictionaries. Respondents saw that pronunciation, usage, and examples were considered as a secondary importance

    Cross-language Wikipedia Editing of Okinawa, Japan

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    This article analyzes users who edit Wikipedia articles about Okinawa, Japan, in English and Japanese. It finds these users are among the most active and dedicated users in their primary languages, where they make many large, high-quality edits. However, when these users edit in their non-primary languages, they tend to make edits of a different type that are overall smaller in size and more often restricted to the narrow set of articles that exist in both languages. Design changes to motivate wider contributions from users in their non-primary languages and to encourage multilingual users to transfer more information across language divides are presented.Comment: In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI 2015. AC

    Digital libraries and minority languages

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    Digital libraries have a pivotal role to play in the preservation and maintenance of international cultures in general and minority languages in particular. This paper outlines a software tool for building digital libraries that is well adapted for creating and distributing local information collections in minority languages, and describes some contexts in which it is used. The system can make multilingual documents available in structured collections and allows them to be accessed via multilingual interfaces. It is issued under a free open-source licence, which encourages participatory design of the software, and an end-user interface allows community-based localization of the various language interfaces - of which there are many
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