Effective Use of Chinese Structural Auxiliaries for Chinese Parsing

PACLIC 23 / City University of Hong Kong / 3-5 December 200

The Semantics of Article Acquisition

Accurately using articles has consistently been a difficult task for English language learners as articles are often treated as solely grammatical forms rather than also recognizing as representatives of complex semantic properties. This paper aims to synthesize individual research on semantic factors which influence article acquisition and explore how they interact with each other. This paper especially focuses on how native and second language speakers of English acquire and understand the concepts of definiteness and specificity and explores these features within the framework of Chomsky’s theory of Universal Grammar. This paper examines the Fluctuating Hypothesis (FH) and its use as a theoretical framework for a variety of modern article acquisition research. The theory states that ELLs have access to Universal Grammar when discovering the parameters for the semantic categories of definiteness and specificity. This paper then explains the interaction between the FH and transfer in language learners from both article-based and articleless language backgrounds, concluding that transfer does not override the effects of the FH. Additional semantic factors such as countability, plurality, and idiomatic phrase structures are also discussed in this paper, emphasizing the many complex layers ELLs must learn to navigate. This paper examines recent attempts to create linguistically informed article instruction, some of which incorporate concepts from the FH. Finally, the paper provides guidelines for English language instructors, stressing the importance of understanding features of their students’ native language, building students’ awareness of the complexities associated with article use, and correcting their misconceptions of specificity and definiteness

ONLINE TEACHING + FLIPPED CLASSROOM + ONLINE CORRECTION: AN EXPERIMENTAL TEACHING REFORM OF COLLEGE ENGLISH WRITING COURSE IN CHINA

One hundred and six sophomore students in English major from four classes in a Chinese university were divided into the experimental group and control group. The experimental group adopted a new teaching model of "online teaching + flipped classroom + online correction", while the control group adopted the traditional teaching model of "classroom instruction + homework + teacher correction". The experiment lasted a semester and the results show that the new teaching model can more effectively stimulate students' interest and enthusiasm for English writing than the traditional one. The mean score of the students in the experimental group increased 10.35 points and the growth is three times as much as that of the control group. The students' overall satisfaction with the new teaching model reaches 90%, while the overall satisfaction of the traditional teaching model is only 20%. This teaching reform experiment has certain significance for the teaching reform of college English writing course in China and other non-English speaking countries.  Article visualizations

Self-Repair Devices in Classroom Monologue Discourse

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