For many students in engineering and engineering technology programs in the US, senior capstone design courses require students to form a team, define a problem, and find a feasible technical solution to address this problem. Students must integrate the knowledge and skills acquired during their studies at the college or university level. These…

Chinese idioms are mostly four-character phrases and are called Quadra-syllabic Idiomatic Expressions (QIEs). It has long been reported that learning of Chinese QIEs poses a great challenge for both young L1 speakers and adult L2 learners as the condensed form is often associated with complicated figurative meanings. The present study explored the…

Automatic question generation can help teachers to save the time necessary for constructing examination papers. Several approaches were proposed to automatically generate multiple-choice questions for vocabulary assessment or grammar exercises. However, most of these studies focused on generating questions in English with a certain similarity…

There is considerable evidence that incidental vocabulary acquisition through reading accounts for a large portion of the growth in word knowledge for both first (L1) and second (L2) language acquirers. In this paper, we evaluate the Markov Estimate of Semantic Association (MESA) technique for detecting small, incremental gains in vocabulary…

Students attending object-oriented analysis and design (OOAD) courses typically encounter difficulties transitioning from requirements analysis to logical design and then to physical design. Concept maps have been widely used in studies of user learning. The study reported here, based on the relationship of concept maps to learning theory and…

This study measures the extent to which Arabic-speaking EFL learners are aware of polysemy in English. It also investigates whether the English proficiency level of Arabic-speaking EFL learners plays a role in their ability to distinguish between the various meanings of English polysemous words, and whether they face problems when they encounter…

The present study investigated the effects of two types of core-image-based basic verb learning approaches: the learner-centered and the teacher-centered approaches. The learner-centered approach was an activity in which participants found semantic relationships among several definitions of each basic target verb through a picture-elucidated card…

We describe a new educational tool that relies on Semantic Web technologies to enhance lessons content. We conducted an experiment with 32 students whose results demonstrate better performance when exposed to our tool in comparison with a plain native tool. Consequently, this prototype opens new possibilities in lessons content enhancement.

Building from a theoretical foundation of active learning, this article describes how using a retail laboratory in an educational curriculum can benefit both students and strategic partners. Students work alongside strategic partners, and the retail laboratory enables them to probe and design novel retailing strategies, such as launching new…

The current loss of biodiversity requires efforts to increase awareness of pollinator conservation. An important tool is education which often uses the honeybee ("Apis mellifera") as an exemplary organism to reach this goal. Any successful module needs to focus on reducing the perceived danger associated with fear, in order to support…

Purpose: Most EFL textbooks suggest the use of vivid pictures and verbal explanations in teaching English prepositions. However, this word class appears in collocations, and rote-learning does not really help learners retain and use this word class successfully. Cognitive linguistics (CL) has implications for English language teaching as it rests…

This paper introduces an approach to teaching ethics as design in a new course entitled Design Ethics, team-taught by a philosopher and an engineer/designer. The course follows a problem-based learning model in which groups of students work through the phases of the design process on a project for a local client, considering the design values and…

This study aims to investigate how Turkish Teacher Trainees of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) interpret implied meanings, which is an integral but lesser-studied component of pragmatic competence. The conduct of the study began with the development of an online multiple-choice discourse completion test (MDCT) through two piloting phases.…

Associating a content word to its rational semantic relations is regarded as a language learning strategy which explicitly contributes to mental lexicon. Semantic mapping herein seems to constitute an efficacious pattern for its practice in language instruction. Conversely, it appears to be among the least frequently used vocabulary learning…

Aspects that influences mathematics learning is widely studied and language factors have been identified as a key backer to difficulties in learning Mathematics. It is evidenced that not only cognitive factors but also affective factors have vital role in learning mathematics. Such affective beliefs sources from various aspects of mathematics…