This paper proposes a personalized teaching strategy based on Total Physical Response (TPR) to acquire new words. TPR combines target language items with semantically corresponding gestures conducive to learners understanding and memorizing them by repeatedly executing commands from their teachers. One limitation of TPR is that it does not allow…

Successful oral presentation effectually involves multi-faceted training of listening, writing, and nonverbal delivery besides speaking orally, which calls for a systematic holistic/multimodal approach. However, a multimodal learning environment for fostering EFL learners' presentation development remains virtually unexplored. This study employed…

This dissertation investigates the effect of linguistic and nonlinguistic variables on the use of spatial representations in bilingual speakers of Taiwanese Southern Min (TSM) and Mandarin Chinese (MC) as compared to monolinguals. Linguists and psychologists are particularly interested in the factors that influence the selection among such…

Animated pedagogical agents with characteristics such as facial expressions, gestures, and human emotions, under an interactive user interface are attractive to students and have high potential to promote students' learning. This study proposes a convenient method to add an embodied empathic avatar into a computer-aided learning program; learners…

Recognition of students' facial expressions can be used to understand their level of attention. In a traditional classroom setting, teachers guide the classes and continuously monitor and engage the students to evaluate their understanding and progress. Given the current popularity of e-learning environments, it has become important to assess the…

Background: There is a lack of empirical research investigating challenging behaviour in children with autism with severe speech impairments in naturalistic settings. The aim of the present study was to investigate challenging behaviour among Australian and Taiwanese children with autism who are non-verbal or have limited speech (i.e. less than…