ethanporcaro/eric-fulltext-meta huggingface dataset:
Investigating Foreign Language Education through the Lenses of Great Minds
Author: Gao, Yang
Date: 2013-00-00
Type: Journal Articles
Subjects: Second Language Instruction,Second Language Learning,Empathy,Scaffolding (Teaching Technique),Caring,Experiential Learning,Sociocultural Patterns

The paper is a brief review of three great philosophers' tenets and their implications on foreign language education. Based on the recurring themes, namely, Noddings &quot;teaching with care&quot;, Dewey's &quot;learning by doing&quot; and Vygotsky's sociocultural theory, the paper highlights the importance of care and love, interaction, practical opportunities and scaffolding in a foreign language classroom, and gives insights on teaching, learning and curriculum design in foreign language education. Leaners in a foreign language classroom may be more struggling with their learning, thus requiring more care and help from their teachers. These philosophies serve as guiding principles to help teachers understand the meaning of their teaching and explore the world of foreign language education.
Distribution of Articles in Written Composition among Malaysian ESL Learners
Author: Rahim, Mia Emily Abdul
Date: 2013-00-00
Type: Journal Articles
Subjects: Foreign Countries,English (Second Language),Second Language Instruction,Second Language Learning,Form Classes (Languages),Computational Linguistics,Content Analysis,Statistical Analysis,Grammar,Sentence Structure,Writing (Composition),Measures (Individuals),Computer Software,College Students

The study aimed to investigate the distribution patterns of the English grammar articles (a, an, and the) as well as the distributions of their colligation patterns in written compositions of English among Malaysian ESL learners. This paper reports the results of a corpus-based study on articles used by these learners. The method used in this study was quantitative content analysis, in which it utilized the data from the Malaysian Corpus of Students' Argumentative Writing (MCSAW). The findings indicated that all the three articles were presented throughout the entire compositions and that the frequency of occurrences made up 18 percent of the entire tokens. The findings also showed that the distributions of the colligation patterns of the articles were at variance. Some of the colligation patterns were used heavily while others were not often applied in the compositions. The findings can help language teachers identify areas in the structure that need further emphasis in their teaching.
The Application of &quot;Three Dimensional&quot; Model in the Teaching Design of EFL Writing
Author: Li, Xiping
Date: 2013-00-00
Type: Journal Articles
Subjects: English (Second Language),Second Language Learning,Second Language Instruction,Writing Instruction,Teaching Methods,Business English,Language Role,Models,Writing (Composition),Instructional Design,Electronic Mail,Prewriting,Feedback (Response),Foreign Countries

As an indispensable and most difficult part of language acquisition, the importance of English writing has been intensified by the economic globalization and internet revolution due to the special role of English as a universal language (Warshauer, 2000). However, writing teaching and learning has been long perplexing language teachers and learners even in the first language. Therefore many studies have been conducted on the revelation of the nature of writing and how to achieve it in pursuit of solutions to this problem. Consequently, the paradigm of teaching design of EFL Writing has experienced corresponding shift with the development of science, technology and social culture. Based on the analyses of various paradigms, the paper proposes the framework of a &quot;three dimensional&quot; model as well as its application in the teaching of EFL Business English discourse composition so as to cultivate the learners' all-round writing skills in the aspect of teaching design.
Towards the Development of Communicative Language Approach for Adult EFL Students of the Community College, Taif University, KSA
Author: Alamin, Abdulamir
Date: 2013-00-00
Type: Journal Articles
Subjects: Foreign Countries,English (Second Language),Second Language Instruction,Second Language Learning,Teaching Methods,Communicative Competence (Languages),Language Teachers,Student Improvement,Academic Achievement,Language Skills,College Students,Questionnaires,Student Surveys

The paper describes the experience of the author as a teacher in general English language skills program. In this paper an attempt will be made to briefly deal with the notion of communication, communicative language teaching, and its implications for teaching English as a foreign language students through language skills post-secondary program. Firstly, this paper aims to describe the problems that the students tend to have in these multi-level classes regardless of the difference in their age and sex. Suggestions will be given as how the teachers in these classrooms can do better to improve the students' performance. Then, it will suggest some strategies to successfully &quot;teach&quot; these students, given the fact that all have different language skills that need to be improved. To achieve this goal, we shall look at the teaching process and suggest some ways to improve the teaching quality and students' learning and motivation.
Teaching English Reading through MI Theory in Primary Schools
Author: Jing, Jinxiu
Date: 2013-00-00
Type: Journal Articles
Subjects: Foreign Countries,Second Language Instruction,Elementary Education,Multiple Intelligences,Reading Instruction,Academic Standards,Pretests Posttests,Interviews,Student Interests,Reading Achievement,Language Proficiency,National Standards,Grade 5,Measures (Individuals),Elementary School Teachers,Elementary School Students

The theory of Multiple Intelligences (MI theory), put forward by Gardner in 1983, claims that each person possesses different combinations of nine intelligences. In education, it advocates that teachers should address students' personal uniqueness and provide a wide range of intelligence-oriented activities and experiences to facilitate learning, which is consistent with the core idea of the National English Curriculum Standards, namely, English teaching is not only for knowledge, but for the all-round development and the individuality of every student as well. The author conducted an empirical research about application of MI theory in Primary School English class. Two parallel classes were chosen, and one class was taught under the guidance of MI theory, and final evaluations of the two classes were conducted by applying post-tests and interviews. The research data showed that MI-based reading contributed significantly to arousing pupils' interest toward English reading and improving pupils' reading proficiency.
A Proposed Model of Optimality Theory for Jordanian Arabic Broken Plurals
Author: Sakarna, Ahmad Khalaf
Date: 2013-00-00
Type: Journal Articles
Subjects: Semitic Languages,Language Variation,Linguistic Theory,Foreign Countries,Phonology,Models,Guidelines,Morphemes,Morphology (Languages),Linguistic Input

One of the most challenging, but rather interesting, topics in the literature of Arabic phonology and morphology is the broken plurals (BP). The most widely acceptable account of Arabic BP, as far as I know, is McCarthy (1982) within the framework of Autosegmental Phonology. This paper presents and discusses the model of McCarthy (1982) and shows that it is unsatisfactory for providing a plausible account for Jordanian Arabic BP, as it suffers from a number of exceptions that McCarthy found hard to account for. The emergence of Optimality Theory (OT) in the 1990s has opened the door for further perspectives of treating different phonological problems. This paper shows that there are three major issues that constitute a challenge to McCarthy's Model of Arabic BP within the framework of Autosegmental Phonology. They include dialectal variation, the existence of more than one surface plural form for the same input, and the difference in the outputs of BP forms with the same underlying form. It also cannot account for the diverse shape of similar forms. As an alternative, this paper proposes a model within the framework of Optimality Theory that can account for and solve all the challenging problems for McCarthy's model in a satisfactory and straightforward manner.
Showing or Telling a Story: A Comparative Study of Public Education Texts in Multimodality and Monomodality
Author: Wang, Kelu
Date: 2013-00-00
Type: Journal Articles
Subjects: Comparative Analysis,Printed Materials,Visual Aids,Wildlife,Climate,Mass Instruction,Text Structure,Intermode Differences

Multimodal texts that combine words and images produce meaning in a different way from monomodal texts that rely on words. They differ not only in representing the subject matter, but also constructing relationships between text producers and text receivers. This article uses two multimodal texts and one monomodal written text as samples, which are for the same purpose of public education and on the same subject matter of wildlife protection. Through a comparative analysis of the two sets of sample texts, this article aims to show that different modes of representation produce different effects on text receivers and convey different amount of information. Thus, the multimodal texts and monomodal texts can meet the needs of different readers, who want to know about a subject matter or seek for detailed information on that subject matter. In addition, the different ways of meaning representation requires different modes of reading for readers of multimodal texts and monomodal texts.
The Impact of Cooperative Listening Materials Adaptation on Listening Comprehension Performance of Iranian EFL Learners
Author: Ghassemi, Mojtaba
Date: 2013-00-00
Type: Journal Articles
Subjects: English (Second Language),Second Language Learning,Student Attitudes,Language Proficiency,Language Tests,Foreign Countries,Listening Comprehension,Role,Learning Strategies,Independent Study,Second Language Instruction,Student Participation,Instructional Materials,Cooperative Learning,Scores,Pretests Posttests,Experimental Groups,Attitude Change,Teaching Methods,Quasiexperimental Design,Questionnaires

Listening comprehension has gained more prominence in EFL/ESL classes. Due to this prominence, scholars have tried to shed light on different ways of improving learners' listening comprehension. One of these ways is using listening strategies. There is still a controversy over the effective role of these strategies in improving listening comprehension. Thus, the proposed strategies have always been reviewed and reformed. Adopting either strategy, the course shall be quite ineffective if it fails to increase learners' participation in the course. The purpose of this study was to investigate whether or not peer-cooperative self-access materials adaptation has any effect on learners' involvement and participation in listening classes. In addition, the present study tried to probe any possible changes in students' attitude toward listening as a result of the treatment. In order to accomplish the purpose of the study, 90 Iranian students who were studying at Islamic Azad University, an independent university, were selected based on their obtained scores in a language proficiency test (TOEFL). They were randomly assigned to one control and two experimental groups. Then they undertook a 17-session treatment. With a quasi-experimental pretest posttest design, it became evident that having students adapt listening materials improved listening comprehension performance. And also a positive change occurred in students' overall attitude toward listening.
Cross-Linguistic Influence: Its Impact on L2 English Collocation Production
Author: Phoocharoensil, Supakorn
Date: 2013-00-00
Type: Journal Articles
Subjects: Second Language Learning,Language Proficiency,English (Second Language),Phrase Structure,Native Language,Foreign Countries,Learning Strategies,Transfer of Training,Form Classes (Languages),Language Usage,Grammar,Thai,Interference (Language),College Students,College Entrance Examinations,Language Tests,Scores,Statistical Analysis,Qualitative Research

This research study investigated the influence of learners' mother tongue on their acquisition of English collocations. Having drawn the linguistic data from two groups of Thai EFL learners differing in English proficiency level, the researcher found that the native language (L1) plays a significant role in the participants' collocation learning as it is regarded as a primary learning strategy on which they depend. Such L1 transfer seems to lead the learners to a number of collocational problems in the target language (TL), e.g. preposition omission, preposition insertion, non-targetlike word choice, and collocate redundancy. It was discovered that high-proficiency learners relied heavily upon their L1, a behavior claimed to be characteristic of those with limited TL knowledge (Ellis, 2008; Odlin, 1989). That the L1 evidently has a great impact on high-proficiency learners' use of English collocations found support for some past studies (e.g. Boonyasaquan, 2006; Koya, 2003).
Using Reading Inventory as a Learning Tool
Author: Guo, Siao-cing
Date: 2013-00-00
Type: Journal Articles
Subjects: Standardized Tests,Elementary School Students,Elementary School Teachers,Informal Reading Inventories,Parent Conferences,Reading Achievement,Reading Skills,Reading Strategies,Alternative Assessment,Teacher Attitudes,Student Attitudes

Standardized testing is widely utilized to determine the levels of children's learning achievement. There has been a constant debate on how accurately standardized tests reflect children's achievement. Many practice teachers struggle with teaching to the test to meet the national criteria. An elementary teacher questioned the accuracy of the standardized test and worked with the researcher to seek an alternative form of reading assessment to determine the student's reading level. The researcher utilized reading inventory, student's learning records, teacher's and student's feedback, and a parental conference to inquire into the issue. The results revealed that although the child was categorized as a low-level reader, the child was a capable reader, only that he read too quickly and tended to miss details of the information he was reading. He adopted reading strategies to assist his reading. This study demonstrated that alternative assessing can be a valuable learning tool for teachers and students.
An Empirical Study on the Curriculum Construction of Business English for International Trade Based on the Case of GDUFS
Author: Wenzhong, Zhu
Date: 2013-00-00
Type: Journal Articles
Subjects: Foreign Countries,Business English,English (Second Language),Second Language Learning,Second Language Instruction,International Trade,Curriculum Development,Business Administration Education,College Students,Needs Assessment,Educational History,Questionnaires

Business English education concern is of great significance. Business English for International Trade in Guangdong University of Foreign Studies (GDUFS) is widely acclaimed, and it is also a popular major. GDUFS has adopted the slogan &quot;Learn from East and West, moral integrity and direct behavior&quot;. It is a famous cradle of learning, where complex and capable persons are educated. Through review and reflection into the findings of the practice of business English in GDUFS and other instructions, this paper is aimed at analyzing the situation of the present curriculum, identifying existing problems such as the misbalance between the English courses and Business courses based on the theory of Needs Analysis, and then make some suggestions to increase the percentage of the Business courses and Business practices. In this way, this paper can serve as a reference for the curriculum construction of Business English for International trade in GDUFS.
An Empirical Research of Chinese Learners' Acquisition of the English Article System--Based on Syntactic Misanalysis Account
Author: Jian, Shi
Date: 2013-00-00
Type: Journal Articles
Subjects: Foreign Countries,English (Second Language),Second Language Instruction,Second Language Learning,Form Classes (Languages),Error Analysis (Language),Student College Relationship,Language Tests,Grammar,Measures (Individuals),Statistical Analysis

In the field of applied linguistics, the English article is the acknowledged teaching and learning difficulty and receives lots of attention in second language acquisition (SLA). This paper, based on the Syntactic Misanalysis Account (SMA) advocated by Trenkic in which L2 articles are analyzed as adjectives by L2ers, proposes the English article is the functional category with null semantic meaning and its production is syntactic-driven. The English Proficiency Test and the Forced Choice Elicitation Task have been conducted with 41 freshmen, 41 sophomores and 41 juniors of English majors in Xi'an University of Science and Technology (XUST), which finds L2ers from L1 Chinese maybe relate referential meaning of definite to the perceptible referent but the meaning of indefinite to the non-recognizable referent and thus produce substitution errors in their English article choices.
The Effects of Vocabulary Knowledge and Dictionary Use on EFL Reading Performance
Author: Shen, Zhifa
Date: 2013-00-00
Type: Journal Articles
Subjects: Foreign Countries,English (Second Language),Second Language Instruction,Second Language Learning,Vocabulary,Vocabulary Development,Dictionaries,Reading Achievement,Reading Comprehension,Correlation,Scores,Electronic Publishing,Language Proficiency,College Students,Language Tests,Regression (Statistics),Statistical Analysis

The present study mainly investigated the effects of vocabulary knowledge and dictionary use on EFL reading performance. The results show that scores on vocabulary size, specific vocabulary knowledge, and reading comprehension are highly and positively correlated. Scores on specific vocabulary knowledge are more closely correlated with reading comprehension than scores on vocabulary size. Scores on specific vocabulary knowledge adds a noticeable prediction in reading comprehension over and above the prediction already afforded by scores on vocabulary size. The additional prediction can be explained by the ability to infer from the context, activating content schemata and the knowledge of polysemy of the words. It is also found that learners often overestimate their understanding of words. The results also show that the access to a bilingual electronic dictionary has a significant effect on the reading scores for both high proficiency group and low proficiency group. It is due to quick access to electronic dictionaries and relatively limited control of vocabulary in English.
The Cooperative Learning Effects on English Reading Comprehension and Learning Motivation of EFL Freshmen
Author: Pan, Ching-Ying
Date: 2013-00-00
Type: Journal Articles
Subjects: Foreign Countries,English (Second Language),Second Language Instruction,Second Language Learning,Cooperative Learning,Reading Comprehension,Correlation,Learning Motivation,College Freshmen,Conventional Instruction,Comparative Analysis,Control Groups,Experimental Groups,Pretests Posttests,Quasiexperimental Design,Lecture Method,Reading Tests,Reading Achievement,Achievement Tests,Statistical Distributions,Statistical Analysis,Measures (Individuals)

This experimental study aims to investigate the effects of using cooperative learning to enhance the English reading comprehension and learning motivation of EFL freshmen by comparing the cooperative learning instruction and traditional lecture instruction. This experiment was implemented in a Freshman English Reading course, a two credit course, with two hours of instruction per week, over a full semester. Seventy-eight EFL freshmen taking Freshman English Reading courses participated in this study, with 44 participants in the experimental group and 34 in the comparison group. We employed a pretest-posttest comparison group quasi-experimental design. The experimental group received a reciprocal cooperative learning instruction, whereas the comparison group received a traditional lecture instruction. Both groups were administered three English-reading achievement tests and an English learning motivation scale. The data were analyzed by means, standard deviations, t tests, and one-way ANCOVA. The findings indicate statistically significant differences in favor of cooperative learning instruction on English reading comprehension, particularly among medium- and low-proficiency students. Cooperative learning instruction also created a significantly positive effect on student motivation toward learning English reading. In conclusion, we strongly suggest teachers use cooperative learning instruction in university-level EFL reading classes.
Study Abroad and Interlanguage Pragmatic Development in Request and Apology Speech Acts among Iranian Learners
Author: Khorshidi, Hassan Rasouli
Date: 2013-00-00
Type: Journal Articles
Subjects: Study Abroad,Second Language Learning,Pretests Posttests,Program Effectiveness,Knowledge Level,Correlation,Language Proficiency,Comparative Analysis,Speech Acts,Interlanguage,Foreign Countries,Language Usage,Pragmatics,Questionnaires,Gender Differences

This research study empirically investigated the impact of study abroad context on L2 learners' pragmatic development compared with study at home group in Iran. For the study abroad group the participants were selected from the Iranian students who registered in a six-month program in language institutes in India (Mysore) and for the study at home group the participants were chosen from the language learners at the most outstanding language institute in Iran (Iran Language Institute) at the intermediate level. A Discourse Completion Task (DCT) including request and apology speech acts was used to measure the gains in the two groups. The DCT was administered one at the beginning as a pre-test and then at the end of the six months course as a post-test. Overall, the study revealed significant development in study abroad learners' pragmatic knowledge, whereas this change in at home group was meager. It was also found that a correlation governs the growth in apology and request proficiency in language learning. This comparative study moreover yielded this finding that gender is not a determining factor in the acquisition of pragmatic knowledge specifically in request and apology speech acts in language learning.