ethanporcaro/eric-fulltext-meta huggingface dataset:
Understanding Participation in CALL Vocabulary Tasks through Complexity Theory
Author: Dickinson, Paul
Date: 2020-12-14
Type: Speeches/Meeting Papers
Subjects: Student Participation,College Freshmen,Late Adolescents,Computer Assisted Instruction,Second Language Instruction,Second Language Learning,English (Second Language),Telecommunications,Handheld Devices,Vocabulary Development,Game Based Learning,Cooperative Learning,Tests,Foreign Countries

This study explored participation by Japanese university English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners in Computer Assisted Language Learning/Mobile Assisted Language Learning (CALL/MALL) vocabulary tasks through the lens of Complexity Theory (CT). CT, which studies how complex systems are influenced by changes in interconnected variables (Larsen-Freeman &amp; Cameron, 2008), has been advocated as an approach that aligns well with Second Language Acquisition (SLA) and CALL research (Godwin-Jones, 2019). In this study, CT was applied to action research involving learners using smartphones to create game-based vocabulary quizzes. It aimed to understand how the context, personal attributes, and in-class interactions affected participation and learning outcomes. The results show the variability and nonlinearity of learners' language development, the importance of initial conditions, and the vital role of teacher input. It also demonstrated that there are various ways to successfully complete a task, so viewing tasks as dynamic systems may be a fruitful approach. [For the complete volume, &quot;CALL for Widening Participation: Short Papers from EUROCALL 2020 (28th, Online, August 20-21, 2020),&quot; see ED610330.]
Understanding the Use of Eye-Tracking Recordings to Measure and Classify Reading Ability in Elementary Children School
Author: Fayed, Karim
Date: 2020-12-14
Type: Reports - Research
Subjects: Eye Movements,Measurement,Data Interpretation,Reading Skills,Beginning Reading,Children,Elementary School Students,Emergent Literacy,Educational Games,German,Memorization,Pattern Recognition,Reading Difficulties,Vowels,Accuracy

The iRead EU Project has released literacy games for Spanish, German, Greek, and English for L1 and L2 acquisition. In order to understand the impact of these games on reading skills for L1 German pupils, the authors employed an eye-tracking recording of pupils' readings on a weekly basis as part of an after-school reading club. This work seeks to first understand how to interpret the eye-tracker data for such a study. Five pupils participated in the project and read short texts over the course of five weeks. The resulting data set was extensive enough to perform preliminary analysis on how to use the eye-tracking data to provide information on skill acquisition looking at pupils' reading accuracy and speed. Given our set-up, we can show that the eye-tracker is accurate enough to measure relative reading speed between long and short vowels for selected 2-syllable words. As a result, eye-tracking data can visualize three different types of beginning readers: memorizers, pattern learners, and those with reading problems. [For the complete volume, &quot;CALL for Widening Participation: Short Papers from EUROCALL 2020 (28th, Online, August 20-21, 2020),&quot; see ED610330.]
Intelligent Speaker Is Watching You: Alleviation of L2 Learners&apos; Social Anxiety
Author: Hayashi, Kotaro
Date: 2020-12-14
Type: Reports - Research
Subjects: Second Language Learning,Second Language Instruction,Eye Movements,Artificial Intelligence,Teaching Methods,Instructional Effectiveness,Undergraduate Students,Family Environment,Rejection (Psychology),Pretests Posttests,Listening Comprehension Tests,Learning Motivation,Computer Software,Foreign Countries,Anxiety,Robotics,Computer Assisted Instruction,English (Second Language),Language Tests

This study investigates the effectiveness of an Artificial Intelligence (AI) speaker as a device used for interactions in a foreign language (L2), and a tracking eye installed on the speaker to reduce L2 anxiety. L2 anxiety is an urgent issue since the anxiety derived from a fear of being judged, being negatively evaluated, or being rejected by others is hindering active L2 use. Our study hypothesizes that the question--response functions of the AI speakers would encourage L2 learners to input and output a considerable amount of L2 without the feeling of anxiety toward the speakers. We then asked eight Japanese undergraduates to conduct daily L2 interactions with the speakers in their homes for one month. The findings from pre-and post-listening tests, questionnaire surveys, and interviews revealed that intelligence speakers -- Google Home (GH) -- could enhance the learners' L2 motivations, gave them positive impressions, and helped eradicate their anxiety toward L2 interactions. [For the complete volume, &quot;CALL for Widening Participation: Short Papers from EUROCALL 2020 (28th, Online, August 20-21, 2020),&quot; see ED610330.]
Analysis of a Japan-Philippines Telecollaboration from a Social Realist Perspective
Author: Healy, Sandra
Date: 2020-12-14
Type: Reports - Research
Subjects: Foreign Countries,Undergraduate Students,Language Teachers,English (Second Language),Intercultural Communication,International Programs,Computer Mediated Communication,Educational Policy,Global Approach

This study applies social realist theory to the analysis of an ongoing online telecollaboration between Japanese undergraduate students in a classroom setting in Japan and Filipino teachers in an English conversation school in Cebu, the Philippines. The accepted goals of telecollaboration in an international context are the development of intercultural communication and linguistic skills. Analysis showed that, without guidance, the influence of Japanese educational policies on students, including a version of internationalisation known as kokusaika, can result in intracultural -- rather than intercultural -- communication. It is suggested that a focus on &quot;small&quot; -- rather than &quot;large&quot; -- culture may help address this issue in Japan, and improve intercultural and linguistic awareness. [For the complete volume, &quot;CALL for Widening Participation: Short Papers from EUROCALL 2020 (28th, Online, August 20-21, 2020),&quot; see ED610330.]
Designing a Gamified Reading App with Pupils in Elementary School
Author: El Naggar, Bassant
Date: 2020-12-14
Type: Speeches/Meeting Papers
Subjects: Game Based Learning,Design,Reading Instruction,Elementary School Students,Learner Engagement,After School Programs,Reading Programs,Handheld Devices,German

Playing games on mobile devices has become an integral part of younger generations' lives. Mobile games foster, among other things, deep concentration. This paper reports on design guidelines derived from observations of six elementary school pupils' engagement over a six-week period during an after-school reading club program. Each meeting consisted of three activities as well as reading text on the Microsoft immersive reader on an iPad, and playing a competitive reading game app, 'Henry rennt', which are both designed to support reading. Pupils were engaged in informal conversation with the researchers about both applications, and the authors informally observed the pupils' engagement with the apps and each other. Patterns of engagement and comments from pupils informed the design of a new reading app. This work reports these general patterns and concludes with new research areas to pursue as a result, including the impact of: social setting on playing, in-game teaching with avatars on engagement, and speed as a measurement of skill mastery. Finally, the applicability of children's engagement patterns is validated with adult students of German as a second language who used the app. [For the complete volume, &quot;CALL for Widening Participation: Short Papers from EUROCALL 2020 (28th, Online, August 20-21, 2020),&quot; see ED610330.]
U.S. National Strategy for Financial Literacy, 2020
Author: Financial Literacy and Education Commission (FLEC) (DOT)
Date: 2020-00-00
Type: Reports - Descriptive
Subjects: Money Management,Teaching Methods,Educational Improvement,Strategic Planning,Evidence Based Practice,Best Practices,Disproportionate Representation,Minority Groups,Well Being,Public Agencies,National Programs,Disadvantaged,COVID-19,Pandemics,Federal Aid,Outcome Measures,Federal Programs

The U.S. National Strategy for Financial Literacy 2020 (&quot;National Strategy 2020&quot; or &quot;National Strategy&quot;) promotes the financial literacy of Americans in two ways. First, it identifies methods to improve and increase the financial literacy and education of Americans. Second, it articulates the federal government's roles, priorities, and structures for promoting financial education. The National Strategy 2020 builds on previous National Strategy iterations, and draws on a review of federal financial education activities and opportunities for streamlining federal financial education activities completed by the U.S. Department of the Treasury in its 2019 report, &quot;Federal Financial Literacy Reform: Coordinating and Improving Financial Literacy Efforts&quot; (see ED611168). The National Strategy 2020 seeks to improve financial literacy and education among Americans by providing evidence-based best practices to the financial education field. Use of these best practices can help improve the delivery of financial education on different topics, especially to diverse populations, including historically underserved groups. These best practices are adaptable and applicable to changing economic contexts and can inform both policy-making and the development of new financial education activities. To build youth financial capability, the National Strategy identifies the importance of building young people's executive functions, financial habits, and financial knowledge and decision-making skills. The National Strategy also identifies ways that financial educators can measure the impact of their work through assessing financial well-being or other measures of financial health. With enhanced coordination, the Financial Literacy and Education Commission (FLEC) can effectively mobilize expertise and resources to provide assistance when and where it is most needed. The National Strategy 2020 describes a new structure to better organize the FLEC. It also identifies planned actions in priority areas of basic financial capability, including access to financial services (such as savings and credit products), housing, retirement savings and investor education, postsecondary education, and the unique issues facing military communities.
The Importance of Teaching and Learning Conditions: Infuences on Teacher Retention and School Performance in North Carolina. Research Brief
Author: Berry, Barnett
Date: 2021-01-00
Type: Reports - Descriptive
Subjects: Teaching Conditions,Teacher Persistence,Equal Education,Academic Achievement,Achievement Gains,Teacher Administrator Relationship,Principals,Teacher Leadership,Faculty Development,Teacher Collaboration,Teacher Effectiveness,Self Efficacy,Community Support,Parent School Relationship,School Effectiveness,Elementary Secondary Education,Public School Teachers

This brief draws on a study of teacher working conditions and their relationship to teacher retention and school performance in North Carolina. It is part of a series of studies conducted by the Learning Policy Institute (LPI)--in collaboration with WestEd and the Friday Institute for Educational Innovation at North Carolina State University--as part of an action plan developed to inform ongoing efforts to ensure compliance with the North Carolina Supreme Court's decision in &quot;Leandro v. the State of North Carolina.&quot; That case affirmed the state's constitutional responsibility to provide every student an equal opportunity for a sound basic education, including access to qualified teachers and administrators. Requested by the court in conjunction with both plaintiffs and defendants, the action plan aims to identify root causes of current inequalities and evidence-based solutions to meet the constitutional standard. This brief is based on an LPI report published in 2019: &quot;How Teaching and Learning Conditions Affect Teacher Retention and School Performance in North Carolina.&quot;
Crowdsourcing for Widening Participation and Learning Opportunities: A View from Language Learners&apos; Window
Author: Hatipoglu, Çiler
Date: 2020-12-14
Type: Speeches/Meeting Papers
Subjects: Electronic Publishing,Collaborative Writing,Foreign Countries,Second Language Learning,Context Effect,Cultural Differences,Teaching Methods,Educational Technology,Technology Uses in Education,Web Sites,Computer Games

Online crowdsourcing sites/platforms have become popular in recent years. This study aims to uncover when, where, and how language learners in Turkey (TUR), Poland (POL), Macedonia (MAC), and Bosnia and Herzegovina (B&amp;H) make use of the available crowdsourcing websites/games to learn foreign languages. To ensure parallelism among the data collected in the four countries, a cross-culturally appropriate online questionnaire in English comprised of two parts was designed for this study. Part one gathered information about the use of crowdsourcing sites, tools, and games, while part two elicited background information related to the participants (N=211). The data were analysed considering country- and context-specific variables. The results show that there are more similarities than differences in the ways informants in the studied countries perceive, and employ crowdsourcing resources to learn languages. Therefore, the findings might provide insights for experts, material developers and teacher trainers striving to create cross-culturally valid crowdsourcing platforms/games. [For the complete volume, &quot;CALL for Widening Participation: Short Papers from EUROCALL 2020 (28th, Online, August 20-21, 2020),&quot; see ED610330.]
Collaborative Virtual Learning in the shAR Geometry Simulation Environment
Author: Walkington, Candace
Date: 2021-06-00
Type: Speeches/Meeting Papers
Subjects: Cooperative Learning,Electronic Learning,Computer Simulation,Mathematics Education,Geometry,Geometric Concepts,Computer Interfaces,Nonverbal Communication

Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) platforms now support shared, immersive experiences that enable people to directly physically and perceptually engage with mathematical objects, including shared objects. These new forms of AR/VR technology -- which we call &quot;shared holographic AR/VR&quot; (shAR) -- enable multiple learners to manipulate and reason about the same mathematical objects represented as holograms projected in a joint three-dimensional collaborative space in front of them, using intuitive hand gestures. This Interactive Tools and Demos paper discusses an AR/VR environment for collaboratively exploring geometry conjectures about shapes and solids. We show data of learners collaborating in our environment using speech, dynamic actions on virtual objects, and hand gestures. We discuss the potential of AR and VR environments for mathematics learning.
Crowdsourcing in Language Learning as a Continuation of CALL in Varied Technological, Social, and Ethical Contexts
Author: Gajek, Elzbieta
Date: 2020-12-14
Type: Speeches/Meeting Papers
Subjects: Computer Assisted Instruction,Second Language Learning,Second Language Instruction,Teaching Methods,Ethics,Feedback (Response),Learning Motivation,Computer Software,Active Learning,Program Descriptions,Computer Games,Student Attitudes,Web Sites,Secondary School Students,Student Surveys,Cross Cultural Studies,Foreign Countries

Crowdsourcing not only opens new perspectives within the general concept of Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL), but also raises questions about ethics, motivation, and fair contribution. Technology offers platforms such as Duolingo, Bussu, and Babbel for learning languages with active contribution of the learners. Such applications reach millions of users. Thus, there is a need for initiatives to explore the potential of crowdsourcing for language learning. One of them is enetCollect CA16105 Combining Language Learning with Crowdsourcing Techniques, which is a European project within COST action. The aim of this paper is to disseminate the project's ideas as well as present some results of the research done by the author as her contribution to the project activities. The findings show that language learners are not heavy gamers and the feedback they receive is the strongest motivational factor towards crowdsourcing. [For the complete volume, &quot;CALL for Widening Participation: Short Papers from EUROCALL 2020 (28th, Online, August 20-21, 2020),&quot; see ED610330.]
A Situation Creation System to Enable Experiential Learning in Virtual Worlds for Developing Cross-Cultural Competencies
Author: Mirzaei, Maryam Sadat
Date: 2020-12-14
Type: Speeches/Meeting Papers
Subjects: Experiential Learning,Cultural Awareness,Second Language Learning,Second Language Instruction,English (Second Language),Computer Simulation,Intercultural Communication,Vignettes,Cultural Differences,Teaching Methods,Instructional Design,Role Playing,Decision Making,Native Language,Cultural Context,Computer Software,Computer Assisted Instruction,Language Teachers,Language Usage,Graduate Students,Undergraduate Students

The emergence of virtual worlds and simulation games provide ample opportunities for developing cultural competence by offering a visual, contextual, immersive, and interactive experience. Learners can benefit from contextual interactions and develop cultural competencies by fulfilling quests or exploring the environment. However, most of the existing systems contain few pre-designed scenarios, inadequate for covering unique aspects of different cultures. This study introduces a situation creation toolkit for teachers and learners to design their culture-specific scenarios in a 3D environment and share it with others to experience such situations. In a preliminary experiment, 37 English learners with different cultural backgrounds created a scenario, specific to their culture, and provided proper/improper communicative choices as well as cultural-related notes. Scenarios were then exchanged to those of different cultures for role-playing and decision-making. Results highlighted the influence of L1 culture and stereotyping when facing an unfamiliar cultural context, thus leading to culturally unacceptable behavior. Findings suggest that through real-life scenario design and experience, our platform can prepare learners to interact in culturally appropriate ways and encourages them to gain cross-cultural competence. [For the complete volume, &quot;CALL for Widening Participation: Short Papers from EUROCALL 2020 (28th, Online, August 20-21, 2020),&quot; see ED610330.]
Sentence Complexity as an Indicator of L2 Learner&apos;s Listening Difficulty
Author: Mirzaei, Maryam Sadat
Date: 2020-12-14
Type: Speeches/Meeting Papers
Subjects: Second Language Learning,Second Language Instruction,Difficulty Level,Listening Skills,English (Second Language),Ambiguity (Semantics),Undergraduate Students,Syntax,Listening Comprehension,Psycholinguistics,Correlation,Language Processing,Visual Aids,Cues,Video Technology,Task Analysis,Transcripts (Written Records),Asians,Engineering Education

This paper investigates the effect of sentence complexity, specifically lexical and syntactic surprisal, on L2 listening difficulty. Psycholinguistic studies revealed that surprisal cases correlate with textual comprehension difficulty. Based on surprisal theory, these cases are less probable or expected, considering the precedent context, thus require more complex processing to comprehend. Little is known about the influence of the surprisal factor on L2 listening comprehension. We aim to examine this effect and propose to include these cases in captioning to assist L2 listeners. Since conventional captions include the whole transcript, we use Partial and Synchronized Caption (PSC) with limited textual clues, which allows for highlighting surprisal cases to reduce ambiguity. In our experiment, intermediate learners of English (undergraduates) were asked to transcribe and paraphrase videos containing surprisal cases. Results revealed that learners faced difficulty when encountering surprisal, which was partially addressed with the help of PSC, yet more assistance was required. [For the complete volume, &quot;CALL for Widening Participation: Short Papers from EUROCALL 2020 (28th, Online, August 20-21, 2020),&quot; see ED610330.]
Phonological and Orthographic Problems in EFL College Spellers
Author: Al-Jarf, Reima
Date: 2008-02-17
Type: Speeches/Meeting Papers
Subjects: Foreign Countries,College Freshmen,Second Language Learning,English (Second Language),Listening Comprehension Tests,Spelling,Error Patterns,Phonology,Orthographic Symbols,Graphemes,Phonemes,Vowels,Morphemes,Spelling Instruction

36 Saudi EFL freshmen students took a listening-spelling test in which they filled out 100 blanks in a dialogue. Results indicated that 63% of the spelling errors were phonological and 37% were orthographic. It was also found that the subjects had more phonological problems with whole words but more orthographic problems with graphemes. Some of the phonological problems that the subjects had were: Inability to hear and discriminate all or most of the phonemes in a word, hearing and inability to discriminate vowel phonemes and hear the final syllable or suffix. They mostly had orthographic problems with vowel digraphs, double consonants, silent vowels and consonants, and homophones. A simplification process seems to affect students' spelling errors. A detailed account of EFL students' phonological and orthographic errors in spelling is given.
House Bill 5 and High School Endorsements: How Do They Align to College Admissions?
Author: Holzman, Brian
Date: 2020-12-00
Type: Reports - Evaluative
Subjects: State Legislation,Educational Legislation,High School Students,Graduation Requirements,Majors (Students),College Admission,STEM Education,Career Pathways,Selective Admission,Alignment (Education)

This policy brief describes the Texas high school graduation requirements put into effect through the passage of House Bill 5 in 2013. The brief also contends the introduction of academic endorsements, similar to college majors and intended to help high school students develop subject-area knowledge, may create clearer paths to selective college enrollment for students studying STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) than other academic subject areas. Of the five subject-area endorsements outlined in House Bill 5, STEM has the most rigorous requirements in science and math, both in terms of the credits and courses required. A content analysis of state four-year college admissions websites reveals selective institutions are more likely to require or recommend more science and math credits and specific advanced courses than nonselective institutions. These findings suggest schools and school districts should consider aligning requirements among endorsements, as well as ensure middle and high school guidance counselors provide information to students and families about how each endorsement could impact advancement to college, particularly selective four-year colleges.