AN ENCOURAGING STRATEGY IN PEER CORRECTION

The purpose of the article is to introduce a strategy in the peer correction. Any correction of the mistake being reluctantly welcomed is usually accepted with a sense of disfavor. Peer correction in speaking activity is no exception. To turn this tedious process into an attractive one we have developed a relatively new strategy. Peer correction in writing activity has long been practiced. Learners enjoy discovering each other’s mistakes in essays, spelling or grammar tests, etc. But correcting speaker’s errors being rarely carried out has gradually almost been forgotten. The paper introduces a new concept in peer correction involving a point system. The students actively participating in a correction process are praised with a surplus point for a corrected mistake, which is further taken into account. The strategy has proved to be a motivating one in teaching English as a foreign language.The purpose of the article is to introduce a strategy in the peer correction. Any correction of the mistake being reluctantly welcomed is usually accepted with a sense of disfavor. Peer correction in speaking activity is no exception. To turn this tedious process into an attractive one we have developed a relatively new strategy. Peer correction in writing activity has long been practiced. Learners enjoy discovering each other’s mistakes in essays, spelling or grammar tests, etc. But correcting speaker’s errors being rarely carried out has gradually almost been forgotten. The paper introduces a new concept in peer correction involving a point system. The students actively participating in a correction process are praised with a surplus point for a corrected mistake, which is further taken into account. The strategy has proved to be a motivating one in teaching English as a foreign language

Wronging a Right: Generating Better Errors to Improve Grammatical Error Detection

Grammatical error correction, like other machine learning tasks, greatly benefits from large quantities of high quality training data, which is typically expensive to produce. While writing a program to automatically generate realistic grammatical errors would be difficult, one could learn the distribution of naturallyoccurring errors and attempt to introduce them into other datasets. Initial work on inducing errors in this way using statistical machine translation has shown promise; we investigate cheaply constructing synthetic samples, given a small corpus of human-annotated data, using an off-the-rack attentive sequence-to-sequence model and a straight-forward post-processing procedure. Our approach yields error-filled artificial data that helps a vanilla bi-directional LSTM to outperform the previous state of the art at grammatical error detection, and a previously introduced model to gain further improvements of over 5% $F_{0.5}$ score. When attempting to determine if a given sentence is synthetic, a human annotator at best achieves 39.39 $F_1$ score, indicating that our model generates mostly human-like instances.Comment: Accepted as a short paper at EMNLP 201

Challenges in Teaching Pronunciation at Tertiary Level in Bangladesh

Teaching pronunciation is one the most challenging parts of ELT in Bangladesh. Very few research and least attention on pronunciation teaching has instigated those challenges more. Moreover, setting an ambitious target to achieve native like pronunciation and teaching without considering the Bangladeshi context are more specific reasons for creating those problems. Therefore, this paper concentrates on the discussion of the existing condition of teaching pronunciation in Bangladesh. Consequently, it starts with presenting existing circumstances of pronunciation teaching in Bangladesh, and showing what the achievable and realistic goal should be for this situation. Then, it talks about the challenges that the teachers face while teaching pronunciation in ELT classroom. This discussion provides deep insight into those challenges which are only applicable to Bangladeshi students. Finally, the paper suggests some contextual and practical solutions to those specific problems

Reducing Students' Foreign Language Anxiety in Speaking Class Through Cooperative Learning

One of the challenges in teaching English as a foreign language to students in Indonesia is the existence of Foreign Language Anxiety (FLA) that are faced by students at any level of education. FLA has hindered the students in mastering English, especially in Speaking Skill, it is shown by their performances in the class which are too nervous, shy, unwilling to participate and lack of confidence.Gardner and McIntyre,(1987) stated that FLA negatively impacts the quality of learning and is a critical factor in learners' success or failure in learning a foreign language. Based on the aforementioned statements, it means reducing students' language anxiety can enhance their overall learning experience and improve motivation and achievement.Thus, for many years, some researchers have attempted to find the most suitable techniques and methods to help students overcome this problem. Some of which is by providing them a conducive learning environment, the culture of caring and of course, a non-threatening atmosphere in the classroom. For that reason, this paper isintended to propose a technique to reduce the students' anxiety; that is cooperative learning. By using cooperative learning, it is expected that it can overcome this problem, as this technique offers a good language-learning environment in which the process of learning dealing with cooperativeness rather than competitiveness. This is in line with Krashen (1982). He, through his Affective Filter Hypothesis, contends that one of the factors of language acquisition to happen is in a low-filter language-learning environment

An evaluation of word usage practice lessons

Thesis (M.A.)--Boston Universit