title: Does direct grammar instruction improve students’ performance on grammar-based tests of English as a foreign language?

authors: Wu, Hsiao-li

subjects: language learning

abstract: This paper reports the results of an experiment designed to test the hypothesis that direct grammar instruction has a positive impact on the test performance of learners of English as a foreign language. At first sight, the results appear to indicate that direct grammar instruction had a negligible effect overall on test performance. However, a more detailed examination of the results suggests that there was a marked positive effect in the case of some students. Furthermore, the test itself proved useful as a diagnostic tool and as a measure of student progress. Perhaps most significant is the fact that a comparison of the results of a pilot study and the experimental study itself raises issues about the significance, or otherwise, of research on teaching and learning second and foreign languages that is based on single experiments. Teachers of languages (international, community and indigenous) need to be sure that experimentally-based research is both robust and of direct relevance to the particular contexts in which they work. This is of real importance for many Pacific and Pacific-rim countries where the teaching and learning of English can have implications for economic success, and the teaching and learning of indigenous languages can have implications for the very survival of these languages.

text: Does direct grammar instruction improve students’ performance on grammar-based tests of English as a foreign language? This paper reports the results of an experiment designed to test the hypothesis that direct grammar instruction has a positive impact on the test performance of learners of English as a foreign language. At first sight, the results appear to indicate that direct grammar instruction had a negligible effect overall on test performance. However, a more detailed examination of the results suggests that there was a marked positive effect in the case of some students. Furthermore, the test itself proved useful as a diagnostic tool and as a measure of student progress. Perhaps most significant is the fact that a comparison of the results of a pilot study and the experimental study itself raises issues about the significance, or otherwise, of research on teaching and learning second and foreign languages that is based on single experiments. Teachers of languages (international, community and indigenous) need to be sure that experimentally-based research is both robust and of direct relevance to the particular contexts in which they work. This is of real importance for many Pacific and Pacific-rim countries where the teaching and learning of English can have implications for economic success, and the teaching and learning of indigenous languages can have implications for the very survival of these languages.

year: 2004-09

title: Improving on bagging with input smearing

authors: Frank, Eibe

subjects: computer science

abstract: Bagging is an ensemble learning method that has proved to be a useful tool in the arsenal of machine learning practitioners. Commonly applied in conjunction with decision tree learners to build an ensemble of decision trees, it often leads to reduced errors in the predictions when compared to using a single tree. A single tree is built from a training set of size N. Bagging is based on the idea that, ideally, we would like to eliminate the variance due to a particular training set by combining trees built from all training sets of size N. However, in practice, only one training set is available, and bagging simulates this platonic method by sampling with replacement from the original training data to form new training sets. In this paper we pursue the idea of sampling from a kernel density estimator of the underlying distribution to form new training sets, in addition to sampling from the data itself. This can be viewed as “smearing out” the resampled training data to generate new datasets, and the amount of “smear” is controlled by a parameter. We show that the resulting method, called “input smearing”, can lead to improved results when compared to bagging. We present results for both classification and regression problems.

text: Improving on bagging with input smearing Bagging is an ensemble learning method that has proved to be a useful tool in the arsenal of machine learning practitioners. Commonly applied in conjunction with decision tree learners to build an ensemble of decision trees, it often leads to reduced errors in the predictions when compared to using a single tree. A single tree is built from a training set of size N. Bagging is based on the idea that, ideally, we would like to eliminate the variance due to a particular training set by combining trees built from all training sets of size N. However, in practice, only one training set is available, and bagging simulates this platonic method by sampling with replacement from the original training data to form new training sets. In this paper we pursue the idea of sampling from a kernel density estimator of the underlying distribution to form new training sets, in addition to sampling from the data itself. This can be viewed as “smearing out” the resampled training data to generate new datasets, and the amount of “smear” is controlled by a parameter. We show that the resulting method, called “input smearing”, can lead to improved results when compared to bagging. We present results for both classification and regression problems.

year: 2006

title: Editorial Introduction: The utility and futility of 'the nation' in histories of Aotearoa New Zealand.

authors: Coleborne, Catharine

subjects: New Zealand

abstract: An introduction is presented which discusses articles in the issue on New Zealand history, including one on interracial rape and sexual violence in the 1860s, one on postcolonial methodology and the historical concept of the British World, and one on Whanganui Māori claims to the Whanganui River.

text: Editorial Introduction: The utility and futility of 'the nation' in histories of Aotearoa New Zealand. An introduction is presented which discusses articles in the issue on New Zealand history, including one on interracial rape and sexual violence in the 1860s, one on postcolonial methodology and the historical concept of the British World, and one on Whanganui Māori claims to the Whanganui River.

year: 2011