Hiromi Ban

An English vocabulary learning support system for the learner's sustainable motivation

In English vocabulary learning, continuation is an important factor; however, many learners are not good at continuing learning because they tend to prefer amusement or rest. Our proposed system is targeting learners who are eager to learn but are not able to continue learning for various reasons. We especially focused on English vocabulary learning, and described an approach for learners who have difficulty with continuing learning. Our developed application aggressively supports the learners’ sustainable motivation by gamification techniques and an efficient difficulty setting method.

Factors to Affect Descriptions on Intra-Concept Relation in Introductory Concept Mapping

Introductory Concept mapping is a method that property of association task is introduced to Concept Mapping. With a certain extent of freedom permitted to experiment participants for association, the method is advantageous in that motivation of participants to construct maps is enhanced higher than Concept Mapping. Experiment participants are supposed to write down concepts which are associated from the concept of developmental psychology around the word, “developmental psychology”, written on a white paper. In an examination of correlation coefficient based on this method using score of intra-concept relation explanation as a dependent variable and previous (existing) knowledge score, number of mean expressed concepts, number of bifurcated concepts, number of cross-links, and number of forward reactions as independent variables, significant positive correlation was observed with all independent variables except for the number of cross-links. In addition, only number of bifurcated concepts and previous knowledge score remained as reasonable independent variable by a multi-regression analysis performed based on stepwise way.

Text Data Mining of English Interviews

An “interview” is the technique to gain the particular data effectively which the interviewers want to know through the conversation. In this paper, we metrically analyzed some English interviews: Larry King Live on CNN, and compared these with English news (CNN Live Today) and the inaugural addresses of the three U.S. Presidents. In short, frequency characteristics of character- and word-appearance were investigated using a program written in C++. These characteristics were approximated by an exponential function. Furthermore, we calculated the percentage of American basic vocabulary to obtain the difficulty-level as well as the K-characteristic of each material.