Hasil untuk "English language"

S. Krashen

W. Gale, Kenneth Ward Church

J. Wertsch

G. Smitherman

Mattia Antonino Di Gangi, R. Cattoni, L. Bentivogli et al.

Current research on spoken language translation (SLT) has to confront with the scarcity of sizeable and publicly available training corpora. This problem hinders the adoption of neural end-to-end approaches, which represent the state of the art in the two parent tasks of SLT: automatic speech recognition and machine translation. To fill this gap, we created MuST-C, a multilingual speech translation corpus whose size and quality will facilitate the training of end-to-end systems for SLT from English into 8 languages. For each target language, MuST-C comprises at least 385 hours of audio recordings from English TED Talks, which are automatically aligned at the sentence level with their manual transcriptions and translations. Together with a description of the corpus creation methodology (scalable to add new data and cover new languages), we provide an empirical verification of its quality and SLT results computed with a state-of-the-art approach on each language direction.

Mitchell P. Marcus

A. Fernald, T. Taeschner, J. Dunn et al.

Jae-Bong Jeon

Abstract Professionals within the field of language learning have predicted that chatbots would provide new opportunities for the teaching and learning of language. Despite the assumed benefits of utilizing chatbots in language classrooms, such as providing interactional chances or helping to create an anxiety-free atmosphere, little is known about learners’ actual use of chatbots during language classes or how chatbots affect their motivation to learn a language. To address these gaps, this exploratory study aimed to create an inventory of affordances that chatbots provide in the primary English as a foreign language (EFL) classroom and to explore how the affordances affect psychological aspects in language learners, particularly regarding their motivation to learn English through chatbots. Thirty-six Korean primary school learners participated in a 16-week EFL course that utilized customized chatbots. These chatbots were created using Google’s Dialogflow. After the course, individual in-depth interviews were conducted regarding the participants’ experiences and perceptions of the chatbots. Student-chatbot interaction logs produced during the course were also collected to supplement the interview data. Qualitative analysis of the interview transcripts and interaction logs revealed the presence of pedagogical, technological, and social affordances. Depending on the learner, the chatbot affordances were perceived differently; thus, each affordance acted as either an opportunity or a constraint for English language learning. In addition, this study specifically discussed how these chatbot affordances might have affected psychological states in language learners. Future recommendations regarding the use of chatbots in language classrooms were suggested from both pedagogical and technological perspectives.

Yinfei Yang, Y. Zhang, C. Tar et al.

Most existing work on adversarial data generation focuses on English. For example, PAWS (Paraphrase Adversaries from Word Scrambling) consists of challenging English paraphrase identification pairs from Wikipedia and Quora. We remedy this gap with PAWS-X, a new dataset of 23,659 human translated PAWS evaluation pairs in six typologically distinct languages: French, Spanish, German, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. We provide baseline numbers for three models with different capacity to capture non-local context and sentence structure, and using different multilingual training and evaluation regimes. Multilingual BERT fine-tuned on PAWS English plus machine-translated data performs the best, with a range of 83.1-90.8 accuracy across the non-English languages and an average accuracy gain of 23% over the next best model. PAWS-X shows the effectiveness of deep, multilingual pre-training while also leaving considerable headroom as a new challenge to drive multilingual research that better captures structure and contextual information.

A. Durgunoğlu, William Nagy, Barbara J. Hancin-Bhatt

C. Weber-Fox, H. Neville

N. Hornberger, Holly Link

R. Hawkins, Cecilia Yuet Hung Chan

Michal Ziemski, Marcin Junczys-Dowmunt, B. Pouliquen

M. Swain, Sharon Lapkin

Ken Hyland

Phe Quang Chu, Raqib Chowdhury, Le Thi Thanh Thu

While numerous studies targeted the effects of blended learning (BL) on English as a foreign language (EFL) students’ written products, a study to determine the mechanism of what factors in the BL environment impact EFL writing performance is under-researched. In response, the authors drew on Bandura’s triadic reciprocal determinism and Venkatesh et al.’s unified theory of acceptance and use of technology to navigate the hypothesized research model in an exploratory sequential mixed methods design. The sample included six participants in the initial qualitative phase and 148 respondents in the later quantitative phase. The findings based on the statistical analysis of measurement and structural models indicate that BL improves students’ global aspects of writing (task fulfillment, organization) more than their local matters (vocabulary, grammar). In the BL environment, environmental factors and students’ personal factors significantly influence their behaviors, which powerfully predict their writing performance. In the indirect relation, writing performance is impacted almost equally by the BL environmental factors and students’ personal factors. The study suggests some conclusions on the roles of individual, environmental, and behavioral factors in affecting writing performance and implications for promoting the BL prospect in the EFL writing context.

A. Gilmore

Sukarno Sukarno, Megan Jinabe, Fadhl Mohammed Awadh Gharamah

A coursebook is one of the essential learning resources. However, limited research has highlighted the evaluation of English coursebooks for the high school level. This research intends to assess the efficacy of three high school English coursebooks under the Merdeka Curriculum to determine their strengths and weaknesses in meeting curriculum expectations and enhancing student learning. While the coursebooks are designed to aid English teaching and integrate reform, many reports have emerged regarding their usability, content relevance, and alignment with the local context. In evaluating these coursebooks with SQRAR, this research aims to analyze the suitability of these materials for the target students, the variety of exercises proposed, and the balance achieved between theoretical instruction and practical language use. The findings highlight the challenges educators and learners face regarding these materials and articulate suggestions for future coursebook revisions, such as adding more explicit teaching strategies, giving greater attention to pluralistic approaches, increasing engagement with authentic materials, and more modern technology-oriented tasks. The evaluation seeks to support ongoing efforts in developing curricula to ensure that English coursebooks can effectively foster students' learning.

Reem A. Al-Samiri

Abstract With the increase in the use of face masks as a health precaution in the post-pandemic era, the effects of wearing such masks on language learners’ speech perception, which depends highly on visual cues, remain uncertain. This study explores the impact of wearing face masks on the listening comprehension and word recognition of 254 learners of English as a foreign language at intermediate and lower-intermediate levels at a university in Saudi Arabia. Participants listened to a passage read by a native English speaker in one of three conditions assigned randomly: audio-visual-face (AV-F), audio-visual-mask (AV-M), or audio-only (A-O) groups. A series of multiple-choice questions measured their comprehension of the listening passage and recognition of words. Findings revealed significant differences in accuracy scores, with AV-M and A-O resulting in lower accuracy than AV-F, which was the highest in accuracy. Additionally, higher language proficiency correlated with better AV-F performance, indicating the participants’ experience in recognizing facial cues. This study supports other findings on the negative impact of face masks on second language learners’ listening comprehension and word recognition, emphasizing the significance of observing facial and lip movements for language learners. Relevant implications and recommendations are provided for educators and researchers working with language learners to support their listening comprehension and perception skills.