Using tracking software for writing instruction

is what is often evaluated in the context of language teaching, the process of giving thought to linguistic form is fascinating. For almost forty years, language teachers have found it more effective to help learners in the writing process than in the written product; it is there that they could find sources of writing problems. Despite all controversy evoked by post-process approaches with respect to process writing, information technology has lately offered tools that can shed new light on how writing takes place. Software that can record keyboard, mouse, and screen activities is capable of unraveling mysteries of the writing process. Technology has given teachers and learners the option of examining the writing process as it unfolds, enabling them to diagnose strategy as well as wording problems, thus empowering teachers to guide learners individually in how to think about each of their trouble spots in the context of a specific product of writing. With these advances in information technology, metacognitive awareness and strategy training begin to acquire new dimensions of meaning. Technology lays open aspects of the writing process, offering unprecedented insight into creative text production as well. This paper attempts to explain how tracking software can influence writing instruction. It briefly examines the process and post-process approaches to assess their viability, explains the concept of tracking software, proposes methodology needed for the adoption of this technology, and then discusses the pedagogical implications of these issues

Computational Discourse Analysis for Interpretation

In order to perform discourse analysis on interpretation, a computational method that facilitates the scrutiny of SL and TL discourses on a millisecond by millisecond basis was developed. Using an in-house purpose-built program, interpretation discourse analysis can now be automated and made quantitative. Both SL and TL discourses are graphically plotted on a clock-time axis, thereby facilitating a comparison of simultaneously-delivered speech in terms of the duration of each burst and pause. As well, onsets and offsets can be compared to their equivalents in the other language, as can the degree of simultaneity of speech between speaker and interpreter, and various other matters of concern to the interpretation theoretician.Une m"thode informatis"e qui permet lÕexamen attentif du discours dans la langue source et dans la langue cible, milliseconde par milliseconde, a "t" "labor"e afin de permettre une analyse de lÕinterpr"tation. En utilisant un programme sp"cialement d"velopp" ‹ cet effet, lÕanalyse du discours de lÕinterpr"tation peut maintenant 'tre automatis"e et rendue quantitative. Les discours en langue source et en langue cible peuvent 'tre trac"s graphiquement et parall'lement sur lÕaxe des temps, facilitant ainsi la comparaison entre le discours et son interpr"tation simultan"e; on peut comparer la dur"e de chaque "clat et de chaque pause, le d"but et la compensation, le degr" de simultan"it" entre lÕorateur et lÕinterpr'te et bien dÕautres param'tres importants au th"oricien de lÕinterpr"tariat

Studying Style in Simultaneous Interpretation

Several tools are developed to facilitate the quantitative analysis of interpretation style, a matter that has hitherto been discussed only in vague terms. These tools can allow the investigation of questions such as: How does an interpreter divide up a source language input, to what extent does he mirror a source language speaker, and to what degree does he practise reformulation? Furthermore, an adaptive monitoring instrument is devised to facilitate the graphic representation of the linear developments of a source language discourse and its simultaneous interpretation equivalent. Not only does it allow the assessment of convergence and divergence between the two discourses, but this also permits commenting on an interpreter's tempo by characterising the narrow and broad periodicity within his discourse, and on his composure and tribulation by describing his consistency and fluency in the discourse.Divers outils ont été développés pour faciliter l'analyse quantitative du style d'interprétation, un sujet qui n'a été que vaguement traité jusqu'à maintenant. Ces outils peuvent permettre la recherche sur des questions telles que "Comment procède l'interprète pour partager le message original reçu ?", "Jusqu'à quel point reflète-t-il l'orateur original?" et "Jusqu'à quel point pratique-t-il une modification? ". De plus, un instrument adaptif de surveillance est mis au point pour faciliter la représentation graphique du développement linéaire d'un discours et de son interprétation équivalente simultanée. Non seulement nous permet-il d'évaluer la convergence et la divergence entre les deux discours, mais aussi et surtout de porter un jugement sur le tempo d'un interprète en caractérisant la périodicité (courte ou longue) de son discours, ainsi que sur son sang-froid ou son trouble en décrivant le degré de cohérence et d'aisance dans le discours

A Computer Aided Learning Tool for Readers

A bilingual piece of software has been developed to cultivate student speed and critical reading abilities by expanding their visual span, improving their eye movement, reducing their visual regression, developing their stock of vocabulary, and by honing their skimming, scanning, and critical understanding skills. This paper overviews the software, explains its educational value for language teaching, and experimentally demonstrates its utility

A Computer Aided Learning Tool for Readers

A bilingual piece of software has been developed to cultivate student speed and critical reading abilities by expanding their visual span, improving their eye movement, reducing their visual regression, developing their stock of vocabulary, and by honing their skimming, scanning, and critical understanding skills. This paper overviews the software, explains its educational value for language teaching, and experimentally demonstrates its utility

ENGLISH-ARABIC POLITICAL PARALLEL CORPUS: CONSTRUCTION, ANALYSIS, AND A CASE STUDY IN TRANSLATION STRATEGIES

This study reports on the construction of a one million word English-Arabic Political Parallel Corpus (EAPPC), which will be a useful resource for research in translation studies, language learning and teaching, bilingual lexicography, contrastive studies, political science studies, and cross-language information retrieval. It describes the phases of corpus compilation, and explores the corpus, by way of illustration, to discover the translation strategies used in rendering the Arabic and Islamic culture-specific terms takfîr and takfîrî from Arabic into English and from English into Arabic. The Corpus consists of 351 English and Arabic original documents and their translations. A total of 189 speeches, 80 interviews, and 68 letters, translated by anonymous translators in the Royal Hashemite Court, were selected and culled from King Abdullah II's official website, in addition to the textual material of the English and Arabic versions of His Majesty's book, Our Last Best Chance: The Pursuit of Peace in a Time of Peril (2011). The texts were meta-annotated, segmented, tokenized, English-Arabic aligned, stemmed, and POS-tagged. Furthermore, a parallel (Bilingual) concordance was built to facilitate exploration of the parallel corpus. The challenges encountered in corpus compilation were found to be the scarcity of freely available machine-readable Arabic-English translated texts, and the deficiency of tools that process Arabic texts