Hasil untuk "Language acquisition"

Balázs Fajt, Szabolcs Csorba, Emese Schiller

Learner autonomy is a fundamental aspect of language acquisition, particularly in higher education contexts, where students must engage in self-directed learning beyond formal instruction. While institutions often provide self-access support systems, their effectiveness depends on not only available resources but also educators’ ability to facilitate autonomous learning. This practice-oriented paper examines student-led writing and speaking support programs as a means to foster learner autonomy and prepare teacher trainees for outside-class learning. By using the student writing and speaking support initiatives at a Hungarian university as an illustrative context, this paper offers a descriptive and reflective analysis to ground the discussion. The practice-based insights highlight the dual role of such initiatives in developing student skills while reinforcing reflective practice and consultation-based pedagogy in higher education. By critically overviewing institutional support mechanisms, this paper provides insights into potential models for integrating self-access learning into university curricula, contributing to both learner autonomy and professional development. The programs are introduced as examples of good practice, with broader implications for how similar initiatives can be adapted in other institutional contexts to promote autonomy, strengthen teacher education, and support lifelong learning.

Somayeh Razmjoo Moghadam, Ghasem Barani

The current study systematically reviewed selected literature on background, current conceptualization, and direction of the issues of linguistic and cultural imperialism in publications of applied linguistics and language teaching to determine themes in the field. To do this, based on the inclusion/exclusion criteria, provided in the PRISMA Chart, 30 most updated and recent articles (mainly since 2020) were selected from the 5 main publications in the field through the advanced search engines. Then, two raters used coding books to screen and code necessary quantitative and qualitative data based on which, a total of 989 general coding schemes and categories were elicited from the coding of the main themes, trends, and findings of linguistic and cultural imperialism. Overall, the main themes of the study were provided in the form of the concepts and perspectives of linguistic and cultural imperialism, informed by the historical directions and the influence of the colonial era. Moreover, the role of power relations and prevailing linguistic dominance in supporting dominant languages and the influence of linguistic and cultural imperialism on L1 acquisition were presented and discussed. Since language imperialism can impact L1 language acquisition by marginalizing local languages and threatening them, each community needs to follow its practical language policy and plans to revitalize and support its languages and cultures. It was suggested that the intersection of linguistic and cultural imperialism impacts social and language identity which can lead to neo-imperialism, colonization, and language hierarchization. The study puts forward some recommendations and suggests future directions to reinforce language rights through different parties with the integration of a human rights perspective in language preservation efforts as the main actions that can be done to improve language awareness of the people. Policy-makers and language decision-makers can follow these guidelines to preserve the legal aspects of the language and cultural identity and utilize foreign languages in more rational and non-threatening ways.

Andi Rustandi, R. Bunga Febriani, Bambang Ruby Sugiarto

This study investigated the interface between pragmatic and grammatical competence in second language acquisition. This study aims to discover the conceptual framework of how pragmatics competence interfaces with grammatical competence. This study employs three research questions such as (1) how pragmatics competence and grammatical competence are interfaced with each other, (2) what kind of pragmatics competence should be learned by the learner of a second language, and (3) to what extent grammatical construction interface with the pragmatic domain. This study used the groundwork of the library research method, which forms the theoretical framework of this study by searching, reading, and evaluating some journals from the online journal that deals with the topic. The result revealed that pragmatic competence and grammatical competence are interfaced with each other since grammatical construction in the utterance contributes to the language use expression.

Shannon McMorrow, Jyotika Saksena

Refugees fleeing the Democratic Republic of Congo are vulnerable to health and social inequities. Women from the DRC are at unique risk within the social and cultural milieu of the U.S., but there is insufficient evidence to inform tailored programs and policies for this population. This article describes results from a longitudinal, qualitative Photovoice study with women refugees from the DRC between 2016 and 2023. Participatory analysis with participant co-researchers and inductive manual analysis revealed four themes illustrating experiences with employment and the workplace: job (in)security, discrimination, injuries, and workplace potential. Evidence from this study demonstrates the need for more intentional, tailored public health and social service interventions centering on the workplace for Congolese refugee women resettled in the U.S. The federal policy pushes refugees toward early self-sufficiency. Our findings suggest this is problematic as it negatively impacts language acquisition, which in turn creates a ripple effect of negative outcomes, including insufficient access to jobs offering a living wage, limited access to jobs with health insurance, and exposure to jobs with high risk of injury or social settings enhancing discrimination. These experiences can be further exacerbated for women refugees from Africa standing at the intersection of race, gender, and refugee status. Study results also show opportunities for the workplace to be an outlet for positive health impacts and advocacy for social justice for this population and potentially other refugee groups that are marginalized in the U.S.

Elisa Corino, Cecilia Fissore, Marina Marchisio Conte

Mathematics is undoubtedly one of the school disciplines in which students generally have the most significant difficulties. Numerous studies in Mathematics education have shown that the causes of disciplinary learning difficulties are the acquisition, understanding, and management of language for specific purposes. This paper will illustrate Data-Driven learning activities with automatic formative assessment implemented within a Digital Learning Environment. The research sample comprises 40 students from two upper secondary schools in Turin, Italy. In an L1 context, students were guided to study the language of Mathematics using a concordance to analyse language and specialised texts. Students carried out activities with automatic formative assessment, featuring step-by-step and adaptive questions that guided them in discovering the peculiarities of the language in use and understanding the concepts expressed by the LPS. In this contribution, we will illustrate this close relationship between the use of technologies, the analysis of language, and the subject contents that the LSP conveys.

Khalid Elasri

This study explores the use of English emotion vocabulary by learners of English with L11 Moroccan Arabic (MA). Just as with color terms, languages carve up the emotional spectrum differently. Cross-linguistic comparison of emotion lexicons may, therefore, reveal varying degrees of lexical equivalence. In addition to this lexical anisomorphism, the study investigates the effects of word frequency and L2 proficiency on the use of English emotion vocabulary. To examine these factors, intermediate and advanced learners of English, as well as a group of native English speakers, watched two concise films and described the actors’ emotions during specific scenes. The data was analyzed listing the most frequently used emotion terms for each group. Chi-square tests were then performed to compare the significance of the lexical choices made by native speakers to those provided by each learner group. The results indicate that advanced learners managed to describe the suggested scenes using nearly the same emotion words as native speakers. However, some culture-specific emotion terms posed problems for them. L2 proficiency demonstrated a strong effect, as intermediate learners often deviated from native usage. The implications drawn from these results suggest that culturally specific emotion terms, which lead to lexical inequivalence, should be considered alongside factors, namely word type and word frequency, that can challenge learners in acquiring L2 vocabulary. The study also highlights the importance of context-rich instruction of L2 emotion vocabulary and opens avenues for further research that would contribute to the understanding of the intersection between second language acquisition, culture, and emotions.

M. R. Alekseenko

The article is devoted to revealing the mechanisms of depicting the process of identity transformation in the literary work of the Japanese diaspora in Brazil. The aim is achieved by studying small prose in the genre of naturalism using the material of the Collection of Colonia Stories. The time frame is limited by the arrival of immigrants in 1908 and the prohibition of foreign language printing in 1941.The article describes the formation of the collective identity of the Japanese in Brazil from a historical perspective. The key features of the Japanese emigration, further reflected in the literary work of the diaspora in Brazil, are revealed: regional localization, migrants’ belonging to the peasantry, the formation of a special koroniago dialect. Special attention is paid to the reasons for the split within the diaspora, which became the main motif in the problems of literary works. Intragroup disunity has its roots in the social structure of the Japanese community and was stimulated by the urbanization of the 1930s.The article analyzes the process of formation of a distinctive center of literary creativity in the Japanese emigration in Brazil. The mechanisms of alienation of literary works based on the opposition between “pure” and “mass” literature are revealed.The transformation of Japanese identity in Brazil is evidenced by analyzing the problematics of the works. The painful process of integration into the host community gives center stage to the racial-ethnic issues of imin bungaku. The works depict the interaction between Japanese and Brazilians through inter-ethnic conflicts. The works studied reflect discursive patterns of describing the racial Other in the space of literature. The works are particularly sensitive to the betrayal of intra-community bonds and the acquisition of the traits of the host community. The process of identity transformation is examined in literature through the prism of social status, ethnicity, and gender discrimination. The analysis of the works shows the evolution of the representation of the Other from demonization and rejection to acceptance of the transformed identity. The change of perspective on the formation of a bicultural “Japanese-Brazilian” identity on the eve of World War II was interrupted by the outburst of Japanese nationalism during the war years. However, the acceptance of one’s own otherness and the literary representation of this process would become the foundation for the successful integration of the Japanese into Brazilian society in the postwar decades.

Chengzhi Zhong, Fei Cheng, Qianying Liu et al.

Large language models exhibit strong multilingual capabilities despite limited exposure to non-English data. Prior studies show that English-centric large language models map multilingual content into English-aligned representations at intermediate layers and then project them back into target-language token spaces in the final layer. From this observation, we hypothesize that this cross-lingual transition is governed by a small and sparse set of dimensions, which occur at consistent indices across the intermediate to final layers. Building on this insight, we introduce a simple, training-free method to identify and manipulate these dimensions, requiring only as few as 50 sentences of either parallel or monolingual data. Experiments on a multilingual generation control task reveal the interpretability of these dimensions, demonstrating that the interventions in these dimensions can switch the output language while preserving semantic content, and that it surpasses the performance of prior neuron-based approaches at a substantially lower cost.

Xabier de Zuazo, Eva Navas, Ibon Saratxaga et al.

Automatic speech recognition systems have undoubtedly advanced with the integration of multilingual and multitask models such as Whisper, which have shown a promising ability to understand and process speech across a wide range of languages. Despite their robustness, these models often fall short in handling the linguistic distinctions of minority languages. This study addresses this gap by integrating traditional and novel language models with fine-tuned Whisper models to raise their performance in less commonly studied languages. Through rigorous fine-tuning and evaluation across multiple datasets, we demonstrate substantial improvements in word error rate, particularly in low-resource scenarios. Our approach not only does take advantage of the extensive data Whisper was pre-trained on, but also complements its linguistic adaptability by incorporating language models. We obtained improvements up to 51% for in-distribution datasets and up to 34% for out-of-distribution sentences using statistical language models, while large language models provided moderate but consistently robust improvement across diverse linguistic contexts. The findings reveal that, while the integration reliably benefits all model sizes, the extent of improvement varies, highlighting the importance of optimized language model parameters. Finally, we emphasize the importance of selecting appropriate evaluation parameters when reporting the results using transformer-based ASR models. In summary, this research clears the way for more inclusive ASR technologies that perform better across languages by enriching their linguistic knowledge. For further implementation details of this study, the technical documentation and source code are available at http://www.github.com/hitz-zentroa/whisper-lm.

Stefano Bannò, Rao Ma, Mengjie Qian et al.

Natural language-based assessment (NLA) is an approach to second language assessment that uses instructions - expressed in the form of can-do descriptors - originally intended for human examiners, aiming to determine whether large language models (LLMs) can interpret and apply them in ways comparable to human assessment. In this work, we explore the use of such descriptors with an open-source LLM, Qwen 2.5 72B, to assess responses from the publicly available S&I Corpus in a zero-shot setting. Our results show that this approach - relying solely on textual information - achieves competitive performance: while it does not outperform state-of-the-art speech LLMs fine-tuned for the task, it surpasses a BERT-based model trained specifically for this purpose. NLA proves particularly effective in mismatched task settings, is generalisable to other data types and languages, and offers greater interpretability, as it is grounded in clearly explainable, widely applicable language descriptors.

Ying Wen, Ziyu Wan, Shao Zhang

The evolution of large language models (LLMs) toward artificial superhuman intelligence (ASI) hinges on data reproduction, a cyclical process in which models generate, curate and retrain on novel data to refine capabilities. Current methods, however, risk getting stuck in a data reproduction trap: optimizing outputs within fixed human-generated distributions in a closed loop leads to stagnation, as models merely recombine existing knowledge rather than explore new frontiers. In this paper, we propose language games as a pathway to expanded data reproduction, breaking this cycle through three mechanisms: (1) \textit{role fluidity}, which enhances data diversity and coverage by enabling multi-agent systems to dynamically shift roles across tasks; (2) \textit{reward variety}, embedding multiple feedback criteria that can drive complex intelligent behaviors; and (3) \textit{rule plasticity}, iteratively evolving interaction constraints to foster learnability, thereby injecting continual novelty. By scaling language games into global sociotechnical ecosystems, human-AI co-evolution generates unbounded data streams that drive open-ended exploration. This framework redefines data reproduction not as a closed loop but as an engine for superhuman intelligence.

Arta KËPUSKA

This study investigates the acquisition of tense-aspect systems in Albanian learners, focusing on adult English as a Second Language (ESL) learners and young native Albanian speakers. Guided by the Aspect Hypothesis (AH), which posits that verb aspectual features influence tense-aspect acquisition, the research explores whether these groups follow universal patterns. Data was collected from adult Albanian ESL learners (bachelor students) and young Albanian pupils (grades 2-5) through written compositions, narrative descriptions, and demographic questionnaires. The findings reveal distinct differences in past tense use: Albanian ESL learners show a more complex and variable pattern, while L1 Albanian speakers follow a more predictable sequence, supporting AH. This study contributes to understanding the application of the Aspect Hypothesis across different languages and age groups, providing valuable insights for improving teaching strategies and curriculum design for Albanian ESL learners.

Renata Asali-van der Wal, Sarah Raad Salih Alshanmy

AbstractAs an established educational institute, the University of Jordan promotes intercultural exchange through language support. This thesis addresses the question of heterogeneity of German language teaching at the University of Jordan and develops a didactic strategy for improving language acquisition at the A2 and B1 levels. The focus is on combining two assigned courses Writing and Grammar that are taught as separate courses for German and English dual students. The emphasis will be on quality and comparability of the course content. This approach is oriented toward the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR), contributing to the renewal of foreign language teaching in various academic contexts.

Mercedes Rico-García, Laura V. Fielden Burns

Cultural cartography as a way to understand the relationship between cultural manifestations and maps involves visual, symbolic and cognitive mechanisms of inquiry referring to the interpretation of territorial landscapes. The introduction of geo-computation techniques has enabled users to approach map-like visualizations of the world under different parameters. The design and interpretation of map symbology is crucial which according to Peirce (1994) is activated by forming a relationship between three distinct elements: signs, interpretants and objects.  In this light, the study aims to explore the usage of digital story maps to enhance students’ cultural and linguistic acquisition in a course of English for engineers in higher education. To cover the objective, the methodology comprises a two-phased didactic approach developed as a final course project within the English for Specific Purposes (ESP) classroom. Divided into two groups, the instruction starts for the experimental and the control groups with a set of learning sessions analysing the theoretical framework underlying the semiotic process of map making and symbol interpretation. The second step for the experimental group involves the analysis and production of digital cartographic storytelling created by learners through collaborative team work, while the control group continues to analyse and then presents their conclusions about pre-existing maps to the rest of the class. The study demonstrates that the introduction of map-creation using a web-based mapping platform provided students with the ability to create geocoded narratives through visual representations, enhanced critical and spatial thinking and fostered the development of cultural and communication skills in a foreign language

Yunisrina Qismullah Yusuf, Zulfadli A. Aziz, Nurjannah et al.

This study explored the production of 11 English vowels by Acehnese Indonesian EFL students. Ten undergraduates (five males and five females) from the Pidie District, Aceh, participated, with Acehnese and Bahasa Indonesia as their first languages, and English learned formally at school since the 7th grade. Using PRAAT, recordings of vowel elicitations were measured and analyzed, revealing distinctions in vowel pairs. Statistical tests were employed to compare vowel productions between the males and females. The results showed that the females produced many of the vowel pairs similarly: /i:/-/ɪ/, /ɛ/-/æ/, /u:/-/ʊ/, /ʌ/-/ɑː/, and /ɑː/-/ɒ/. The pairs they differentiated were /ɜ:/-/ʌ/ and /ɔ:/-/ɒ/. However, the female students could not discriminate between the long and short vowel pairs. Meanwhile, the male students could distinguish the following pairs: /i:/-/ɪ/, /ɜ:/-/ʌ/, /ʌ/-/ɑː/, and /ɔ:/-/ɒ/. The others, /ɛ/-/æ/, /u:/-/ʊ,/ and /ɑː/-/ɒ/, were produced similarly. Additionally, they could distinguish the long and short vowels in the /ɜ:/-/ʌ/, /u:/-/ʊ/, /ʌ/-/ɑː/, and /ɑː/-/ɒ/ pairs, but not /i:/-/ɪ/, /ɛ/-/æ/ and /ɔ:/-/ɒ/. This study has shown complex distinctions in the production of English vowels by Acehnese Indonesian EFL students. These findings underscore the importance of considering gender-specific phonetic patterns in English language acquisition, providing valuable insights for language educators and researchers.

Tianchi Liu, Ivan Kukanov, Zihan Pan et al.

The effects of language mismatch impact speech anti-spoofing systems, while investigations and quantification of these effects remain limited. Existing anti-spoofing datasets are mainly in English, and the high cost of acquiring multilingual datasets hinders training language-independent models. We initiate this work by evaluating top-performing speech anti-spoofing systems that are trained on English data but tested on other languages, observing notable performance declines. We propose an innovative approach - Accent-based data expansion via TTS (ACCENT), which introduces diverse linguistic knowledge to monolingual-trained models, improving their cross-lingual capabilities. We conduct experiments on a large-scale dataset consisting of over 3 million samples, including 1.8 million training samples and nearly 1.2 million testing samples across 12 languages. The language mismatch effects are preliminarily quantified and remarkably reduced over 15% by applying the proposed ACCENT. This easily implementable method shows promise for multilingual and low-resource language scenarios.

Grażyna Gorbacz-Dailida

Some learners are more successful in foreign language mastering than others. Among the plausible explanations discussed in the literature (Carroll 1981; Skehan 1991; Dörnyei 2005; Stansfield & Reed 2019; Griffiths & Soruç 2020), the concept of foreign language aptitude (FLA) is regarded as one of the key factors that can influence or predict learners’ success in the process of foreign language acquisition. The present pilot quantitative study aims to assess the extent to which learners’ level of foreign language aptitude can be correlated to their general phonological ability based on the example of first-year MA English Philology students (N=10). To assess the students’ level of aptitude, the Polish adaptation of the Modern Language Aptitude Test (MLAT), called the Test of Aptitude for the Learning of Foreign Languages (Test Uzdolnień do Nauki Języków Obcych – TUNJO), was used. On the other hand, to measure their level of phonetic ability, the test, which focused on several chosen areas covered during practical and theoretical phonetics classes during the BA programme, was constructed and submitted to the group. The quantitative data gathered throughout those two stages were subsequently analysed and interpreted. The results obtained revealed no significant correlation between the students’ level of aptitude and their general phonetic ability. Other individual differences and affective factors in language learning, alongside the structure of the measuring tools and the measurement itself, may justify the apparent lack of correlation.

Wenxuan Wang, Zhaopeng Tu, Chang Chen et al.

Safety lies at the core of developing and deploying large language models (LLMs). However, previous safety benchmarks only concern the safety in one language, e.g. the majority language in the pretraining data such as English. In this work, we build the first multilingual safety benchmark for LLMs, XSafety, in response to the global deployment of LLMs in practice. XSafety covers 14 kinds of commonly used safety issues across 10 languages that span several language families. We utilize XSafety to empirically study the multilingual safety for 4 widely-used LLMs, including both close-API and open-source models. Experimental results show that all LLMs produce significantly more unsafe responses for non-English queries than English ones, indicating the necessity of developing safety alignment for non-English languages. In addition, we propose several simple and effective prompting methods to improve the multilingual safety of ChatGPT by evoking safety knowledge and improving cross-lingual generalization of safety alignment. Our prompting method can significantly reduce the ratio of unsafe responses from 19.1% to 9.7% for non-English queries. We release our data at https://github.com/Jarviswang94/Multilingual_safety_benchmark.

Yiduo Guo, Yaobo Liang, Chenfei Wu et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable performance in various basic natural language tasks. For completing the complex task, we still need a plan for the task to guide LLMs to generate the specific solutions step by step. LLMs can directly generate task plans, but these plans may still contain factual errors or are incomplete. A high-quality task plan contains correct step-by-step solutions for solving all situations and behavioral instructions for avoiding mistakes. To obtain it, we propose the Learning to Plan method, which involves two phases: (1) In the first learning task plan phase, it iteratively updates the task plan with new step-by-step solutions and behavioral instructions, which are obtained by prompting LLMs to derive from training error feedback. (2) In the subsequent test phase, the LLM uses the learned task plan to guide the inference of LLM on the test set. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on the five different reasoning type tasks (8 datasets). Further, our analysis experiment shows that the task plan learned by one LLM can directly guide another LLM to improve its performance, which reveals a new transfer learning paradigm. We release the code at \url{https://github.com/Eureka6174/LearnNLPlan}

Wannaphong Phatthiyaphaibun, Korakot Chaovavanich, Charin Polpanumas et al.

We present PyThaiNLP, a free and open-source natural language processing (NLP) library for Thai language implemented in Python. It provides a wide range of software, models, and datasets for Thai language. We first provide a brief historical context of tools for Thai language prior to the development of PyThaiNLP. We then outline the functionalities it provided as well as datasets and pre-trained language models. We later summarize its development milestones and discuss our experience during its development. We conclude by demonstrating how industrial and research communities utilize PyThaiNLP in their work. The library is freely available at https://github.com/pythainlp/pythainlp.