The role of feedback in the processes and outcomes of academic writing in english as a foreign language at intermediate and advanced levels

Providing feedback on students’ texts is one of the essential components of teaching second language writing. However, whether and to what extent students benefit from feedback has been an issue of considerable debate in the literature. While many researchers have stressed its importance, others expressed doubts about its effectiveness. Regardless of these continuing and well-established debates, instructors consider feedback as a worthwhile pedagogical practice for second language learning. Based on this premise, I conducted three experimental studies to investigate the role of written feedback in Myanmar and Hungarian tertiary EFL classrooms. Additionally, I studied syntactic features and language-related error patterns in Hungarian and Myanmar students’ writing. This attempt was made to understand how students with different writing proficiency acted upon teacher and automated feedback. The first study examined the efficacy of feedback on Myanmar students’ writing over a 13-week semester and how automated feedback provided by Grammarly could be integrated into writing instruction as an assistance tool for writing teachers. Results from pre-and post-tests demonstrated that students’ writing performance improved along the lines of four assessment criteria: task achievement, coherence and cohesion, grammatical range and accuracy, and lexical range and accuracy. Further results from a written feedback analysis revealed that the free version of Grammarly provided feedback on lower-level writing issues such as articles and prepositions, whereas teacher feedback covered both lower-and higher-level writing concerns. These findings suggested a potential for integrating automated feedback into writing instruction. As limited attention was given to how feedback influences other aspects of writing development beyond accuracy, the second study examined how feedback influences the syntactic complexity of Myanmar students’ essays. Results from paired sample t-tests revealed no significant differences in the syntactic complexity of students’ writing when the comparison was made between initial and revised texts and between pre-and post-tests. These findings suggested that feedback on students’ writing does not lead them to write less structurally complex texts despite not resulting in syntactic complexity gains. The syntactic complexity of students’ revised texts varied among high-, mid-, and low-achieving students. These variations could be attributed to proficiency levels, writing prompts, genre differences, and feedback sources. The rationale for conducting the third study was based on the theoretical orientation that differential success in learners’ gaining from feedback largely depended on their engagement with the feedback rather than the feedback itself. Along these lines of research, I examined Hungarian students’ behavioural engagement (i.e., students’ uptake or revisions prompted by written feedback) with teacher and automated feedback in an EFL writing course. In addition to the engagement with form-focused feedback examined in the first study, I considered meaning-focused feedback, as feedback in a writing course typically covers both linguistic and rhetorical aspects of writing. The results showed differences in feedback focus (the teacher provided form-and meaning-focused feedback) with unexpected outcomes: students’ uptake of feedback resulted in moderate to low levels of engagement with feedback. Participants incorporated more form-focused feedback than meaning-focused feedback into their revisions. These findings contribute to our understanding of students’ engagement with writing tasks, levels of trust, and the possible impact of students’ language proficiency on their engagement with feedback. Following the results that Myanmar and Hungarian students responded to feedback on their writing differently, I designed a follow-up study to compare syntactic features of their writing as indices of their English writing proficiency. In addition, I examined language-related errors in their texts to capture the differences in the error patterns in the two groups. Results from paired sample t-tests showed that most syntactic complexity indices distinguished the essays produced by the two groups: length of production units, sentence complexity, and subordination indices. Similarly, statistically significant differences were found in language-related error patterns in their texts: errors were more prevalent in Myanmar students’ essays. The implications for research and pedagogical practices in EFL writing classes are discussed with reference to the rationale for each study

Proceedings

Proceedings of the Ninth International Workshop on Treebanks and Linguistic Theories. Editors: Markus Dickinson, Kaili Müürisep and Marco Passarotti. NEALT Proceedings Series, Vol. 9 (2010), 268 pages. © 2010 The editors and contributors. Published by Northern European Association for Language Technology (NEALT) http://omilia.uio.no/nealt . Electronically published at Tartu University Library (Estonia) http://hdl.handle.net/10062/15891

Second language learning from a multilingual perspective

Thesis: Ph. D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2018.This electronic version was submitted by the student author. The certified thesis is available in the Institute Archives and Special Collections.Cataloged from student-submitted PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (pages 119-127).How do people learn a second language? In this thesis, we study this question through an examination of cross-linguistic transfer: the role of a speaker's native language in the acquisition, representation, usage and processing of a second language. We present a computational framework that enables studying transfer in a unified fashion across language production and language comprehension. Our framework supports bidirectional inference between linguistic characteristics of speakers' native languages, and the way they use and process a new language. We leverage this inference ability to demonstrate the systematic nature of cross-linguistic transfer, and to uncover some of its key linguistic and cognitive manifestations. We instantiate our framework in language production by relating syntactic usage patterns and grammatical errors in English as a Second Language (ESL) to typological properties of the native language, showing its utility for automated typology learning and prediction of second language grammatical errors. We then introduce eye tracking during reading as a methodology for studying cross-linguistic transfer in second language comprehension. Using this methodology, we demonstrate that learners' native language can be predicted from their eye movement while reading free-form second language text. Further, we show that language processing during second language comprehension is intimately related to linguistic characteristics of the reader's first language. Finally, we introduce the Treebank of Learner English (TLE), the first syntactically annotated corpus of learner English. The TLE is annotated with Universal Dependencies (UD), a framework geared towards multilingual language analysis, and will support linguistic and computational research on learner language. Taken together, our results highlight the importance of multilingual approaches to the scientific study of second language acquisition, and to Natural Language Processing (NLP) applications for non-native language.by Yevgeni Berzak.Ph. D

Knowledge Expansion of a Statistical Machine Translation System using Morphological Resources

Translation capability of a Phrase-Based Statistical Machine Translation (PBSMT) system mostly depends on parallel data and phrases that are not present in the training data are not correctly translated. This paper describes a method that efficiently expands the existing knowledge of a PBSMT system without adding more parallel data but using external morphological resources. A set of new phrase associations is added to translation and reordering models; each of them corresponds to a morphological variation of the source/target/both phrases of an existing association. New associations are generated using a string similarity score based on morphosyntactic information. We tested our approach on En-Fr and Fr-En translations and results showed improvements of the performance in terms of automatic scores (BLEU and Meteor) and reduction of out-of-vocabulary (OOV) words. We believe that our knowledge expansion framework is generic and could be used to add different types of information to the model.JRC.G.2-Global security and crisis managemen

Lexical and Grammar Resource Engineering for Runyankore & Rukiga: A Symbolic Approach

Current research in computational linguistics and natural language processing (NLP) requires the existence of language resources. Whereas these resources are available for a few well-resourced languages, there are many languages that have been neglected. Among the neglected and / or under-resourced languages are Runyankore and Rukiga (henceforth referred to as Ry/Rk). Recently, the NLP community has started to acknowledge that resources for under-resourced languages should also be given priority. Why? One reason being that as far as language typology is concerned, the few well-resourced languages do not represent the structural diversity of the remaining languages. The central focus of this thesis is about enabling the computational analysis and generation of utterances in Ry/Rk. Ry/Rk are two closely related languages spoken by about 3.4 and 2.4 million people respectively. They belong to the Nyoro-Ganda (JE10) language zone of the Great Lakes, Narrow Bantu of the Niger-Congo language family.The computational processing of these languages is achieved by formalising the grammars of these two languages using Grammatical Framework (GF) and its Resource Grammar Library (RGL). In addition to the grammar, a general-purpose computational lexicon for the two languages is developed. Although we utilise the lexicon to tremendously increase the lexical coverage of the grammars, the lexicon can be used for other NLP tasks.In this thesis a symbolic / rule-based approach is taken because the lack of adequate languages resources makes the use of data-driven NLP approaches unsuitable for these languages

Workshop Proceedings of the 12th edition of the KONVENS conference

The 2014 issue of KONVENS is even more a forum for exchange: its main topic is the interaction between Computational Linguistics and Information Science, and the synergies such interaction, cooperation and integrated views can produce. This topic at the crossroads of different research traditions which deal with natural language as a container of knowledge, and with methods to extract and manage knowledge that is linguistically represented is close to the heart of many researchers at the Institut für Informationswissenschaft und Sprachtechnologie of Universität Hildesheim: it has long been one of the institute’s research topics, and it has received even more attention over the last few years

"Irritating but helpful" : using a social media tool for peer and user writing feedback in a Spanish language course

Language students need formative feedback on written production during the drafting phase, before receiving summative feedback on the final written product. However, providing this type of feedback to students adds to instructors’ already busy workload. Peer feedback has been suggested as an alternative to instructor-provided feedback, but peers’ limited target language knowledge restricts the utility of this feedback. Native speakers may be more capable of identifying target language gaps than are nonnative speaking peers. Furthermore, Web 2.0 affords learners with tools to connect target language learners with native speakers of the target language. The goal of this study was to understand more about what occurs in the context of language learning via social networking websites. This exploratory case study examined feedback to written production received by 18 intermediate-level university Spanish language learners in an intact semester-long Spanish course using Lang-8, a website that supports language learning via social networking tools. The following four research questions were addressed: 1) Who responds to assigned student writings on Lang-8? 2) How much feedback do students receive? 3) What kinds of feedback do they get? 4) What is the students’ response to this feedback? The amount and types of feedback received from both peers and unknown website users were quantitatively analyzed, and these data were triangulated with student participants’ survey responses to four end-of-chapter and one end-of-semester surveys to reveal students’ reactions to receiving feedback on Lang-8. Findings indicated that participants received predominantly accurate feedback from both peer and user responder groups, and this feedback was generally perceived as useful by participants. Moreover, peers offered more global feedback related to content, whereas website users provided more local feedback related to form. Overall, participants’ reactions to receiving feedback was positive, but variation was observed in individual responses that was attributed to individual preferences related to response provider groups, feedback types, and language variations present when receiving feedback from multiple sources. Based on the affordances and limitations of using Lang-8 to receive feedback as revealed through this study, it seems that Lang-8 can afford instructors a way to outsource formative feedback for target language learners.Foreign Language Educatio

Comparing Second Language Learners' Sensitivity to Arabic Derivational and Inflectional Morphology at the Lexical and Sentence Levels

While L2 learners are less sensitive than native speakers to morphological structure in general (Clahsen & Felser, 2006; Jiang, 2007; Neubauer & Clahsen, 2009), researchers disagree about the roles different features of morphological systems play in determining the timecourse and accuracy of their acquisition by L2 learners. Some studies suggest that L2 learners process derivational morphemes in a more native-like manner than inflectional ones (Silva & Clahsen, 2008; Kirkici & Clahsen, 2013). Other research demonstrates accurate acquisition of L2 inflectional morphology as well (Gor & Jackson, 2013; Hopp, 2003; Jackson, 2008; Sagarra & Herschensohn, 2010). To date, few studies have directly compared L2 acquisition of inflectional and derivational morphology (Silva & Clahsen, 2008; Kirkici & Clahsen, 2013). Arabic verbs exhibit a system of derivational morphology whose function in constraining event structures and theta roles allows for comparably direct comparison with inflectional morphemes at the sentence level. Forty-four L2 learners and thirty-three native speakers of Arabic participated in the current study, which used three behavioral tasks: a primed lexical decision task, an acceptability judgment task, and a self-paced reading task, to triangulate a picture of L1 and L2 Arabic learners' commands of derivational and inflectional morphology at the lexical and sentential levels. Results of the lexical decision and self-paced reading tasks indicated that both L2 learners and native speakers alike made use of Arabic derivational and inflectional morphological structure during lexical access and sentence processing. However, the acceptability judgment task found that L2 learners made far more accurate judgments about Arabic inflectional errors than about derivational errors. By contrast, native speakers made accurate judgments about both kinds of morphological errors. Thus, L2 learners' behavior regarding Arabic inflectional morphology was at least as native-like as their behavior regarding derivational morphology, if not more so, across tasks. This pattern of results accords with previous research that found accurate processing of inflectional morphology in proficient L2 learners. It also adds to a growing body of research suggesting that the distinction between derivational and inflectional morphology in Semitic languages may be more graded than it is in Indo-European languages (Boudelaa & Marslen-Wilson, 2000; Frost, Forster, Deutsch, 1997)