Taiwanese College Students’ Perceptions of Integrating Multimedia into ESP Courses

The purpose of this study was to investigate the learning difficulties and the preferred learning strategies among Taiwanese college students while they were taking English for Specific Purpose (ESP) courses. Two different ESP courses are examined: one of the courses is an undergraduate Marketing English course and the other is an undergraduate Hospitality English course, both in a college of liberal arts and social science in the national university in Taiwan. The instructor in the ESP courses adopted the multimedia—integrated instruction. The multimedia—integrated instruction not only provided authentic materials for learners in the target ESP, but also offered students real situational settings and useful activities that based on individual need. The result of the study indicated that students’ self-learning effectiveness in both performance and linguistic skills were significantly improved. In addition, they reported satisfaction with the multimedia-integrated instruction. Thus, the multimedia—integrated instruction increase learners’ motivation and also offer a solution to learners’ problems in the development of ESP courses

The Impact of Multimedia Materials Teaching on EFL Elementary School Learners

Nowadays, it is hard for EFL students to learn a foreign language well because of the learning environment and limited teaching materials. Therefore, if we are willing to create a successful foreign language learning classroom, the use of multimedia will be very important. Besides, learning with multimedia has become the latest tendency among the education field. For instance, many researches and professionals all approve that various materials of multimedia learning can make the learning more productive, impressive, abundant, and memorable. In this research, multimedia materials were constructed by video clips. Furthermore, after adopting multimedia materials, some findings showed that multimedia-material teaching can strongly increase the vocabulary acquisition in a short period of time. In addition, students can learn not only by spelling and images, but also by vivid of video clips presentation and sounds to make connections to their daily life. Furthermore, through the interect program, their learning motivation is higher than the traditional teaching styles. Students get more positive learning attitude and their self-efficacy all been improved. Therefore, multimedia-material teaching can make learners learning more productive, abundant and efficient; therefore, using multimedia-material teaching will be one of the important teaching materials that can be applied in the classroom

Constructing space-filling curves of compact connected manifolds

AbstractLet M be a compact connected (topological) manifold of finite- or infinite-dimension n. Let 0 ⩽ r ⩽ 1 be arbitrary but fixed. We construct in this paper a space-filling curve f from [0,1] onto M, under which M is the image of a compact set A of Hausdorff dimension r. Moreover, the restriction of f to A is one-to-one over the image of a dense subset provided that 0 ⩽ r ⩽ log|2n/log(2n + 2). The proof is based on the special case where M is the Hilbert cube [0,1]ω

Effects of English Teaching with Interactive Whiteboards in the Elementary English Classrooms

The purpose of the study was to probe the effectiveness of English language teaching through Interactive Whiteboards (IWBs). Three specific factors were probed: (a) the results from immediate test and retention test; (b) students’ perceptions related to the utilization of IWBs; (c) the advantages and disadvantages of the technology-supported instruction. Forty-three students from Grade 3 students in Sahes Elementary School in Taiwan were engaged in either technology-supported group or none technology-supported group. The results revealed that the experimental group through technology-supported instruction significantly outperformed the control group on students’ immediate test and retention test. Moreover, students’ perceptions related to the IWBs indicated that most of them enjoying learning English in the technology-supported classrooms. Finally, the results also showed the advantages and disadvantages through the IWBs instructions. The study revealed that teaching through technology was an effective way to help students in English learning

A Unified Gaussian Process for Branching and Nested Hyperparameter Optimization

Choosing appropriate hyperparameters plays a crucial role in the success of neural networks as hyper-parameters directly control the behavior and performance of the training algorithms. To obtain efficient tuning, Bayesian optimization methods based on Gaussian process (GP) models are widely used. Despite numerous applications of Bayesian optimization in deep learning, the existing methodologies are developed based on a convenient but restrictive assumption that the tuning parameters are independent of each other. However, tuning parameters with conditional dependence are common in practice. In this paper, we focus on two types of them: branching and nested parameters. Nested parameters refer to those tuning parameters that exist only within a particular setting of another tuning parameter, and a parameter within which other parameters are nested is called a branching parameter. To capture the conditional dependence between branching and nested parameters, a unified Bayesian optimization framework is proposed. The sufficient conditions are rigorously derived to guarantee the validity of the kernel function, and the asymptotic convergence of the proposed optimization framework is proven under the continuum-armed-bandit setting. Based on the new GP model, which accounts for the dependent structure among input variables through a new kernel function, higher prediction accuracy and better optimization efficiency are observed in a series of synthetic simulations and real data applications of neural networks. Sensitivity analysis is also performed to provide insights into how changes in hyperparameter values affect prediction accuracy