Designing Instructional Materials for Teaching Listening Comprehension

An approach to the design of listening comprehension materials and classroom activities reflects a view of the nature of listening and the processes it involves. An understanding of the role of bottom up and top down processes in listening is central to any theory of listening comprehension, as well as recognition of the differences between the interactional and transactional dimensions of language use and how these affect listening. In this paper, these views of listening will first be elaborated and then applied to the design of instructional materials and activities for the teaching of listening comprehension

Readings on L2 reading: Publications in other venues 2021-2022

This feature offers an archive of articles published in other venues during the past year and serves as a valuable tool to readers of Reading in a Foreign Language (RFL). It treats any topic within the scope of RFL and second language reading. The articles are listed in alphabetical order, each with a complete reference as well as a brief summary. The editors of this feature attempt to include all related articles that appear in other venues. However, undoubtedly, this list is not exhaustive

Implicit Causality And Consequentiality In Native And Non-Native Coreference Processing

This dissertation is composed of two studies that examined the role of implicit causality and consequentiality in coreference processing. Implicit causality (IC) refers to the phenomenon that certain interpersonal verbs bias the causation of the events described by the verbs towards either its subject (the first noun phrase NP1) or its object (the second noun phrase NP2). Implicit consequentiality (IR) refers to the phenomenon that certain verbs bias the consequence towards either NP1 or NP2. These IC and IR biases have been found to influence language comprehenders’ establishment of coreference. The first study examined whether intentionality of an event affects native English speakers’ re-mention biases of IC and IR. In two sentence-completion experiments, the strength of event intentionality was manipulated via intentionality-strengthening adverbs such as deliberately and intentionality-weakening adverbs such as accidentally. Results show that reinforcing intentionality changed IC and IR biases with participants showing increased references to NP1 in the IC context and NP2 in the IR context. The present study thus adds to a growing body of literature showing that IC and IR re-mention biases are not just determined by verb semantics but rather reflect a discourse phenomenon resulting from comprehenders’ causal inferences about the explanation for or the consequence of an event. The second study investigated advanced Chinese-speaking English learners’ use of IC and IR biases in establishing coreference. In two sentence-completion experiments that focused on IC and IR, respectively, participants wrote continuations to sentence fragments containing either NP1-biasing verbs or NP2-biasing verbs and ending with either a free prompt (e.g., NP1 verb-ed NP2 because…) or a pronoun prompt (e.g., NP1 verb-ed NP2 because he…). In both the IC and IR contexts, non-native speakers showed native-like re-mention biases in the free prompt condition. Moreover, like native speakers, non-native speakers produced more NP1 references in the pronoun prompt condition than in the free prompt condition. However, unlike native speakers, non-native speakers exhibited a “subject bias” in pronoun resolution by producing more NP1 references after NP2-biasing verbs. Overall, the study reveals that non-native speakers are able to generate predictions about the next-mentioned referent based on discourse-level information. The “subject bias” shown by non-native speakers in their resolution of pronouns indicates that when processing multiple sources of information, non-native speakers tend to resort to the cues that are easy to process, such as the subjecthood cue associated with the presence of pronouns

Japanese word prediction

This report deals with the implementation of a Japanese word prediction engine written by the author. As this type of software does not seem to exist for Japanese at the time of writing, it could prove useful in Japanese augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) as a software tool used to improve typing speed and reduce the amount of keystrokes needed to produce text. Word prediction, in contrast to the word completion software commonly found in mobile phones and word processor intellisense engines etc. is a technique for suggesting a followup word after a word has just been completed. This is usually done by providing a list of the most probable words to the user, sorted by commonality (general and user-specific frequency). Combined with good word completion software and a responsive user interface, word prediction is one of the most powerful assistive tools available to movement impaired users today. The main goals of the thesis will be to: 1. Answer as many of the questions raised by the language differences as possible. 2. Investigate further avenues of research in the subject. 3. Make a functional word prediction prototype for Japanese. All project code is in the public domain and is currently hosted at: http://www.mediafire.com/?rrhqtqsgp6ei6m

International Students’ Responses to Explicit Instruction on Vocabulary Learning Strategies: Implications for EAP Courses

Given that the importance of understanding the academic language is strongly associated with the academic vocabulary size, vocabulary knowledge is regarded as one of the most crucial areas of language competence to bolster academic achievement. The present study investigates the effectiveness of two different strategies of vocabulary acquisition in English including 1) learning from sample sentences and 2) learning from word parts. Results are significant for immediate testing and reveal the beneficial role of explicit instruction on vocabulary learning strategies that increases international students’ English vocabulary learning ability. The study also discusses survey responses from the participants in relation to their use of vocabulary learning strategies and their own approaches to acquiring new vocabulary words. It is recommended that self-learning strategies should be explicitly taught in English for Academic Purposes (EAP) programs to help students acquire words from higher levels in academic settings. Some implications for teachers include integrating a variety of learning strategies and multimodal activities into vocabulary instruction and engaging students in learning pronunciation, common rules of word stress, word context, and word parts while encountering unfamiliar words

Going Beyond the Text: The Inferencing Processes of Skilled Readers in L1 and L2 Across Reading Tasks

This small exploratory study investigated the inferencing processes of skilled first language (L1) and second language (L2) readers for two academic tasks. The goal was to examine possible effects of language and task, or reading purpose, on the frequency and distribution of inferences. Participants (n = 10) were native speakers of German enrolled at a large university in Hessen, Germany in a B.Ed. program. Participants read two expository texts (one written in German and the other written in English) in two task conditions: summary and position-paper. Think-aloud protocols while reading and stimulated recall immediately after reading were recorded, transcribed, coded, and the results were compared quantitatively and qualitatively across tasks and languages. The statistical analyses indicated that there were task effects on inferencing processes, and that they were stronger in L2. When reading for a summary purpose, inferencing processes differed across languages which was not the case for the position-paper task. Readers inferencing processes differed significantly across tasks in L2, but not in L1. The results suggest that skilled readers strategically inference based on academic task demands, but that transfer of strategic inferencing skills from L1 to L2 is not complete even with advanced L2 readers. Findings raise questions about the explicit instruction of strategic inferencing for academic tasks in L2 reading classrooms

Going Beyond the Text: The Inferencing Processes of Skilled Readers in L1 and L2 across Reading Tasks

This small exploratory study investigated the inferencing processes of skilled first language (L1) and second language (L2) readers for two academic tasks. The goal was to examine possible effects of language and task, or reading purpose, on the frequency and distribution of inferences. Participants (n = 10) were native speakers of German enrolled at a large university in Hessen, Germany in a B.Ed. program. Participants read two expository texts (one written in German and the other written in English) in two task conditions: summary and position-paper. Think-aloud protocols while reading and stimulated recall immediately after reading were recorded, transcribed, coded, and the results were compared quantitatively and qualitatively across tasks and languages. The statistical analyses indicated that there were task effects on inferencing processes, and that they were stronger in L2. When reading for a summary purpose, inferencing processes differed across languages which was not the case for the position-paper task. Readers’ inferencing processes differed significantly across tasks in L2, but not in L1. The results suggest that skilled readers strategically inference based on academic task demands, but that transfer of strategic inferencing skills from L1 to L2 is not complete even with advanced L2 readers. Findings raise questions about the explicit instruction of strategic inferencing for academic tasks in L2 reading classrooms

Detecting Machine-obfuscated Plagiarism

Related dataset is at https://doi.org/10.7302/bewj-qx93 and also listed in the dc.relation field of the full item record.Research on academic integrity has identified online paraphrasing tools as a severe threat to the effectiveness of plagiarism detection systems. To enable the automated identification of machine-paraphrased text, we make three contributions. First, we evaluate the effectiveness of six prominent word embedding models in combination with five classifiers for distinguishing human-written from machine-paraphrased text. The best performing classification approach achieves an accuracy of 99.0% for documents and 83.4% for paragraphs. Second, we show that the best approach outperforms human experts and established plagiarism detection systems for these classification tasks. Third, we provide a Web application that uses the best performing classification approach to indicate whether a text underwent machine-paraphrasing. The data and code of our study are openly available.Peer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/152346/1/Foltynek2020_Paraphrase_Detection.pdfDescription of Foltynek2020_Paraphrase_Detection.pdf : Foltynek2020_Paraphrase_Detectio