Language transfer has been a key issue in applied linguistics, second language acquisition, and language teaching for at least a century. Within the last few decades, however, its importance has been reassessed severa...Language transfer has been a key issue in applied linguistics, second language acquisition, and language teaching for at least a century. Within the last few decades, however, its importance has been reassessed several times. The paper focuses on the phenomena of language transfer in Chinese EFL writing, expecting to provide implications for Chinese English learners and teachers.展开更多
In speech recognition, acoustic modeling always requires tremendous transcribed samples, and the transcription becomes intensively time-consuming and costly. In order to aid this labor-intensive process, Active Learni...In speech recognition, acoustic modeling always requires tremendous transcribed samples, and the transcription becomes intensively time-consuming and costly. In order to aid this labor-intensive process, Active Learning （AL） is adopted for speech recognition, where only the most informative training samples are selected for manual annotation. In this paper, we propose a novel active learning method for Chinese acoustic modeling, the methods for initial training set selection based on Kullback-Leibler Divergence （KLD） and sample evaluation based on multi-level confusion networks are proposed and adopted in our active learning system, respectively. Our experiments show that our proposed method can achieve satisfying performances.展开更多
The gap between the theories of second language acquisition and their practice in materials development has been a controversial issue in the field of applied linguistics. Recently, the findings of corpus linguistics ...The gap between the theories of second language acquisition and their practice in materials development has been a controversial issue in the field of applied linguistics. Recently, the findings of corpus linguistics have narrowed the gap. However, their practice, especially in the realm of vocabulary acquisition, has encountered pedagogic problems in the classroom because the authentic nature of the words in corpus-based examples was beyond the level of learners＇ comprehension which paves the way for the practice of pedagogic corpus linguistics. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to practice pedagogic corpus linguistics, and mainly data-driven learning, with the first year secondary school English language learners in Iran in terms of their vocabulary acquisition. To do so, 28 students participated in the study. Examples from the British National Corpus for the main words of each unit of their course book, Prospect 1, were presented to them in a course of 16 sessions. Those which were beyond their understanding were eliminated and those comprehensible for them, the pedagogic ones, were selected based on their reports regarding the comprehensibility of each corpus-based example.展开更多
This paper presents the results of a 14-week attention strategy training of 174 college freshmen. It illustrates the promoting function of attention in second language vocabulary acquisition by raising students＇ expe...This paper presents the results of a 14-week attention strategy training of 174 college freshmen. It illustrates the promoting function of attention in second language vocabulary acquisition by raising students＇ expectations for new words, by increasing the frequency of exposure to them, by enhancing their perceptual salience, and by increasing the task demand for word study. The results show that enhancing attention in input could promote students＇ vocabulary acquisition and help them form vocabulary learning strategy suitable for their levels of proficiency.展开更多
文摘Language transfer has been a key issue in applied linguistics, second language acquisition, and language teaching for at least a century. Within the last few decades, however, its importance has been reassessed several times. The paper focuses on the phenomena of language transfer in Chinese EFL writing, expecting to provide implications for Chinese English learners and teachers.
基金Acknowledgements This study is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China （60705019）, the National High-Tech Research and Development Plan of China （ 2006AA010102 and 2007AA01Z417）, the NOKIA project, and the 111 Project of China under Grant No. 1308004.
文摘In speech recognition, acoustic modeling always requires tremendous transcribed samples, and the transcription becomes intensively time-consuming and costly. In order to aid this labor-intensive process, Active Learning （AL） is adopted for speech recognition, where only the most informative training samples are selected for manual annotation. In this paper, we propose a novel active learning method for Chinese acoustic modeling, the methods for initial training set selection based on Kullback-Leibler Divergence （KLD） and sample evaluation based on multi-level confusion networks are proposed and adopted in our active learning system, respectively. Our experiments show that our proposed method can achieve satisfying performances.
文摘The gap between the theories of second language acquisition and their practice in materials development has been a controversial issue in the field of applied linguistics. Recently, the findings of corpus linguistics have narrowed the gap. However, their practice, especially in the realm of vocabulary acquisition, has encountered pedagogic problems in the classroom because the authentic nature of the words in corpus-based examples was beyond the level of learners＇ comprehension which paves the way for the practice of pedagogic corpus linguistics. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to practice pedagogic corpus linguistics, and mainly data-driven learning, with the first year secondary school English language learners in Iran in terms of their vocabulary acquisition. To do so, 28 students participated in the study. Examples from the British National Corpus for the main words of each unit of their course book, Prospect 1, were presented to them in a course of 16 sessions. Those which were beyond their understanding were eliminated and those comprehensible for them, the pedagogic ones, were selected based on their reports regarding the comprehensibility of each corpus-based example.
文摘This paper presents the results of a 14-week attention strategy training of 174 college freshmen. It illustrates the promoting function of attention in second language vocabulary acquisition by raising students＇ expectations for new words, by increasing the frequency of exposure to them, by enhancing their perceptual salience, and by increasing the task demand for word study. The results show that enhancing attention in input could promote students＇ vocabulary acquisition and help them form vocabulary learning strategy suitable for their levels of proficiency.
