An Online Oral Practice/Assessment Platform: Speak Everywhere

Despite its obvious importance, it appears that in many foreignlanguage programs, oral practice is not given as much time andattention as it deserves. Or perhaps it is more accurate to say thatforeign language professionals recognize the need for more oralpractice, but do not have at their disposal a convenient means toprovide it. An online oral practice/assessment platform, SpeakEverywhere, has been developed to fill this void. It allows instructorswithout special computer knowledge to quickly create video-basedspeaking exercises and quizzes for their students to work on outside theclassroom. The instructor can access the oral productions that thestudents submit to the system, and grade them or give individualfeedback on them either in text or audio or both. Using its flexible andeasy-to-use authoring sub-system, it is possible to create exercises ofvarious formats (e.g. Q&A, repeat after the model, structure drills,role-play, and oral reading)

Effects of Oral Repetition on Learners’ Japanese Word Accentuation

Japanese word accentuation is a problematic area for learnersunfamiliar with a pitch accent system. Since accent locations areunpredictable, learners are typically told to memorize them by rote,which is a time-consuming, tedious, and demanding task. It wouldcertainly be ideal for learners to learn correct accentuation withoutexplicit instruction as they learn new words. This article reports on apreliminary study that examined effects of a computer-based onlineword repetition exercise on the learning of Japanese wordaccentuation. 41 students in their 10th week and 17 students in their12th week in a 2nd-year 1st-semester Japanese course took a pretest,followed by computer-based online word repetition practice on theSpeak Everywhere system, a posttest immediately after the practice,and a delayed posttest after one week (class-and-computer condition).Out of the same group of students now in a 2nd-year 2nd-semestercourse, 22 students took a pretest, followed by two posttests in their 5thweek (class-only condition). A paired t-test (two tailed) performed on13 overlapping subjects found a significant difference between the twoconditions (t=5.58, p<.001, Cohen’s d =1.9309). The online word repetition practice produced a significant gain in accentuation scores without explicit instruction, while classroom instruction alone was not sufficient to produce a significant gain

日本語用例・コロケーション情報抽出システム『茶漉』

パデュー大学Purdue University本稿は,日本語コーパスからコロケーション情報を拍出することを主眼に設計・開発された,ウェブ上で簡便に利用できるアプリケーション『茶漉』を紹介する。ウェブ上のアプリケーションであるので,ブラウザでアクセスするだけで利用でき,ソフトウェアのインストール,サーバの設定のような導入手続きは一切必要としない。コロケーション情報を調べる以外にkwic形式による用例検索も可能である。当システムの公開が,コーパスを用いた日本語研究の発展の一助となることを願う。This article introduces Chakoshi, a user-friendly web application designed and developed to extract collocations from Japanese text corpora. Because it is a web application, users need only to access the application web site, and there is no need to install special software or configure a server computer. In addition to extracting collocations, it is also capable of generating KWIC output in response to search queries. It is hoped that this publicly available system will help promote corpus-based Japanese linguistic research

Teaching Languages Online: Innovations and Challenges

Language professionals long resisted teaching online mainly because it was unthinkable to teach speaking in the online environment. Recent advances in technology, however, have made it conceivable. This chapter presents the design and implementation of online courses in Japanese and Chinese recently developed and being offered at Purdue University. We will highlight not only technologies involved, but also pedagogical innovations that helped resolve difficult issues. The efficacy of online teaching will also be touched upon. Reactions from enrolled students and the instructors that have taught the courses will also be shared

MyoD regulates apoptosis of myoblasts through microRNA-mediated down-regulation of Pax3

Suppression of the myogenic transcription factor MyoD is required for maintenance of muscle stem cells

Online Business Chinese Speaking Instruction: A Speak Everywhere Speaking Program for Practical Business Chinese

Despite the obvious importance of speaking skills, for technology and other reasons, it is difficult for foreign language instructors to provide ample speaking practice opportunities to students. However, particularly in business language teaching, speaking is crucial. To address this problem, the authors have created an oral program for a Business Chinese textbook on an online platform called Speak Everywhere. This article discusses general oral training issues and reports on the design of the oral program

Implementation and Evaluation of a Curricular Framework for Online Language Courses

[EN] Constraints caused by the Covid-19 pandemic led to a spike in courses originally designed for in-class instruction being delivered online. As the pandemic wanes many courses will return to in-class instruction while other programs will look to develop post-pandemic long-term online courses, indicating a clear need for an effective curriculum for online foreign language classes. This article describes the implementation and evaluation of a newly developed curricular framework for online language courses at university level. Primarily, this framework is designed to foster oral proficiency. The technology used to implement the framework was also developed specifically to facilitate speaking practice. We have used the framework at Purdue University to develop a curriculum for Japanese online courses Levels 1 4 (i.e., semesters 1 4). Japanese Level 1 is used in this article to illustrate the features and effectiveness of the framework. The framework has three major components: asynchronous self-learning modules, weekly small-group synchronous sessions, and performance-based assessments. Each component involves a pedagogical innovation, a technological innovation, or both. This study s main research question was, Do students in an online course designed using the new framework develop a degree of oral proficiency comparable to that of students in a classroom? An oral test administered at the end of the course showed that the online students performed comparably to their classroom counterparts on question and answer and picture description tasks and outperformed them on an elicited imitation task. The results of a questionnaire also indicated participants positive perceptions of the technology used and the online course itself. These findings serve as further evidence for the effectiveness of the proposed curricular framework.Miyamoto, M.; Peterson, J.; Fukada, A. (2024). Implementation and Evaluation of a Curricular Framework for Online Language Courses. The EuroCALL Review. 30(2):55-68. https://doi.org/10.4995/eurocall.2023.16117556830