Symbiosis of language testing and language teaching:The journey of the 37^(th) Language Testing Research Colloquium( LTRC 2015) in Toronto,Canada

The 37th Language Testing Research Colloquium(LTRC 2015①)was held at Eaton Chelsea Hotel in Toronto Canada during March 16-20,2015.The first two days of March 16-17 were preconference workshop days with March 18-20 as the three main conference days.More than 300 participants from 27 countries and regions joined the conference.The top numbers of the

An approach based on deep learning for Indian sign language translation

Purpose–According to the Indian Sign Language Research and Training Centre(ISLRTC),India has approximately 300 certified human interpreters to help people with hearing loss.This paper aims to address the issue of Indian Sign Language(ISL)sentence recognition and translation into semantically equivalent English text in a signer-independent mode.Design/methodology/approach–This study presents an approach that translates ISL sentences into English text using the MobileNetV2 model and Neural Machine Translation(NMT).The authors have created an ISL corpus from the Brown corpus using ISL grammar rules to perform machine translation.The authors’approach converts ISL videos of the newly created dataset into ISL gloss sequences using the MobileNetV2 model and the recognized ISL gloss sequence is then fed to a machine translation module that generates an English sentence for each ISL sentence.Findings–As per the experimental results,pretrained MobileNetV2 model was proven the best-suited model for the recognition of ISL sentences and NMT provided better results than Statistical Machine Translation(SMT)to convert ISL text into English text.The automatic and human evaluation of the proposed approach yielded accuracies of 83.3 and 86.1%,respectively.Research limitations/implications–It can be seen that the neural machine translation systems produced translations with repetitions of other translated words,strange translations when the total number of words per sentence is increased and one or more unexpected terms that had no relation to the source text on occasion.The most common type of error is the mistranslation of places,numbers and dates.Although this has little effect on the overall structure of the translated sentence,it indicates that the embedding learned for these few words could be improved.Originality/value–Sign language recognition and translation is a crucial step toward improving communication between the deaf and the rest of society.Because of the shortage of human interpreters,an alternative approach is desired to help people achieve smooth communication with the Deaf.To motivate research in this field,the authors generated an ISL corpus of 13,720 sentences and a video dataset of 47,880 ISL videos.As there is no public dataset available for ISl videos incorporating signs released by ISLRTC,the authors created a new video dataset and ISL corpus.

Appraisal of the Production-Oriented Approach： An Introduction

The production-oriented approach （POA） has been developed over a decade. It is driven by the need to improve English classroom instruction for university students in China （Wen, 2016）. It is also motivated by the aspiration to enhance the quality of foreign language education in other similar pedagogical contexts outside China. A volume of research has been done by Wen Qiufang and her research team, to formulate the theory of POA and to test its effectiveness in classroom pedagogy （e.g. Wen, 2016, 2015; Yang, 2015; Zhang, 2015）. At the moment, the POA is still at an early stage of theory building and almost all empirical research is done in the Chinese context. In order to improve the quality of this theory and to make it intelligible to the international academic community, a one-day symposium was held in Beijing Foreign Studies University on May 15, 2017. The symposium was entitled ＇The first international forum on innovative foreign language education in China： Appraisal of the POA＇. In the forum, leading experts in applied linguistics were invited to discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the POA and the directions for its future development. The symposium was the first attempt for the POA research team to discuss its latest work with international scholars. This Viewpoint section collects the responses of four experts who participated in the symposium, listed in alphabetical order. The collection of articles covers three topics related to the POA： its pedagogical application, its use for teacher training, and its research. Alister Cumming is Professor Emeritus and the former Head of the Centre for Educational Research on Languages and Literacies, University of Toronto, Canada. His article focuses primarily on POA research as an exemplary case of design-based research. Rod Ellis is Research Professor in the School of Education at Curtin University, Australia. He discusses POA in terms of pedagogy, teacher training and research, with both critiques and constructive suggestions. Paul Kei Matsuda is Professor of English and Director of Second Language Writing at Arizona State University, the writed states. He responds to POA from the perspective of an expert researcher and teacher of L2 writing. Charlene Polio is Professor and Associate Chair in the Department of Linguistics ＆ Germanic, Slavic, Asian ＆ African Languages atMichigan State University, the writed states. She conceptualises POA as a useful method to address some issues in pre-service teacher development. Overall, the articles in this section are insightful and reader-friendly. They are not only useful for the development of POA in particular, but may also be valuable to a broad range of researchers as they touch upon pertaining issues, as well as emerging topics, in the field of applied linguistics. We therefore find it necessary to make them accessible to a wide readership.