Effects of Redundancy of Multimedia Instruction on Spanish Reading and Listening Skills

The redundancy principle of multimedia learning indicates that people learn better from graphics and narration simultaneously than from graphics, narration, and printed text simultaneously. The current study investigated whether the redundancy principle may apply to multimedia instruction of correspondences between a second language (L2) and a native language’s reading and listening content. 100 college students in New York City learned correspondences between Spanish and English words and phrases in a counterbalanced within-subjects design, from three trials of video instruction that was redundant (including text as captions) or non-redundant (including text as non-concurrent text slides). For each condition, participants completed tests translating text and audio of taught words/phrases (testing both rote memorization and transfer knowledge) after each instructional trial. Results of multilevel models showed participants learned Spanish reading and listening translations together better from the non-redundant than redundant video instruction (p \u3c .05), and particularly for far transfer and English-to-Spanish translation questions (ps \u3c .05). Results of further multilevel models showed learners’ fluid intelligence and executive functioning to not moderate these effects (ps \u3e .05), but to predict higher L2 learning irrespective of condition (ps \u3c .05). Implications of the study include, when implementing L2 instructional multimedia with videos presented in both L2 and native language versions, that written text can be best included sequentially (on ‘bilingual text slides’) rather than concurrently with videos. In this paired format the two languages’ text displayed together non-redundantly likely facilitates cognitive strategies that are not possible with the same text displayed redundantly as captions on the videos separately. Implementation of such cognitive science-informed instructional practices may have societal benefits of improving L2 learners’ tolerance of ambiguity and cultural competence (qualities linked with L2 learning). Limitations of the present study include unclear generalizability of the advantages of non-redundant L2 instructional multimedia with bilingual text slides to non-translation aspects of L2 reading and listening skills. It is also unclear if non-redundant L2 instructional multimedia with text would be more than equally effective as its redundant counterpart in any situations where its text slides are not bilingual. Future directions are suggested investigating viable design options of non-redundant L2 instructional multimedia, and replications/extensions of the present study’s comparison incorporating highlighting (as per the signaling principle of multimedia learning), gamifications, or adaptations to heritage language learners’ particular learning goals

Teaching EFL on the radio: a genre-based study of language use in English teaching radio programmes in Taiwan

This thesis provides a genre-based study of the ways in which language is used in English teaching radio programmes (ETRPs) in Taiwan. Drawing upon the frameworks of genre analysis, pragmatics, systemic linguistics, interactional sociolinguistics, the ethnography of communication, and variation analysis, and research on classroom discourse and media discourse, ETRPs are studied as a genre by examining the relationship between context, communicative purposes, discourse structure and lexical-grammatical use. Nineteen days of ETRPs of different broadcasts, which were on air in 1998-2001 and which served senior high school students in Taiwan, were recorded, transcribed and coded for linguistic analyses. The pedagogical purposes of ETRPs are identified by investigating the educational needs of the listeners and the stated aims of the broadcasters. They are then studied in more detail by considering the communicative needs generated in the situational context. The purposes of ETRPs provide frameworks for the description and explanation - quantitative and qualitative - of the prominent genre features, above and below the level of sentence, of ETRPs. The accounts of the discourse structure of ETRPs include not only the generic structure (the macrostructure) but also the interaction structure of the genre; i.e. the interaction between the presenters in the generic structure of a monologue. This thesis also makes comparisons between various broadcasts of ETRPs and interprets listeners' perceptions of ETRPs in terms oftheir genre features. It concludes by considering applications ofthe findings to the fields of genre analysis and language teaching

WiFi-Based Human Activity Recognition Using Attention-Based BiLSTM

Recently, significant efforts have been made to explore human activity recognition (HAR) techniques that use information gathered by existing indoor wireless infrastructures through WiFi signals without demanding the monitored subject to carry a dedicated device. The key intuition is that different activities introduce different multi-paths in WiFi signals and generate different patterns in the time series of channel state information (CSI). In this paper, we propose and evaluate a full pipeline for a CSI-based human activity recognition framework for 12 activities in three different spatial environments using two deep learning models: ABiLSTM and CNN-ABiLSTM. Evaluation experiments have demonstrated that the proposed models outperform state-of-the-art models. Also, the experiments show that the proposed models can be applied to other environments with different configurations, albeit with some caveats. The proposed ABiLSTM model achieves an overall accuracy of 94.03%, 91.96%, and 92.59% across the 3 target environments. While the proposed CNN-ABiLSTM model reaches an accuracy of 98.54%, 94.25% and 95.09% across those same environments

Identifying the language problems of overseas students in tertiary education in the United Kingdom

In 2 volsAvailable from British Library Document Supply Centre-DSC:DX191444 / BLDSC - British Library Document Supply CentreSIGLEGBUnited Kingdo

Relative clauses and conjunctive adjuncts in Syrian University student writing in English

Initial investigations into English essays written by Syrian university students triangulated Syrian and British teachers’ evaluations of the essays and the lexico-grammatical features they identified as affecting the overall quality of writing, with text analyses of the sources, types and frequency of all grammatical errors. Following this, and a review of relevant literature, the thesis presents an in-depth study of relative clauses and conjunctive adjuncts as under-researched features in Arabic speaking university student writing that can enrich their writing syntactically and semantically. The relative clause (RC) analysis shows that the 'full' form RC occurred much more frequently than the 'reduced' form, and that confusion between these two forms was a prominent source of student error. 'Pronoun retention' errors indicating L1 interference were among the most frequent RC errors – as most studies of RC use by Arab learners find. Moreover, RC constructions with 'head noun' (or antecedent) in the non-subject position and 'gap' (or relativized NP/sentence) in the subject position were dominant, while other, and more complex, construction types were much less common. This supports the AHH and PDH hypotheses on the frequency/difficulty hierarchy of RC types. Conjunctive adjunct analysis reveals that 'additive' conjunctive adjuncts were more frequent, followed by 'causals'. Despite its informality, the resultive conjunctive adjunct 'so' was used most repeatedly, followed by 'also', 'but', and 'and'. Causal conjunctive adjuncts were most frequently misused, though in general conjunctive adjunct misuse is not a major weakness. Contrastive analysis between the L2 (Syrian) and an equivalent L1 (British) corpus of literature essays revealed no significant difference between the total frequencies of RCs, 'full' RCs and 'non-subject-subject' RCs. In contrast, the total frequencies of conjunctive adjuncts in the two corpora were significantly different, with the L2 corpus containing almost twice as many conjunctive adjuncts as the L1 corpus, particularly causals and additives, this latter category being most frequent in both corpora. The British students' employment of relative clause types and conjunctive expressions was generally more diverse than that of the Syrian students. Pedagogical implications conclude this thesis