Handling non-compositionality in multilingual CNLs

In this paper, we describe methods for handling multilingual non-compositional constructions in the framework of GF. We specifically look at methods to detect and extract non-compositional phrases from parallel texts and propose methods to handle such constructions in GF grammars. We expect that the methods to handle non-compositional constructions will enrich CNLs by providing more flexibility in the design of controlled languages. We look at two specific use cases of non-compositional constructions: a general-purpose method to detect and extract multilingual multiword expressions and a procedure to identify nominal compounds in German. We evaluate our procedure for multiword expressions by performing a qualitative analysis of the results. For the experiments on nominal compounds, we incorporate the detected compounds in a full SMT pipeline and evaluate the impact of our method in machine translation process.Comment: CNL workshop in COLING 201

In Search of Effective Second Language Arabic Vocabulary Teaching Strategies: Theory and Implementation

This portfolio is the outcome of the author’s studies in the Masters of Second Language Teaching (MSLT) program at Utah State University (USU) as well as her experience as a graduate instructor of Arabic at the same university. This work has two main parts. The first comprises the three major components that present the author’s perspectives as a teacher, such as professional environment, teaching philosophy statement and the teaching observation. The second part demonstrated the author’s research interest that aligned with her teaching perspective as an Arabic teacher. It was a position paper that called for Arabic vocabulary teaching strategies that respect the morphology and orthography of that language. She also argued that the existing vocabulary teaching strategies that were borrowed from European languages may not be adequate for all languages

Exploratory Practice: Researching the Impact of Songs on EFL Learners' Verbal Memory

Traditionally popular songs have been used as a way of enhancing listening and auditory perception skills and teaching vocabulary, but not necessarily for memory recall. Popular song gap-fills are already commonplace within the EFL (English as a foreign language) field; however, this study found that more attention needs to be given, to the lexical, grammatical and phonological items that learners are instructed to retain. The results of this study suggest that, verbal memory is a vital part of language learning that should be incorporated into popular song gap-fills and that EFL teachers, theorists and textbook authors need to review the way language in popular songs is encoded, stored and retrieved, by incorporating memory strategies, following guidelines on gap-selection, including a phonological aspect and using a recycling activity. In this article traditional and contemporary understandings of verbal memory and popular song are outlined and comprehensively analysed within relevant fields that embrace ELT (English language teaching), Biology, Psycholinguistics, Neurolinguistics and Cognitive Psychology perspectives and discusses their pedagogical implications

The role of language proficiency and statistical learning in on-line comprehension of syntax among bilingual adult readers

Statistical learning (SL) is the ability to identify co-occurring regularities from the environment, and has been implicated in learning across a range of skills, including language. This research project investigated whether there are associations between SL and on-line sentence processing in L1 Chinese L2 English bilinguals, and sought to examine whether second language proficiency mediated the relationship between visual SL and L2 language processing. To this end, two studies were conducted. In Study 1, sixty Chinese-English bilinguals completed a self-paced reading task in Mandarin and English, which tested participants’ on-line processing of subject and object relative clauses (RCs). They also completed a nonlinguistic visual SL task and a battery of additional measures measuring L2 English proficiency and general cognitive abilities. The results revealed that only nonverbal intelligence predicted L1 Chinese RCs processing, and neither visual SL capacity nor L2 proficiency predicted L2 English RCs processing. One possible explanation is that SL is partially modality-specific. Therefore, an auditory SL task was employed in addition to visual SL task in Study 2. In Study 2, fifty-two native Mandarin-speaking adults completed tests of visual and auditory SL, a self-paced reading task measuring the online processing of Mandarin relative clauses, and measures of general cognitive abilities. The results showed that auditory SL capacity independently predicted reading times in the self-paced reading task. Visual SL was also related to language processing, although the effect was marginal. The findings from Study 2 suggest that individual differences in adults’ capacity for SL are associated with on-line processing of Chinese

Teaching and Learning Chinese Characters in the Chinese as a Foreign Language Classroom

This portfolio covers the author’s perspectives in the field of Chinese as a foreign language when she was in the Master of Second Language Teaching program at Utah State University. The portfolio has three main sections. The first section includes the author’s teaching philosophy statement, rooted in her second language learning and teaching experience, and a reflection on classroom teaching observations. The second section contains two research perspectives on teaching and learning Chinese as a second language. The final section consists of an annotated bibliography on the topic of collaborative writing in a second-language context

INVESTIGATING L1 ARABIC AND L1 KOREAN ACQUISITION OF THE PASSIVE VOICE IN L2 ENGLISH

This thesis investigates how learners from specific first language (L1) groups, Arabic and Korean, use the passive voice in English, their second language (L2). This study analyzes both spoken and written classroom data from English language learners (ELLs), six L1 Korean learners and six L1 Arabic learners, over the course of three semesters at an intensive English program (IEP) in the United States. The main goals of the analysis are to identify, categorize and quantify the errors the learners make when they use the passive voice. The results indicate that there are general obstacles that all of the ELLs face, as well as patterns of use specific to each L1 group. The key finding for the L1 Korean learners is that their most common error is using the passive voice when they should use the active voice. The key finding for the L1 Arabic learners is that their most common error is not using an auxiliary verb. However, lexical learning and other common errors, such as incorrectly conjugating the auxiliary verb and past participle, and certain patterns of use, such as rarely including by-phrases, are evident in both groups. This study also found that passivizing intransitive verbs, an error thought to commonly plague ELLs when they learn the passive voice, did not occur in the participants’ production data. In light of the results, this thesis offers suggestions for future research and instructional practices in the Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) field

Cross-lingual Word Clusters for Direct Transfer of Linguistic Structure

It has been established that incorporating word cluster features derived from large unlabeled corpora can significantly improve prediction of linguistic structure. While previous work has focused primarily on English, we extend these results to other languages along two dimensions. First, we show that these results hold true for a number of languages across families. Second, and more interestingly, we provide an algorithm for inducing cross-lingual clusters and we show that features derived from these clusters significantly improve the accuracy of cross-lingual structure prediction. Specifically, we show that by augmenting direct-transfer systems with cross-lingual cluster features, the relative error of delexicalized dependency parsers, trained on English treebanks and transferred to foreign languages, can be reduced by up to 13%. When applying the same method to direct transfer of named-entity recognizers, we observe relative improvements of up to 26%

An Effective Way to Memorize New Words—Lexical Chunk

Vocabulary is the basis of language, but memorizing new words has always been a hard job for all English learners. This paper was written based on the theories on lexical chunk by Lewis and other scholars, and the experiment conducted on my own teaching class. The paper explored the function of lexical chunks, types of lexical chunk, high frequency lexical chunks, the differences between lexical chunks in English and Chinese, and how to implement the method of lexical chunk teaching