This study examined the validity of data collected from a novel online story retell task. The task was specifically designed for use by junior school teachers with the support of speech-language therapists or literacy specialists. The assessment task was developed to monitor children's oral language progress in their first year at school as part…

Age of acquisition (AoA) refers to the age at which people learn a particular item and the AoA effect refers to the phenomenon that early-acquired items are processed more quickly and accurately than those acquired later. Over several decades, the AoA effect has been investigated using neuroscientific, behavioral, corpus and computational…

Gunawardena et al.'s (1997) Interaction Analysis Model (IAM) is one of the most frequently employed frameworks to guide the qualitative analysis of social construction of knowledge online. However, qualitative analysis is time consuming, and precludes immediate feedback to revise online courses while being delivered. To expedite analysis with a…

In phonetics research, language alternation--including code switching (speaker-initiated) and cued switching (researcher-prompted)--can be used as a tool to investigate various aspects of speech production and perception in bilingual or multilingual speakers (Bullock & Toribio, 2009a). Studies on the production of voice onset time (VOT) during…

Academic discourse communities and learning circles are characterized by collaboration, sharing commonalities in terms of social interactions and language. The discourse of these communities is composed of jargon, common terminologies, and similarities in how they construe and communicate meaning. This study examines the extent to which discourse…

The media discourse on student loans plays a significant role in the way that policy actors conceptualize challenges and potential solutions related to student debt. This study examines the racialized language in student loan news articles published in eight major news outlets between 2006 and 2021. We found that 18% of articles use any racialized…

Although listening is key to communication, it remains the least studied skill compared to other skills, both at the national and international levels, among learners of English as a foreign language (EFL). There is also often a lack of awareness among scholars and teachers of how listening takes place, how it is best taught, and how it can be…

This paper describes the development and evaluation of Interaction Competence Elicitor (ICE), a spoken dialog system (SDS) for the delivery of a paired oral discussion task in the context of language assessment. The purpose of ICE is to sustain a topic-specific conversation with a test taker in order to elicit discourse that can be later judged to…

Two lines of evidence emerged in the past suggesting that lexical form seemed to play a more important role in the organization of the second language (L2) mental lexicon than in that of the first language (L1) lexicon. They were masked orthographic priming in L2 word recognition and an elevated proportion of form-related responses in L2 word…

In view of the complicated translation cognitive process, the study investigated and compared students' translation process of Chinese Classics through translation thinking path schema. Seventy-six participants learning translation courses based on parallel level in two classes of one Chinese university, some of them trained for four months…

Most language experiences take place at the level of multiple sentences. However, previous studies of second language (L2) comprehension have typically focused on lexical- and sentence-level processing. Our study addresses this gap by examining auditory discourse comprehension in 32 English/French bilinguals. We tested the prediction of the noisy…

The work of translation seems to be much easier with the assistance of web-based Machine Translation such as Google Translate. Does it work well? This study aims at finding how Google translates academic texts from Indonesian into English. It is also to find the extent to which Google Translate accurately and naturally transfers such texts. The…

This article, taking the translation courses for English majors in Zhejiang University of Finance and Economics Dongfang College as an example, starts from the current teaching problems of translation courses in application-oriented colleges and universities. In order to clarify the teaching system, highlight the local characteristics, and find a…

Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) issues are urgent in education. We developed and evaluated a massive open online course (N = 963) with embedded equity simulations that attempted to equip educators with equity teaching practices. Applying a structural topic model (STM)--a type of natural language processing (NLP)--we examined how…

Two experiments used eyetracking during reading to examine the processing of the matrix verb following object and subject relative clauses. The experiments show that the processing of the matrix verb following an object relative is indeed slowed compared to the processing of the same verb following a subject relative. However, this difficulty is…