Automatic speech recognition (ASR) has considerable potential to model aspects of classroom discourse with the goals of automated assessment, feedback, and instructional support. However, modeling student talk is besieged by numerous challenges including a lack of data for child speech, low signal to noise ratio, speech disfluencies, and…

I used my Twitter account to tweet images of English and Arabic texts to be translated by my student followers who are translation major. In addition, I tweeted translation common translation errors, Arabic meaning of selected prefixes, suffixes and roots with examples, translation tips on stylistic, syntactic, semantic and cultural issues…

This study examines the L2 pronunciation feedback provided by the Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) functionality in Google Translate (GT). We focus on three Quebec Francophone (QF) errors in English: th-substitution, h-deletion, and h-epenthesis. Four hundred and eighty male and female QF recordings of sentences with correctly and incorrectly…

Speech and language development in children are crucial for ensuring effective skills in their long-term learning ability. A child's vocabulary size at the time of entry into kindergarten is an early indicator of their learning ability to read and potential long-term success in school. The preschool classroom is thus a promising venue for…

This paper explores a general approach to paraphrase generation using a pre-trained seq2seq model fine-tuned using a back-translated anatomy and physiology textbook. Human ratings indicate that the paraphrase model generally preserved meaning and grammaticality/fluency: 70% of meaning ratings were above 75, and 40% of paraphrases were considered…

This paper presents a hybrid approach for correcting grammatical errors in the sentences uttered by Korean learners of English. The error correction system plays an important role in GenieTutor, which is a dialogue-based English learning system designed to teach English to Korean students. During the talk with GenieTutor, grammatical error…

This study proposes a method to detect problematic speech segments automatically for second language (L2) listeners, considering both lexical and acoustic aspects. It introduces a tool, Partial and Synchronized Caption (PSC), which provides assistance for language learners and fosters L2 listening skills. PSC presents purposively selected words…

Data-Driven Learning (DDL), in which learners "confront [themselves] directly with the corpus data" (Johns, 2002, p. 108), has shown to be effective in collocation learning in L2 writing. Nevertheless, there have been only few research studies of this type examining the relationship between English proficiency and corpus consultation.…

According to recent studies, there is a persistence of adverb placement errors in the written productions of francophone learners and users of English at an intermediate to advanced level. In this paper, we present strategies for the automatic detection and correction of errors in the placement of manner adverbs, using linguistic-based natural…

This study surveys the opinions of both teachers and students involved in the Year 1 course "University English" in the Language Centre at City University of Hong Kong. The survey involved 265 students and 37 teachers. The issues studied were: 1) how useful is peer and teacher feedback? And 2) how effective are direct vs indirect…

Using English as a global communicating tool makes Taiwanese people have to speak in English in diverse international situations. However, consonants and vowels in English are not all effortless for them to articulate. This phonological reduction study explores concepts about phonological (articulating system) approximation. From Taiwanese folks'…

Unlike English, Standard Arabic has two forms of subject pronouns: Independent such as "?na" ("I"), and a pronominal suffix that is an integral part of the verb such as "katab-tu" ("I wrote"). Independent subject pronouns are commonly used in nominal sentences, not verbal sentences. Use of independent…

Mother tongue is the language that a person learns in the society he/she lives especially from his/her mother by imitating herself which begins from the period of infancy and also mother tongue is the language that he/she expresses him/herself best. Vardar (1980:20) defines mother tongue as, "[Mother tongue] is the language which is learned for…

French gender marking errors made by 23 Anglophones and 20 Lusophones are analyzed. The observation is made that the errors noted are due to frequent arbitrariness of this particular aspect of the language. It is concluded that the arbitrary portions of this feature of the language are subject to remaining indeterminate in second language…

Preposition usage by students at a secondary school for the deaf was examined in Ss' response to a videotape showing a young woman using Signed English with a voiceover. A descriptive essay was collected in response to a question she posed. Essays were typed verbatim into computer storage and then coded for grammatical features using a multiple…