Distributional effects and individual differences in L2 morphology learning

Second language (L2) learning outcomes may depend on the structure of the input and learners’ cognitive abilities. This study tested whether less predictable input might facilitate learning and generalization of L2 morphology while evaluating contributions of statistical learning ability, nonverbal intelligence, phonological short-term memory, and verbal working memory. Over three sessions, 54 adults were exposed to a Russian case-marking paradigm with a balanced or skewed item distribution in the input. Whereas statistical learning ability and nonverbal intelligence predicted learning of trained items, only nonverbal intelligence also predicted generalization of case-marking inflections to new vocabulary. Neither measure of temporary storage capacity predicted learning. Balanced, less predictable input was associated with higher accuracy in generalization but only in the initial test session. These results suggest that individual differences in pattern extraction play a more sustained role in L2 acquisition than instructional manipulations that vary the predictability of lexical items in the input

MeIPeAS: An Intelligent Virtual Tutor for Mexican Elementary Schoolchildren

Artículo en revista indizada publicado en Research in Computing ScienceIt is known that virtual tutors have a wide range of functionalities, which have been little exploited and applied in the educational field at the primary level. However, these functionalities allow to offer mechanisms of interaction with students through an interactive dialogue by using text to speech, and even more sophisticated, the recognition and understanding of natural language or speech. In this paper, a personalized virtual tutor for the primary education scenario in Mexico is presented. This virtual tutor is called Mexican Intelligent Pedagogical Agent for Schoolchildren (MeIPeAS) and was created to be used as a pedagogical support mechanism offering a unique attraction for current and future generations of schoolchildren in Mexico. The virtual tutor has been validated in practice in public primary schools of the municipalities of the State of Mexico in Mexico. This validation is to analyze the impact of the user experience from the obtained results having relevant information about the reinforcement of topics taught within the classroom

A Questionnaire for Incoming High School ELL Students to Better Assist Them in Entering the American Educational System

This project is designed to help teachers get a better understanding of the incoming ELL students\u27 backgrounds to better assist these students in the education process and make the transition from their native educational system to the American educational system smoother. Teachers must be aware of ELL students\u27 family situations, lives outside the school, diverse background knowledge and how these things affect reading and writing comprehension, and be able to choose the most appropriate assessment and instruction

Towards the Use of Dialog Systems to Facilitate Inclusive Education

Continuous advances in the development of information technologies have currently led to the possibility of accessing learning contents from anywhere, at anytime, and almost instantaneously. However, accessibility is not always the main objective in the design of educative applications, specifically to facilitate their adoption by disabled people. Different technologies have recently emerged to foster the accessibility of computers and new mobile devices, favoring a more natural communication between the student and the developed educative systems. This chapter describes innovative uses of multimodal dialog systems in education, with special emphasis in the advantages that they provide for creating inclusive applications and learning activities

Think about language dialogically – Understand action dialogically

Asking for the possibility of a dialogical approach to spoken as well as to written language on the basis of the founding text by Jakubinskij Über die dialogische Rede (On Dialogical Speech), (1923)

Películas y series como recurso en Educación Primaria

Nowadays, the reality of Spanish pupils is influenced by the large number of audio-visual incentives to which they are exposed from very early ages. From all age ranges, pupils are keen on using digital tools for all kinds of activities, from listening to music or playing games, to watch films or series. In the following document, the focus will be on this later use of technology, that is the use of movies and series as a pedagogical and didactic element in our classroom. This project aims to promote strategies for the application of technological resources in the classroom, which serve to complement and reinforce pupils´ learning, in this case, a group of 2nd Grade of Primary Education in Palencia, Spain. In addition, an analysis will be carried out on the pupils´ previous routines with respect to their screentime. All this, with the subsequent objective of creating the habit of watching movies and series in the foreign language English, in the pupils' homes.La realidad del alumnado en España hoy en día está influida por la gran cantidad de estímulos audiovisuales a los que se ve expuesto desde edades muy tempranas. Los estudiantes de cualquier rango de edad están acostumbrados a usar herramientas digitales para todo tipo de actividades, desde escuchar música o jugar a videojuegos, hasta ver películas y series. En el siguiente documento, el foco estará puesto en este uso posterior de la tecnología, es decir, el uso de películas y series como elemento pedagógico y didáctico en nuestra aula. Este estudio tiene el fin de promover estrategias para la aplicación de recursos tecnológicos en el aula, los cuales sirven para complementar y reforzar el aprendizaje del alumnado, en este caso un grupo de 2.º de Educación Primaria en Palencia, España. Además, se realizará un análisis sobre las rutinas previas del alumno con respecto al tiempo de ocio que dedican delante de las pantallas. Todo esto, con el objetivo posterior de crear el hábito del visionado de películas y series en la lengua extranjera inglés en los hogares del alumnado.Grado en Educación Primari

The Arabic language : a Latin of modernity?

Standard Arabic is directly derived from the language of the Quran. The Arabic language of the holy book of Islam is seen as the prescriptive benchmark of correctness for the use and standardization of Arabic. As such, this standard language is removed from the vernaculars over a millennium years, which Arabic-speakers employ nowadays in everyday life. Furthermore, standard Arabic is used for written purposes but very rarely spoken, which implies that there are no native speakers of this language. As a result, no speech community of standard Arabic exists. Depending on the region or state, Arabs (understood here as Arabic speakers) belong to over 20 different vernacular speech communities centered around Arabic dialects. This feature is unique among the so-called “large languages” of the modern world. However, from a historical perspective, it can be likened to the functioning of Latin as the sole (written) language in Western Europe until the Reformation and in Central Europe until the mid-19th century. After the seventh to ninth century, there was no Latin-speaking community, while in day-to-day life, people who employed Latin for written use spoke vernaculars. Afterward these vernaculars replaced Latin in written use also, so that now each recognized European language corresponds to a speech community. In future, faced with the demands of globalization, the diglossic nature of Arabic may yet yield a ternary polyglossia (triglossia): with the vernacular for everyday life; standard Arabic for formal texts, politics, and religion; and a western language (English, French, or Spanish) for science, business technology, and the perusal of belles-lettres.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

FOSTERING MULTIMODAL PEDAGOGY FOR TEACHING READING “ENGLISH TEXTS”

This study is projected to present an analysis of a series of teaching-learning processes applying multimodal pedagogy to a topic based text-based teaching of English in Indonesia. The motivation is because today technology of communication is more complex and provides multimodal network that the communication among people appears not only in verbal communication but also applies multimodal, in which it involves verbal, images, graphics, cyber links, and other semiotic resources. On the other hand mono-modal pedagogy just include only one mode of meaning-making, usually verbal. That is why, the language teaching should not be developed traditionally, mono-modal fashions; and but it should be able to meet appropriate needs and necessities of the learners, approaches to teaching multimodal texts in multimodal fashions needs to be specifically developed. Based on the result, some pedagogic principles and relevant models of teaching are then suggested to be applied in the Teaching of English as a foreign language in Indonesia context. Keywords: multimodal pedagogy, topic based text-based teaching, semantic resource

SFL in L2 Writing Teacher Education: A Case Study of an EFL Pre-service Teacher in Conceptualizing Grammar

Abstract SFL in L2 Writing Teacher Education: A Case STUDY of an EFL PRE-SERVICE Teacher IN CONCEPTUALIZING GRAMMAR English education globally has been challenged by an increasing need for academic English practices to support access to content area knowledge and scholarly exchanges. However, EFL (English as a Foreign Language) teachers often lack the linguistic and pedagogical knowledge of how academic texts work to construct meanings in specific disciplines and how to design effective academic literacy instruction accessible to all students. This study, therefore, is aimed at responding to the intensifying demand for academic literacy instruction in international contexts by investigating an EFL teacher’s participation in MATESOL program in North America informed in part by Halliday’s SFL (Systemic Functional Linguistics) and Martin’s genre theory. The study focuses on exploring how this teacher’s conceptions of grammar shifted, if at all, over the courses in the teacher education program and how the teacher’s classroom practice during the first year in her career reflect, if at all, the perspective of language learning. This study is informed by two main conceptions as the theoretical frameworks. First, Halliday and Martin’s social conception of language and language learning serves as the theoretical basis informing the pedagogical knowledge that the teacher develops. Second, a sociocultural approach to teachers’ knowledge development serves as a framework to understand how the teacher conceptualizes a more functional conception of language and language learning for academic literacy instruction in a sustained process of teacher learning with respect to the teacher’s whole lived experiences. This study uses an ethnographic method of data collection and analysis. The data were collected from multiple sources including field notes, instructional materials, audio tapes, email exchanges, interviews, textbooks, and course assignments. Data collection focused on documenting this teacher in conceptualizing of grammar over her participation in the teacher education program and over one year of teaching experience upon completion of her MATESOL program. In analyzing these data, this study involved coding and categorizing processes to generate patterns of themes with reference to the research questions. This study is expected to contribute to an effort of preparing teachers with the expertise of teaching academic literacy and development in international contexts by considering how local contexts shape their pedagogical knowledge development