Chalenging Issues in Learning Listening: a Correlational Study in University Level

Listening is one of the four skills that have an important role in mastering the target language, especially in the university level. This skill is very useful to help college students to do some academic activities that involve attending lectures or speeches, presenting materials or finding some resources to do their assignments. However, listening skill cannot be developed well due to some problems. Based on a research, listening problems include lack of vocabulary mastery, less understanding grammatical forms, e.g: speakers' utterances, unclear pronunciation and speed of speech, unclear contents of the passages, and physical setting including uncomfortable class; and lack of facility and background noise. The data is proven by the achievement of listening test that indicates that students who have listening problems tends to have low achievement in the class. To overcome this problem, lectures have to design specific instructional design to solve the listening problems. This paper will discuss more about listening problems and the appropriate learning strategies to solve the problems

Learning Theories in Instructional Multimedia for English Learning

Learning theory is the concept of human learning. This concept is one of the important components in instructional for learning, especially English learning. English subject becomes one of important subjects for students but learning English needs specific strategy since it is not our vernacular. Considering human learning process in English learning is expected to increase students' motivation to understand English better. Nowadays, the application of learning theories in English learning has appeared in several learning methods and media. One of popular media today is instructional multimedia by using computer. There are many educators who design English material in certain computer software or games. It is still possible to apply learning theories in instructional multimedia program since multimedia provides complete learning by using text, picture, sound, video and animation. Multimedia program can adapt students' differences in learning. It is a good potential of collaborating learning process and technology to learn English better. The program will help students to master the whole English language competence (listening, speaking, reading and writing). This paper will discuss the types of learning theory that can be used in instructional multimedia to learn English. This paper also provides several examples of instructional multimedia product that contain learning theories application

Impact of visual based prosody training on listening micro-skills.

El fomento de la habilidad de escucha en el aprendizaje del idioma inglés ha sido directamente acercado al desarrollo de estrategias para mejorar la escucha comprensión. Sin embargo, incluso abrazar tal habilidad receptiva en clase, el lenguaje educadores han prestado poca atención al desarrollo de las habilidades de escucha micro necesaria para permitir la comunicación genuina. Como Ylinen (2010) sostiene, la correcta la comprensión del habla idioma extranjero requiere un reconocimiento adecuado de los sonidos del habla. Con esto en mente, este estudio trata de determinar hasta qué punto formación basada visual en la prosodia de la lengua facilitaría escucha los alumnos el desarrollo de micro-habilidades. Esta investigación involucró a 29 pre-servicio de idiomas Inglés profesores de una universidad pública que se inscribieron en la fonética y por supuesto fonología. Dentro de la clase de instrucción y actividades fuera de clase eran implementado por implique la utilización del software de análisis de realimentación visual acústico.Fostering the listening skill in English language learners has been directly approached to the development of strategies for enhancing listening comprehension. However, even embracing such receptive skill in class, language educators have paid scant regard to the development of listening micro-skills needed to enable genuine communication. As Ylinen (2010) contends, the correct comprehension of foreign language speech requires an adequate recognition of the speech sounds. With this in mind, this study sought to determine to what extent visual based training in prosody of the language would facilitate learners’ listening micro-skills development. This research involved 29 pre-service English language teachers from a public university who were enrolled in the Phonetics and Phonology course. In-class instruction and outside class activities were implemented by entailing the use of the acoustic analysis software visual feedback

The effects of computer-administered instructions providing domain or strategy knowledge on the comprehension of familiar and unfamiliar expository text.

The purpose of the study was to examine the effects of computer-administered instructions on the comprehension of familiar and unfamiliar college-level material. The instructions addressed two majors issues: (a) the effects of domain-specific knowledge and (b) the effects of strategy knowledge (i.e., knowledge about methods for active, purposeful reading). There were 157 university students who were recruited from psychology classes to participate in the study. There were two instructional conditions and two control conditions for the familiar and unfamiliar domain. The first instructional condition presented background information and information on concepts that were central to the topic. The second instructional condition instructed subjects on when and how to generate questions, summarize, and reread portions of the text. The third condition was a control condition in which subjects only read the text before taking the comprehension tests. The fourth condition was a control condition in which subjects were given the domain instructions and the tests without reading the text. The results were examined in terms of performance on each of three comprehension tests. On the sentence verification test, only a main effect for content familiarity was found. Subjects in the unfamiliar content condition performed better than subjects in the familiar content condition. On the summary test, there was a significant interaction of instruction with content familiarity. Contrary to what was expected, the advantage of the strategy condition over the control was not significant for the familiar content condition. For the unfamiliar content condition both the domain and strategy conditions showed a significant advantage over the control condition, but there was no difference between the domain and strategy. For the inference task, no effects of instructions were found for either condition of content familiarity. The findings provide support for the conclusion that strategy knowledge can be useful for comprehension even in the absence of domain knowledge. The evidence for the efficacy of the domain instructions used in the present study was weak, possibly due to methodological problems. The findings also support the use of multiple measures of comprehension in studies that examine the effects of comprehension instructions

ANALYSIS STUDENT’S SPEAKING PERFORMANCE AS AN ACADEMIC SPEAKER’S PRACTICE

Speaking is a productive skill with requires the interactive and performance process. To be able to improve and represent student’s capability in their speaking skill, student also need to drill and practice their speaking as the academic presenter, because if they able to speak academically, their speaking skill will get well improvement automatically. This research is aimed to investigate student’s speaking performance while they have academic speaking practice. The population of this research is 4th semester student of Universitas Muhammadiyah Tangerang, located in Cikokol-Tangerang. The sample is single sample. To find the data, researcher use video record originally from the speaker then doing the analysis with triangulation validity. This research showed that students speaking performance is need to be treating well, especially in their self-confident and vocabulary master, because it will be impossible for them to be a good speaker if they have lots of anxiety

On Cognitive Preferences and the Plausibility of Rule-based Models

It is conventional wisdom in machine learning and data mining that logical models such as rule sets are more interpretable than other models, and that among such rule-based models, simpler models are more interpretable than more complex ones. In this position paper, we question this latter assumption by focusing on one particular aspect of interpretability, namely the plausibility of models. Roughly speaking, we equate the plausibility of a model with the likeliness that a user accepts it as an explanation for a prediction. In particular, we argue that, all other things being equal, longer explanations may be more convincing than shorter ones, and that the predominant bias for shorter models, which is typically necessary for learning powerful discriminative models, may not be suitable when it comes to user acceptance of the learned models. To that end, we first recapitulate evidence for and against this postulate, and then report the results of an evaluation in a crowd-sourcing study based on about 3.000 judgments. The results do not reveal a strong preference for simple rules, whereas we can observe a weak preference for longer rules in some domains. We then relate these results to well-known cognitive biases such as the conjunction fallacy, the representative heuristic, or the recogition heuristic, and investigate their relation to rule length and plausibility.Comment: V4: Another rewrite of section on interpretability to clarify focus on plausibility and relation to interpretability, comprehensibility, and justifiabilit

Models for Learning (Mod4L) Final Report: Representing Learning Designs

The Mod4L Models of Practice project is part of the JISC-funded Design for Learning Programme. It ran from 1 May – 31 December 2006. The philosophy underlying the project was that a general split is evident in the e-learning community between development of e-learning tools, services and standards, and research into how teachers can use these most effectively, and is impeding uptake of new tools and methods by teachers. To help overcome this barrier and bridge the gap, a need is felt for practitioner-focused resources which describe a range of learning designs and offer guidance on how these may be chosen and applied, how they can support effective practice in design for learning, and how they can support the development of effective tools, standards and systems with a learning design capability (see, for example, Griffiths and Blat 2005, JISC 2006). Practice models, it was suggested, were such a resource. The aim of the project was to: develop a range of practice models that could be used by practitioners in real life contexts and have a high impact on improving teaching and learning practice. We worked with two definitions of practice models. Practice models are: 1. generic approaches to the structuring and orchestration of learning activities. They express elements of pedagogic principle and allow practitioners to make informed choices (JISC 2006) However, however effective a learning design may be, it can only be shared with others through a representation. The issue of representation of learning designs is, then, central to the concept of sharing and reuse at the heart of JISC’s Design for Learning programme. Thus practice models should be both representations of effective practice, and effective representations of practice. Hence we arrived at the project working definition of practice models as: 2. Common, but decontextualised, learning designs that are represented in a way that is usable by practitioners (teachers, managers, etc).(Mod4L working definition, Falconer & Littlejohn 2006). A learning design is defined as the outcome of the process of designing, planning and orchestrating learning activities as part of a learning session or programme (JISC 2006). Practice models have many potential uses: they describe a range of learning designs that are found to be effective, and offer guidance on their use; they support sharing, reuse and adaptation of learning designs by teachers, and also the development of tools, standards and systems for planning, editing and running the designs. The project took a practitioner-centred approach, working in close collaboration with a focus group of 12 teachers recruited across a range of disciplines and from both FE and HE. Focus group members are listed in Appendix 1. Information was gathered from the focus group through two face to face workshops, and through their contributions to discussions on the project wiki. This was supplemented by an activity at a JISC pedagogy experts meeting in October 2006, and a part workshop at ALT-C in September 2006. The project interim report of August 2006 contained the outcomes of the first workshop (Falconer and Littlejohn, 2006). The current report refines the discussion of issues of representing learning designs for sharing and reuse evidenced in the interim report and highlights problems with the concept of practice models (section 2), characterises the requirements teachers have of effective representations (section 3), evaluates a number of types of representation against these requirements (section 4), explores the more technically focused role of sequencing representations and controlled vocabularies (sections 5 & 6), documents some generic learning designs (section 8.2) and suggests ways forward for bridging the gap between teachers and developers (section 2.6). All quotations are taken from the Mod4L wiki unless otherwise stated

The impact of aging and language proficiency on the interhemispheric dynamics for discourse processing: a nirs study

Tese (doutorado) - Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, Centro de Comunicação e Expressão. Programa de Pós-graduação em Letras/Inglês e Literatura CorrespondenteO estudo do cérebro bilíngüe e em fase de envelhecimento pode trazer evidências importantes para nossa compreensão da dinâmica cerebral no processamento lingüístico. Há uma necessidade de se implementarem estudos que investiguem o processamento do discurso por estas populações. Neste estudo, investigou-se o processamento de narrativas em seus níveis micro-, macro-proposicional e situacional por bilíngües de proficiência intermediária na língua estrangeira (L1 inglês e L2 francês) e por indivíduos idosos. Os participantes leram narrativas seguidas de asserções as quais contemplavam um dos três níveis do discurso e julgavam a plausibilidade da informação apresentada na asserção com referência ao texto correspondente. Os resultados trazidos pelo estudo sugerem a possibilidade da aplicação de abordagens teóricas similares para explicar o processamento lingüístico nestas duas populações. Embora originadas por diferentes razões (envelhecimento ou reduzida proficiência na segunda língua), as deficiências ou limitações trazidas à compreensão da linguagem geram padrões comparáveis nas mudanças hemodinâmicas no cérebro (por exemplo, mudanças hemodinâmicas mais significativas, difusas ou em alguns casos bilaterais), as quais parecem poder ser explicadas através do mesmo enquadramento teórico, proposto por Banich e colegas. A partir dos dados, parece plausível afirmar-se que, em ambos os grupos, os hemisférios tenderam a cooperar e dividir os custos impostos pelo processamento da tarefa, ou solicitaram uma mais prominente ativação na área recrutada para executar a tarefa. De modo semelhante ao que é postulado pelo modelo, um aumento na ativação em uma região e/ou as contribuições entre os hemisférios foram positivamente correlacionadas ao nível de complexidade da tarefa. The study of the bilingual and of the aging brain has the potential to offer important evidences for our understanding of the cerebral dynamics for language processing. There is a special need of studies to investigate discourse processing by these populations. In this study, intermediate-proficiency bilinguals (English as L1 and French as L2) and elderly individuals' narrative processing at the micro-, macro-structural and situational levels were investigated, by the application of near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS). Participants read narratives followed by probes, which tapped one of the three levels, and judged the plausibility of their information by reference to the corresponding passage. The findings brought by the study suggest the possibility of the application of similar theoretical approaches to explain language processing in these two populations. Although emerging from different reasons (aging or low proficiency in the L2), the deficits or limitations brought to language comprehension generate some comparable inter-hemispheric patterns in brain hemodynamics (for instance that of more relevant, wider and in some cases bilateral hemodynamic changes), which are compatible with the theoretical framework proposed by Banich and colleagues. Thus, it seems to be arguable that in both populations the hemispheres tended to cooperate and share the costs for task processing, or demanded an increased activation in the recruited area in order to accomplish the task. Similarly to the assumptions made by the model, it seems to be plausible to state that the increase of activation within a region and/or the interhemispheric contributions were positively correlated to the amount of task difficulty

Invisible Net

In the past, several studies have found empirical support for the psychological notion of foregrounding. In this paper we will present the results of a reading experiment investigating descriptive and evaluative reader reactions to a poem, both in its original form (containing rather heavy foregrounding, both deviation and parallelism) and a version (from which all foregrounding has been removed). In this sense the research presents a replication of earlier experiments as well as a comparison with some more recent ones that failed to find empirical evidence for the notion of foregrounding. It will also cast light on Bortolussi and Dixon’s rereading paradigm. The results will be combined with a reconsideration of the concept of literariness, which will be confronted with the variety within a reader population, as well as with the diversity within a text corpus. The latter will be confronted with Van Peer’s (1991) effort to develop a descriptive definition of literature, incorporating the heterogeneous nature of the corpus of texts that are regarded as literary. Revisiting these aspects of texts and their reception may illuminate persistent problems in the theory of literariness