In the 2011 census almost one in three Irish teenagers claimed to be unable to speak Irish (Central Statistics Office, Ireland, 2012), despite the language being taught daily in school. The challenges facing the Irish language in schools are complex and multifaceted. The research reported here attempts to address some of these challenges by…

Anyone in the United States who wants to learn Spanish can easily find local instructional options. Opportunities abound as well for maintaining one's Spanish: all-Spanish television stations, widely distributed print media, and an abundance of native speakers. Learning opportunities and resources for other commonly taught languages (CTL) such as…

Vygotskian sociocultural theory of mind holds that language mediates thought. According to the theory, speech does not merely put completed thought into words; rather, it is a tool to refine thought as it evolves in real time. This study investigated from a sociocultural theory of mind perspective how nine beginning learners of Latin used private…

Social presence is considered an important quality in computer-mediated communication as it promotes willingness in learners to take risks through participation in interpersonal exchanges (Kehrwald, 2008) and makes communication more natural (Lowenthal, 2010). While social presence has mostly been investigated through questionnaire data and…

This study aimed at devising a vocabulary learning software that would help learners learn and retain vocabulary items effectively. Foundation linguistics and learning theories have been adapted to the foreign language vocabulary learning context using a computer software named Parole that was designed exclusively for this study. Experimental…

This study designed and developed a Chinese character handwriting diagnosis and remedial instruction (CHDRI) system to improve Chinese as a foreign language (CFL) learners' ability to write Chinese characters. The CFL learners were given two tests based on the CHDRI system. One test focused on Chinese character handwriting to diagnose the CFL…

Knowledge of lexical items is arguably the most essential aspect of being able to communicate in a foreign language (Richards, 2000). Many studies have examined effective strategies for retaining the meaning of foreign words, but studies investigating the effectiveness of different methods for the retention of essential grammatical features of…

Corpus of High School Academic Texts (COHAT), currently of 150,000+ words, aims to make academic language instruction a more data-driven and student-centered discovery learning as a special type of Computer-Assisted Language Learning (CALL), emphasizing students' critical thinking and metacognition. Since 2013, high school English as an additional…

A key design issue for tutorial CALL is that controlled practice activities need to engage learners in meaningful L2 processing, so that any knowledge developed in such practice may transfer to meaningful L2 use in complex skills. Furthermore, activities for controlled practice ideally engender intrinsic motivation, so that learners are willing to…

We present an intelligent tutoring system that lets students of Chinese learn words and grammatical constructions. It relies on a Bayesian, linguistically motivated cognitive model that represents the learner's knowledge. This model is dynamically updated given observations about the learner's behaviour in the exercises, and employed at runtime to…

This paper reports our experience in using a parallel corpus to teach Cantonese, a variety of Chinese spoken in Hong Kong, as a second language. The parallel corpus consists of pairs of word-aligned sentences in Cantonese and Mandarin Chinese, drawn from television programs in Hong Kong (Lee, 2011). We evaluated our pedagogical approach with…

Research has shown that task-based computer-mediated communication (CMC) can foster attention to linguistic form in ways that may promote language learning (c.f., Blake, 2000; Smith, 2003, 2005). However, relatively little research has investigated how differences in the way that tasks are used in CMC settings influence learning opportunities…

In an ever-changing world, foreign language instruction remains faithfully devoted to teaching by means of coursebooks, the design of which is based mainly on the skills or the structural syllabus paradigm that arranges language according to complexity of grammatical phenomena. In this paper, I aim to explore the appropriateness of the materials…

Netnography (Kozinets, 2010) is an ethnographic approach to study communities that exist primarily online. Engaging in online participant observation, the netnographer connects to the online community through a computer screen, and the field is located inside the screen. Although it has been used in marketing research extensively, netnography is a…

This paper presents a study on implementing the ASR-based CALL (computer-assisted language learning based upon automatic speech recognition) system embedded with both formative and summative feedback approaches and using implicit and explicit strategies to enhance adult and young learners' English pronunciation. Two groups of learners including 18…