Studying abroad in an English speaking country is something that many Japanese students wish to do during their university life. Yet, these students can often find themselves underprepared and anxious about the Englis...
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Studying abroad in an English speaking country is something that many Japanese students wish to do during their university life. Yet, these students can often find themselves underprepared and anxious about the English required for life in foreign countries. This paper will at first demonstrate what anxieties are felt by students, and then illustrate a case study of one study abroad program that has used computer assisted language learning (CALL) in an attempt to reduce anxiety and lesson the gap between the English classroom in Japan, and what students experience in an English speaking country. By using readily available and inexpensive online technology, students were exposed to authentic English input in the form of online videos, could practice speaking English as spoken by native speakers, and gain instant feedback on their current English competence level. This paper will finish by suggesting further methods in which the gap between classroom study in Japan and English languagelearning in foreign countries can be reduced.
Concordance programs have been used in literary and mostly religious text analysis for decades. They aim to count and define the frequency and function of a word or word groups in a given text. The aim is to give an i...
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Concordance programs have been used in literary and mostly religious text analysis for decades. They aim to count and define the frequency and function of a word or word groups in a given text. The aim is to give an inductive understanding of the word/structure and its use in authentic texts. Concordancers are now in computer software for the quick and reliable use for the *** many lexis come first advocators still exist in language teaching discipline, it is inevitable to use concordancing programs in English language Teaching. computers are used in language teaching very frequently but they do not take much place in the teaching of lexis with regard to concordancing *** study first details the use of concordancing programs in general and gives techniques that can be applied in ELT and illustrates some sample uses after describing the literature view of the use of concordance programs in ELT.
Posterior probability measure is widely accepted as the most promising feature for automatic pronunciation quality evaluation. However, this measure is not phonetically consistent. This work presents a novel trainable...
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ISBN:
(纸本)9781479945641
Posterior probability measure is widely accepted as the most promising feature for automatic pronunciation quality evaluation. However, this measure is not phonetically consistent. This work presents a novel trainable phone-dependent transformation of posterior probability to deal with the problem. Both linear and non-linear transforms are investigated. Close form solution is found for linear transformation and gradient-based method is derived for nonlinear transformation. Experimental results on the database of 3685 people showed significant improvement. The cross-correlation between human and machine scores increases from 0.582 to 0.760.
In order to improve the Mandarin vowel pronunciation quality assessment, a nox/el formant feature was proposed and applied to formant classification for Chinese Mandarin vowel pronunciation quality evaluation. Formant...
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In order to improve the Mandarin vowel pronunciation quality assessment, a nox/el formant feature was proposed and applied to formant classification for Chinese Mandarin vowel pronunciation quality evaluation. Formant candidates of each frame were plotted on the time-frequency plane to form a bitmap, and its Gabor feature was extracted to represent the formant trajectory. The feature was then classified by using GMM model and the classification posterior probability was mapped to pronunciation quality grade. The experiments of comparing the Gabor transformation based formant trajectory feature with several other kinds of traditionally used features show that with this method, a human-machine scoring correlation coefficient （CC） of 0.842 can be achieved, which is better than the result of 0.832 by traditional speech recognition techniques. At the same time, considering that the long-term information of formant classification and the short-term information of speech recognition technique are complementary to each other, it is investigated to combine their results with linear or nonlinear methods to further improve the evaluation performance. As a result, experiments on PSK show that the best CC of 0.913, which is very close to the correlation of inter-human rating of 0.94, is gotten by using neural network.
Web technologies and educational platforms have greatly evolved over the past decade. One of the most significant factors contributing to education on the Internet has been the development of Web 2.0 technologies. The...
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Web technologies and educational platforms have greatly evolved over the past decade. One of the most significant factors contributing to education on the Internet has been the development of Web 2.0 technologies. These technologies, socially interactive in nature, have much to contribute to the area of computerassistedlanguage Leaning. Unfortunately, Web 2.0 technologies for the most part have been used in an ad hoc manner, permitting language learners acquire knowledge through interaction, but not through a more structured manner as these technologies were not developed to help lean languages as such. The goal of our work is to research and develop an environment, which employs Web 2.0 technology plus online languagelearning tools to provide a more integrated languagelearning environment. This paper will explore the technologies and provide information about how tools can be better integrated to provide a more productive working environment for language learners. A first working proof of concept based on our approach introduced is promising supporting modern language requirements and first findings and space for improvements are discussed.
In this paper, we present our multiple parameter cluster analysis in our multiple languagelearning system. Towards this direction, we have used algorithmic approaches residing in the field of machine learning. Multip...
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ISBN:
(纸本)9781479907700
In this paper, we present our multiple parameter cluster analysis in our multiple languagelearning system. Towards this direction, we have used algorithmic approaches residing in the field of machine learning. Multiple parameter cluster analysis is conducted by the k-means clustering algorithm which takes as input seven important users' characteristics in order to initialize the process. The clustering is conducted by k-means clustering algorithm, which takes as input multiple user characteristics. The incorporation of k-means clustering is used to address several barriers posed by the heterogeneous learning audience of educational systems. After determining in which cluster each new student belongs, the system can reason about this specific student, adapting its behavior to the student's needs, performance and preferences.
The massive use of Facebook opens new horizons in the areas of information and communications technology, which induced changes in pedagogy. Towards this direction, we implemented an educational application for learni...
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ISBN:
(纸本)9781614992622;9781614992615
The massive use of Facebook opens new horizons in the areas of information and communications technology, which induced changes in pedagogy. Towards this direction, we implemented an educational application for learninglanguages. In order to cover the heterogeneous group of people to which educational applications are targeted and to further emphasize the educational aspect of Facebook, we implemented and present the multivariate clustering for group learning in Facebook. By the incorporation of the multiple parameter based clustering, the problem of grouping students, in order to provide sophisticated user models, is further treated. Multivariate clustering is conducted by the k-means algorithm which takes as input, to initialize the process, multiple students' characteristics.
The ability to make effective use of technology is becoming increasingly important for prospective language teachers. As a result, many teacher preparation programs include some form of training in computerassisted l...
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The ability to make effective use of technology is becoming increasingly important for prospective language teachers. As a result, many teacher preparation programs include some form of training in computer assisted language learning (CALL). This study focuses on one component of such training, the textbooks used in methods courses, and employs content analysis to investigate how popular methods textbooks discuss CALL. Criteria based on standards for teacher training and the professional CALL literature revealed that overall, the textbooks can serve as a valuable springboard for early training. Based on the coverage of CALL in their methods textbook(s) and the needs of their particular student teachers, methods instructors should expand the discussion of CALL to provide a solid basis for continued professional development. Several key criteria for such well-rounded training are included in this article.
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