谈《The Practice of English Language Teaching》中的平衡活动法

平衡活动法是教育界一直很关注的一个热点话题。了解平衡活动法的基本内容、合理性和活动方法,探讨其在课堂教学中应注意的问题,对克服传统教学法的弊端,吸收交际法的精华和人本主义教学法"the wholeperson"的思想,改进我国的外语教学,具有积极的意义。

Translating Interdisciplinary Research on Language Learning into Identifying Specific Learning Disabilities in Verbally Gifted and Average Children and Youth

The current research was grounded in prior interdisciplinary research that showed cognitive ability (verbal ability for translating cognitions into oral language) and multiple-working memory endophenotypes (behavioral markers of genetic or brain bases of language learning) predict reading and writing achievement in students with and without specific learning disabilities in written language (SLDs-WL). Results largely replicated prior findings that verbally gifted with dyslexia score higher on reading and writing achievement than those with average verbal ability but not on endophenotypes. The current study extended that research by comparing those with and without SLDs-WL with assessed verbal ability held constant. The verbally gifted without SLDs-WL (n = 14) scored higher than the verbally gifted with SLDs-WL (n = 27) on six language skills (oral sentence construction, best and fastest handwriting in copying, single real word oral reading accuracy, oral pseudoword reading accuracy and rate) and four endophenotypes (orthographic and morphological coding, orthographic loop, and switching attention). The verbally average without SLDs-WL (n = 6) scored higher than the verbally average with SLDs-WL (n = 22) on four language skills (best and fastest hand-writing in copying, oral pseudoword reading accuracy and rate) and two endophenotypes (orthographic coding and orthographic loop). Implications of results for translating interdisciplinary research into flexible definitions for assessment and instruction to serve students with varying verbal abilities and language learning and endophenotype profiles are discussed along with directions for future research.

On the Combination of “The Textual Research on Historical Documents” and “The Comparative Study of Historical Data” —— and a Discussion on “The Law of Quan-ma and Gui-mei” in Chinese Language Studies

In Chinese language studies, both “The Textual Research on Historical Documents” and “The Comparative Study of Historical Data” are traditional in methodology and they both deserve being treasured, passed on, and further developed. It will certainly do harm to the development of academic research if any of the two methods is given unreasonable priority. The author claims that the best or one of the best methodologies of the historical study of Chinese language is the combination of the two, hence a new interpretation of “The Double-proof Method”. Meanwhile, this essay is also an attempt to put forward “The Law of Quan-ma and Gui-mei” in Chinese language studies, in which the author believes that it is not advisable to either treat Gui-mei as Quan-ma or vice versa in linguistic research. It is crucial for us to respect always the language facts first, which is considered the very soul of linguistics.

Classification of Conversational Sentences Using an Ensemble Pre-Trained Language Model with the Fine-Tuned Parameter

Sentence classification is the process of categorizing a sentence based on the context of the sentence.Sentence categorization requires more semantic highlights than other tasks,such as dependence parsing,which requires more syntactic elements.Most existing strategies focus on the general semantics of a conversation without involving the context of the sentence,recognizing the progress and comparing impacts.An ensemble pre-trained language model was taken up here to classify the conversation sentences from the conversation corpus.The conversational sentences are classified into four categories:information,question,directive,and commission.These classification label sequences are for analyzing the conversation progress and predicting the pecking order of the conversation.Ensemble of Bidirectional Encoder for Representation of Transformer(BERT),Robustly Optimized BERT pretraining Approach(RoBERTa),Generative Pre-Trained Transformer(GPT),DistilBERT and Generalized Autoregressive Pretraining for Language Understanding(XLNet)models are trained on conversation corpus with hyperparameters.Hyperparameter tuning approach is carried out for better performance on sentence classification.This Ensemble of Pre-trained Language Models with a Hyperparameter Tuning(EPLM-HT)system is trained on an annotated conversation dataset.The proposed approach outperformed compared to the base BERT,GPT,DistilBERT and XLNet transformer models.The proposed ensemble model with the fine-tuned parameters achieved an F1_score of 0.88.

Some Tonal and Rhythmical Sequences in the Vocal Language of Dogs as Significant Earthquake Precursors

A monitoring of multiple physical parameters in a moderate seismic area in Western Piedmont (NW Italy) and the simultaneous observation of the behaviour of numerous species of domestic and wild animals gave in a period of over twenty years the possibility to distinguish the unusual animal behaviours due to local earthquake nucleation from other causes. In particular, the observation of the body and vocal language of dogs (Canis familiaris) in the same area has permitted not only to specify the different meanings of vocal language in connection to their body language, but also to classify the minimum elements into a vocal language that is linked together by tonal and rhythmical sequences of sounds that form a semantic lexicon. The usage of the same tonal and rhythmical vocal sequences in similar or identical situations, which are experienced by different groups of dogs, induces us to verify whether it could be possible to link particular vocal sequences to precise physical anomalies before earthquakes. The individuation of physical anomalies due to an earthquake nucleation or due to a hydro-geological destabilization, is possible thanks to a continuous long-term monitoring of some parameters. Moreover, the complexity of the vocal language of dogs increases if the dogs live in an area with a law population density. Then the correlation between some vocal sequences and some seismic precursors is better if dogs live free in yard or on farms, if they are in good health, and if they can establish a strong social relation of group. When dogs live closed in yards of houses that are far apart, they communicate with each other with an amazing vocal language, full of questions and answers, imitations of sequences, and information about situations that may be harmful to them.

Unlocking the Potential:A Comprehensive Systematic Review of ChatGPT in Natural Language Processing Tasks

As Natural Language Processing(NLP)continues to advance,driven by the emergence of sophisticated large language models such as ChatGPT,there has been a notable growth in research activity.This rapid uptake reflects increasing interest in the field and induces critical inquiries into ChatGPT’s applicability in the NLP domain.This review paper systematically investigates the role of ChatGPT in diverse NLP tasks,including information extraction,Name Entity Recognition(NER),event extraction,relation extraction,Part of Speech(PoS)tagging,text classification,sentiment analysis,emotion recognition and text annotation.The novelty of this work lies in its comprehensive analysis of the existing literature,addressing a critical gap in understanding ChatGPT’s adaptability,limitations,and optimal application.In this paper,we employed a systematic stepwise approach following the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses(PRISMA)framework to direct our search process and seek relevant studies.Our review reveals ChatGPT’s significant potential in enhancing various NLP tasks.Its adaptability in information extraction tasks,sentiment analysis,and text classification showcases its ability to comprehend diverse contexts and extract meaningful details.Additionally,ChatGPT’s flexibility in annotation tasks reducesmanual efforts and accelerates the annotation process,making it a valuable asset in NLP development and research.Furthermore,GPT-4 and prompt engineering emerge as a complementary mechanism,empowering users to guide the model and enhance overall accuracy.Despite its promising potential,challenges persist.The performance of ChatGP Tneeds tobe testedusingmore extensivedatasets anddiversedata structures.Subsequently,its limitations in handling domain-specific language and the need for fine-tuning in specific applications highlight the importance of further investigations to address these issues.

A Case Study of Language Policies in Hong Kong

Hong Kong belongs to China. However, Hong Kong has been a colony of the British Empire for 154 years and 11 months and it has been under Japan rule for three years and eight years. Hong Kong returned to China in 1997. Its special history has significant influence on the language development in Hong Kong. During the period of British Empire, the popularity of Christianity, the commercial usefulness of English and high prestige in the society have resulted in the widely spread of English.In addition, English-medium education is in a relatively high state under the colonial regime while Chinese-medium education to some extent is not emphasized. The government has ruled that if parents would like their children to be educated in a good government school, they need to receive English-medium education. Consequently, the majority of parents would like their children to be educated by English. Apart from that, English has a legal status as an official language during British Colonialism period in Hong Kong. Lastly, some scholars supported the existence of a new English variety in Hong Kong(Hong Kong English), but others do not believe that. The requirements of language policies and the process of language spread in Hong Kong could be explained using some theories such as‘linguistic imperialism',‘Kachru's concentric circles' and‘Schneider's five stages'. For instance, from Kachru's perspective, the development of English in Hong Kong could be placed at the beginning of the third stage.It will firstly demonstrate some primary language policies in Hong Kong before its‘Handover'to China. And then, it will show several significant language spread theories and focus on relating them to the requirements of language policies and the process of language spread in Hong Kong.

Towards Realizing Sign Language-to-Speech Conversion by Combining Deep Learning and Statistical Parametric Speech Synthesis

This paper realizes a sign language-to-speech conversion system to solve the communication problem between healthy people and speech disorders. 30 kinds of different static sign languages are firstly recognized by combining the support vector machine (SVM) with a restricted Boltzmann machine (RBM) based regulation and a feedback fine-tuning of the deep model. The text of sign language is then obtained from the recognition results. A context-dependent label is generated from the recognized text of sign language by a text analyzer. Meanwhile,a hiddenMarkov model (HMM) basedMandarin-Tibetan bilingual speech synthesis system is developed by using speaker adaptive training.The Mandarin speech or Tibetan speech is then naturally synthesized by using context-dependent label generated from the recognized sign language. Tests show that the static sign language recognition rate of the designed system achieves 93.6%. Subjective evaluation demonstrates that synthesized speech can get 4.0 of the mean opinion score (MOS).

Plasticity of language pathways in patients with low-grade glioma A diffusion tensor imaging study

Knowledge of the plasticity of language pathways neurosurgeons to achieve maximum resection wh n patients with low-grade glioma is important for e preserving neurological function. The current study sought to investigate changes in the ventral language pathways in patients with low-grade glioma located in regions likely to affect the dorsal language pathways. The results revealed no significant difference in fractional anisotropy values in the arcuate fasciculus between groups or between hemispheres. However, fractional anisotropy and lateralization index values in the left inferior longitudinal fasciculus and lateralization index values in the left inferior fronto-occpital fasciculus were higher in patients than in healthy subjects. These results indicate plasticity of language pathways in patients with low-grade glioma. The ventral language pathways may perform more functions in patients than in healthy subjects. As such, it is important to protect the ventral language pathways intraoperatively.

The Application of TBL Using Role Play to Introduce Vocabulary in China's Private Language School

A specific application of task-based learning in teaching vocabulary to young learners and a complete task cycle using role play to present vocabulary in China's private language school would be described in the study. The participants aged between 7 and 9 are thought to be starters according to their language competence in Common European Framework of Reference for language. The rationale for stages in the task cycle will be fully explored with reference to Piaget and Vygotsky's theory in teaching young learners. The advantages of the adoption of TBL with young learners will be illustrated and some possible problems in implementing TBL in China, a representative country of Confucian-heritage culture would also be discussed in the paper. The study indicates that young learners in China are quite welcome this new approach in their English classes, but the targeted learners' age and background information need to be taken into consideration when actually implement this approach.

Real-Time Data and Visualization Monitoring of Computer Numerical Control Machine Tools Based on Hyper Text Markup Language 5

In order to ensure the safety,quality and efficiency of computer numerical control(CNC)machine tool processing,a real-time monitoring and visible solution for CNC machine tools based on hyper text markup language(HTML)5 is proposed.The characteristics of the real-time monitoring technology of CNC machine tools under the traditional Client/Server(C/S)structure are compared and analyzed,and the technical drawbacks are proposed.Web real-time communication technology and browser drawing technology are deeply studied.A real-time monitoring and visible system for CNC machine tool data is developed based on Metro platform,combining WebSocket real-time communication technology and Canvas drawing technology.The system architecture is given,and the functions and implementation methods of the system are described in detail.The practical application results show that the WebSocket real-time communication technology can effectively reduce the bandwidth and network delay and save server resources.The numerical control machine data monitoring system can intuitively reflect the machine data,and the visible effect is good.It realizes timely monitoring of equipment alarms and prompts maintenance and management personnel.

Abstracts Selected from Naihuo Cailiao (Refractories)——A Chinese Language Bimonthly

Volume 50,Number 6,2016Thoughts for development of China＇s refractories industry-Reviewing＂the 12thFive-Year-Plan＂and prospecting＂the 13thFive-Year-Plan＂/Xu Dianli//Naihuo Cailiao.-2016,50（6）：401Abstract：The production,operating,import and export state,and achievement of China＇s refractories during＂the 12-（th）Five-Year-Plan＂period were reviewed.

The Evil of ‘Reciting’

First of all it is necessary to point out that 'reciting' is the wrong term for what Chinese students are often asked to do when they are learning English. The correct terms are, 'learning by heart' or 'rote learning'. In this article the term 'rote learning' will be used.……

Plain language in the healthcare of Japan:a systematic review of“plain Japanese”

Objective:Despite the decrease in the number of foreign visitors and residents in Japan due to the coronavirus disease 2019,a resurgence is remarkable from 2022.However,Japan's medical support system for foreign patients,especially residents,is inadequate,with language barriers potentially causing health disparities.Comprehensive interpretation and translation services are challenging,but“plain Japanese”may be a viable alternative for foreign patients with basic Japanese language skills.This study explores the application and obstacles of plain Japanese in the medical sector.Methods:A literature review was performed across these databases:Web of Science,PubMed,Google Scholar,Scopus,CINAHL Plus,Springer Link and Ichushi-Web(Japanese medical literature).The search covered themes related to healthcare,care for foreign patients,and scholarly articles,and was conducted in July 2023.Results:The study incorporated five papers.Each paper emphasized the language barriers foreign residents in Japan face when accessing healthcare,highlighting the critical role and necessity of plain Japanese in medical environments.Most of the reports focused on the challenges of delivering medical care to foreign patients and the training of healthcare professionals in using plain Japanese for communication.Conclusion:The knowledge and application of plain Japanese among healthcare professionals are inadequate,and literature also remains scarce.With the increasing number of foreign residents in Japan,the establishment of a healthcare system that effectively uses plain Japanese is essential.However,plain Japanese may not be the optimal linguistic assistance in certain situations,thus it is imperative to encourage more research and reports on healthcare services using plain Japanese.

EFL Teaching Guided by Krashen's Hypotheses in Second Language Acquisition Theory

Based on discussion of the second language acquisition theories,the thesis aims at improving foreign language teaching,and states the implications on our teaching ideas,and what we teachers should do in our EFL practice.

Ways to Overcome Foreign Language Anxiety in Listening and Speaking for Middle School Students

Listening and speaking, being important components in English language learning, are affected by many factors,includ-ing one negative emotion, foreign language anxiety. This paper discusses the effects of foreign language anxiety on middle schoolstudents in English listening and speaking. It analyzes the causes of this anxiety in terms of teachers, students, schools, methodolo-gies and cultural background. The relevant teaching strategies are presented to reduce students' language anxiety and improvetheir listening and speaking.

Smaller & Smarter: Score-Driven Network Chaining of Smaller Language Models

With the continuous evolution and expanding applications of Large Language Models (LLMs), there has been a noticeable surge in the size of the emerging models. It is not solely the growth in model size, primarily measured by the number of parameters, but also the subsequent escalation in computational demands, hardware and software prerequisites for training, all culminating in a substantial financial investment as well. In this paper, we present novel techniques like supervision, parallelization, and scoring functions to get better results out of chains of smaller language models, rather than relying solely on scaling up model size. Firstly, we propose an approach to quantify the performance of a Smaller Language Models (SLM) by introducing a corresponding supervisor model that incrementally corrects the encountered errors. Secondly, we propose an approach to utilize two smaller language models (in a network) performing the same task and retrieving the best relevant output from the two, ensuring peak performance for a specific task. Experimental evaluations establish the quantitative accuracy improvements on financial reasoning and arithmetic calculation tasks from utilizing techniques like supervisor models (in a network of model scenario), threshold scoring and parallel processing over a baseline study.

A Study on Left-behind Junior Students'Foreign Language Learning Anxiety

Since the 1960s, foreign language educators and researchers home and abroad have started to pay attention to the influence of the affective variables including language learning anxiety on foreign language learning. This thesis tried to find out the factors that may influence the foreign language learning anxiety level of left-behind students and put forward ways to help lower down the foreign language learning anxiety level of the left-behind junior middle school students.

Linguistic Reflection on the Online Catchword of Appreciation —From the Perspective of Usage-based Language Model and Complex Adaptive System Theory

Language is a special social phenomenon and is always on the changing process with the development of society. During the evolving process of language, new language varieties will continuously emerge due to the changes of some social and cultural factors. Cyber language is universally accepted as one type of the social language varieties. Basically, cyber language can be treated as a complex adaptive system which is influenced by the interaction between users’ cognition, social culture and the surrounding environments. Thus it is safe to say that cyber language is always undergoing a dynamic evolving process. With the usage-based language model as the theoretical foundation, this paper proposes a Complex Adaptive System (CAS) approach to analyze the expression of Appreciation to explore the complex, dynamic and nonlinear development of cyber language from the angle of meaning construction, grammaticalization and functional adaption respectively. It is found that the expression of Appreciation is experiencing adaptively a semantic connotations development and a process of grammatical functions expansion as well. This paper suggests that the emergence and development of cyber language is a novel and trendy social language phenomenon. Network language can achieve its process and evolution under the huge impact of social changes and social promotions. When faced with the changing surroundings, cyber language itself enjoys a timely adaption and responsive development to keep up with the new environments, which reflects the basic principle of language development, namely, language changes with the development of society.

Exploratory and Confirmatory Factor Analyses for Testing Validity and Reliability of the Malay Language Questionnaire for Urinary Incontinence Diagnosis (QUID)

This study examines the construct validity and reliability of the Malay language questionnaire for urinary incontinence diagnosis (QUID) in women. Study Design: Random sampling design was used in this cross-sectional survey. Materials and Methods: The Americanized English language questionnaire was translated to the Malay language and distributed to community-dwelling Malaysian women living in various locations in Selangor. The construct validity was tested using exploratory factor analysis (EFA) followed by confirmatory factor analysis (CFA). The reliability was determined using Cronbach’s α. Results: A total of 111 women completed the Malay language QUID in this pilot study. The Keiser-Meyer-Olkin (KMO) measure of sampling adequacy of 0.675 and Bartlett’s test of sphericity (χ2 = 284.633, df = 15, p = 0.001) indicated that the EFA was possible. The total variance and the scree plot identified two factors above the initial eigenvalue of 1 while a third factor was just below it (0.758). The CFA output showed a recursive model with the solution being not admissible because two unobserved and exogenous variables had negative variance estimates. The following values of absolute fit indices showed an acceptable level of fit: 1) Chi-square test with χ2 = 4.997, df = 5, p = 0.416, indicated a smaller difference between the expected and observed covariance matrices;2) GFI = 0.986, AGFI = 0.939, RMR = 0.021 and CMIN/DF = 1.0 indicated acceptable level of fit;3) The baseline comparison values of NFI = 0.983 and CFI = 1.0 also indicated a good fit to the data;4) RMSEA = 0.000 was considered a perfect fit indicating that the hypothesized model was a good fit to the observed data. Under the hypothesis of “close fit”, the probability of getting a sample RMSEA as large as 0.000 was 0.567. The Cronbach’s α coefficient of 0.823 indicated good reliability. Conclusion: The Malay language QUID is a valid and reliable instrument for diagnosing female urinary incontinence in the Malaysian population.