Hsien-Chin Liou

Effects of Web-based Concordancing Instruction on EFL Students' Learning of Verb - Noun Collocations

This study investigates the influence of using five web-based practice units on English verb-noun collocations with the design of a web-based Chinese-English bilingual concordancer (keyword retrieval program) on collocation learning. Thirty-two college EFL students participated by taking a pre-test and two post-tests, and responding to a background questionnaire and an evaluation questionnaire. Results indicated that learners made significant collocation improvement immediately after the online practice but regressed later. Yet, the final performance was still better than students entry level. Different verb-noun collocation types and learners with different prior collocation knowledge were found to be not equally receptive to the practice effects. Both the online instructional units and the concordancer were acceptable to most participants.

A Study of Web-Based Oral Activities Enhanced by Automatic Speech Recognition for EFL College Learning.

Recently, a promising topic in computer-assisted language learning is the application of Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) technology for assisting learners to engage in meaningful speech interactions. Simulated real-life conversation supported by the application of ASR has been suggested as helpful for speaking. In this study, a web-based conversation environment called CandleTalk, which allows learners to seemingly talk with the computer, was developed to help EFL learners receive explicit speech acts training that leads to better oral competence. CandleTalk is equipped with an ASR engine that judges whether learners provide appropriate input. Six speech acts are presented as the foci of the materials with local cultural information incorporated as the content of the dialogues to enhance student motivation. The materials were put to use on 29 English major and 20 non-English major students in order to investigate their learning outcome and perception in an EFL context. Oral proficiency assessment using the format of the Discourse Completion Test (DCT) given before and after the use of CandleTalk and an evaluation questionnaire were two instruments used for data collection. The results of the study showed that the application of ASR was helpful for the college freshmen in the teaching of speech acts, particularly for the non-English major students. Most learners perceived positively toward the instruction supported with speech recognition.

Reflective Practice in a Pre-service Teacher Education Program for High School English Teachers in Taiwan, ROC.

Abstract Although reflective practice has become a dominant paradigm in language teacher education research and programs worldwide, little of the inquiry into EFL teacher education has been documented in Taiwan, ROC. Critical reflection raises teachers awareness about teaching, enables deeper understanding of variables related to teaching, and triggers positive changes in their practice. The study aims to provide a description of pre-service teachers reflective practice by examining 20 student teachers observation reports and 20 practice teaching reports over a six-week period while they were taking a practice teaching course. Topics, typesxa0— descriptive or critical, and development of their reflective practice as shown in the 40 reports were analyzed. Results show that student teachers talked about topics mainly related to practical teaching issues and evaluation of other teachers or their own teaching among seven major topic categories, could do more critical reflection than descriptive reflection, but did not show substantial development of critical reflection within a six-week period. Providing a lower affective state may be helpful for teacher change, and interventions such as reflective training and teacher development group meetings may need to be incorporated into teacher education curriculum in order to trigger the development of reflectivity for teaching. Future directions regarding considerations of the factors in social contexts for teacher education programs and research on reflection-in-action are suggested.

The Impact of WWW Texts on EFL Learning.

Abstract The study used a comparison method to investigate the use of the Web texts in a college writing class (experiment group, fifteen students in total as opposed to eighteen in the control group). In addition, four ethnographic observations were conducted on four students. Questionnaires were given to investigate subjects’ perception about the activity. It was found that the experiment group improved their reading comprehension and writing and they held positive attitudes toward the Web activity and its prospects. There are also interesting findings from the ethnographic observations. 1 1 The paper was presented at CALICO 1997 Symposium, West Point, NY, USA, June 23‐27, 1997.

The roles of Second Life in a college computer-assisted language learning (CALL) course in Taiwan, ROC

Various language learning projects using Second Life (SL) have been documented; still, their specific learning potentials, particularly in English as a foreign language (EFL) context, remain to be explored. The current study aims to add one piece of empirical evidence on how SL can be infused into a computer-assisted language learning (CALL) course for 25 college students through task design in a limited Internet connection context. Four tasks – orientation of SL and chatting, pedagogical activities, peer review, and an SL tour – were designed with their influence examined. Although students frustration about the unstable Internet connection was shown from responses of an evaluation questionnaire, they confirmed the benefits of using SL for English learning and teaching. SL provides affordances of interaction and immersion, which are conducive to their English learning, and SL can easily establish an authentic environment for communication. It is argued, as supported in the previous literature of various educational contexts, that sound pedagogy with appropriate tasks, instead of 3D virtual worldsoftware alone, guides SL applications in the multi-member community (instructors, teachers assistants, students, and other users not in this class) advancing toward language learning objectives or sense-making in student learning.

FAST -- An Automatic Generation System for Grammar Tests

This paper introduces a method for the semi-automatic generation of grammar test items by applying Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques. Based on manually-designed patterns, sentences gathered from the Web are transformed into tests on grammaticality. The method involves representing test writing knowledge as test patterns, acquiring authentic sentences on the Web, and applying generation strategies to transform sentences into items. At runtime, sentences are converted into two types of TOEFL-style question: multiple-choice and error detection. We also describe a prototype system FAST (Free Assessment of Structural Tests). Evaluation on a set of generated questions indicates that the proposed method performs satisfactory quality. Our methodology provides a promising approach and offers significant potential for computer assisted language learning and assessment.

Online Synonym Materials and Concordancing for EFL College Writing

The phenomenon of overused adjectives by non-native speaking learners (NNS) has been pinpointed by recent research. This study designed five online units for increasing students awareness of underused specific adjectives for EFL college writing. Five units were developed for five identified overused adjectives: important, beautiful, hard, deep, and big. In each unit, data-driven learning materials, incorporating a bilingual collocation concordancer TANGO, first had learners engaged in distinguishing synonymous adjectives from concordance lines as their first task. Then three exercises for practise followed as a second task. Nineteen English majors in a college freshman writing class participated in the study. The assessment measures included three tests, two in-class writing tasks, and questionnaires. The findings indicate that, in addition to improvement in the immediate posttest, students word knowledge for synonym use was still retained as measured two months later in the delayed posttest. Moreover, in the post-instruction writing task, students avoided using general adjectives, tried to apply more specific items, and thus improved their overall writing quality. As for students attitude toward the learning units, over half reported that inductive learning was beneficial although they still found it difficult to verbalize differences among semantically similar words. TANGO was also considered a useful tool for learning synonyms and their collocates.

Computational Analysis of Move Structures in Academic Abstracts

This paper introduces a method for computational analysis of move structures in abstracts of research articles. In our approach, sentences in a given abstract are analyzed and labeled with a specific move in light of various rhetorical functions. The method involves automatically gathering a large number of abstracts from the Web and building a language model of abstract moves. We also present a prototype concordancer, CARE, which exploits the move-tagged abstracts for digital learning. This system provides a promising approach to Web-based computer-assisted academic writing.

Developing a corpus-based paraphrase tool to improve EFL learners' writing skills

Paraphrasing, or restating information using different words, is critical to successful writing. However, EFL learners have difficulty in making paraphrases to meet their writing demands, and there has been little research on developing automatic reference tools to assist these learners paraphrasing skills for better writing quality. In this study, we developed PREFER, an online corpus-based paraphrasing assistance system. Allowing multi-word input and returning promptly with a list of paraphrases in English and Chinese, along with usage patterns and example sentences, PREFER provides substantial support for EFL learners to vary their expressions during writing. An assessment study of the effectiveness of PREFER was conducted with 55 Chinese-speaking EFL college freshmen in an Asian country. The results indicated that PREFER offered the most benefits to students writing performance (with an after-use improvement of 38.2%), compared with an online dictionary and an online thesaurus (−31.6% and −6.2%, respectively). Further investigation revealed that the less proficient, more motivated, and more conservative students showed more significant progress in the paraphrasing task with the help of PREFER. In the meantime, nearly 90% of the students expressed satisfaction with the paraphrases generated by PREFER, and its functions, and another 75% of them acknowledged that PREFER benefits their writing task.

An Automatic Text-Analysis Project for EFL Writing Revision.

Abstract In order to leave more time for EFL teachers to work on higher-level re-writing tasks, we have launched a project to develop an automatic English grammar text-analysis program for Chinese students in Taiwan, Republic of China to help writing revision processes. This year-long project included extensive research work in several areas: error analysis, linguistic analysis of English, and natural language processing in computational linguistics. The initial effort was devoted to error analysis of 135 writing samples collected from our students mainly with engineering backgrounds. Most of the error types were then formulated into patterns to facilitate the on-line implementation of the grammar program. In addition, linguistic analyses in the areas of idiom collection/analyses, subcategorization of word categories (such as verbs and adverbs), and lexical feature analyses were performed. A small electronic dictionary with 2066 word stems and necessary features was also built, and a suffix processor with morphological rules to accommodate morpho-syntactic variants of each word stem was designed. A parser, equipped with phrase structure rules and error patterns, was then constructed. In addition, appropriate feedback messages were provided when the program located an error. Initial achievements indicated that the grammar program performed slightly better than commercial packages.