Paraphrasing is an important aspect of language competence; however, EFL learners have long had d... more Paraphrasing is an important aspect of language competence; however, EFL learners have long had difficulty paraphrasing in their writing owing to their limited language proficiency. Therefore, automatic paraphrase suggestion systems can be useful for writers. In this paper, we present PREFER1, a paraphrase reference tool for helping language learners improve their writing skills. In this paper, we attempt to transform the paraphrase generation problem into a graphical problem in which the phrases are treated as nodes ...
This is a research report of a one-year study which addresses whether and in what way grammatical... more This is a research report of a one-year study which addresses whether and in what way grammatical CALL can help English writing instruction in an EFL setting, namely, in Taiwan, R.O.C. The study started with the implementation of CALL courseware which contains ten lessons of grammar exercises. The courseware featured (a) empirically based contents, results from error analysis of Chinese EFL students' common mistakes; (b) a sentence-level drill and practice with various formats of guided Chinese-English translation, error correction, and sentence combining; (c) adaptive remedial instruction for individual students while practicing on-line; (d) integration of error anticipation and keyword matching for answer judging as well as item-specific feedback messages; and (e)verbatim recording of student input. To evaluate the effectiveness of this CALL strategy, we designed an experimental study in which two groups of college freshman EFL majors did the pre-test and post-test tasks with ...
... Nevertheless, Anthony pointed out that experiments shows using Mover to help students study r... more ... Nevertheless, Anthony pointed out that experiments shows using Mover to help students study rhetorical ... they are doing academic while-writing tasks as they can look them up through a search ... of the existing approach on automatic discourse tagging of the texts in the corpus. ...
Various language learning projects using Second Life (SL) have been documented; still, their spec... more Various language learning projects using Second Life (SL) have been documented; still, their specific learning potentials, particularly in English as a foreign language (EFL) context, remain to be explored. The current study aims to add one piece of empirical evidence on how SL can be infused into a computer-assisted language learning (CALL) course for 25 college students through task design
The phenomenon of overused adjectives by non-native speaking learners (NNS) has been pinpointed b... more The phenomenon of overused adjectives by non-native speaking learners (NNS) has been pinpointed by recent research. This study designed five online units for increasing students' awareness of underused specific adjectives for EFL college writing. Five units were developed for five identified overused adjectives: important, beautiful, hard, deep, and big. In each unit, data-driven learning materials, incorporating a bilingual collocation concordancer
This study investigates the influence of using five web-based practice units on English verb-noun... more This study investigates the influence of using five web-based practice units on English verb-noun collocations with the design of a web-based Chinese-English bilingual concordancer (keyword retrieval program) on collocation learning. Thirty-two college EFL students participated by taking a pre-test and two post-tests, and responding to a background questionnaire and an evaluation questionnaire. Results indicated that learners made significant collocation improvement
In order to leave more time for EFL teachers to work on higher-level re- writing tasks, we decide... more In order to leave more time for EFL teachers to work on higher-level re- writing tasks, we decided to develop a computer grammar checker. The first stage of development was devoted to error analysis of 125 writing samples collected from our students. We found 1659 errors and classified them into 14 main types and 93 subtypes. The analysis served as
particularly across various sections of research articles (e.g., abstract, introduction, method, ... more particularly across various sections of research articles (e.g., abstract, introduction, method, etc.) remains anecdotal or observational. Scholars have claimed that genre relations across various research article sections are important for students ofacademic English writing; likewise, the variation across disciplinary boundaries may,also have an impact,on different generic interrelatedness. In this paper, comparisons of genre sets (including abstracts, introductions and discussions) in 12 research articles from a humanities ,area (applied linguistics) and 12 articles from the computer ,science area ,were made ,in order ,to grasp ,a glimpse of subtleties among ,genre sets between ,the two illustrative humanities and science disciplines. The functional move ,structures and the use of hedges
Misuse of English conjunction related to incoherent writing, according to the literature, comes f... more Misuse of English conjunction related to incoherent writing, according to the literature, comes from learners’ first language interference, improper mechanical exercises, and misleading lists of connectors in textbooks demonstrated as if mutually interchangeable without contextual constraints. Form-focused instruction with explicit semantic, stylistic and syntactic properties can help learning of connectors. Additionally, computer learner corpus analysis which identifies systematic interlanguage patterns
In 2002, English learning for Academic Purposes (EAP) was among the urgent agendas of e-learning ... more In 2002, English learning for Academic Purposes (EAP) was among the urgent agendas of e-learning for Taiwan, ROC, while general college English instruction was also under reform at National Tsing Hua University and several others in the same country. To respond to the call for proposals on e-Learning in Taiwan, an innovative project for general English education and another project for academic writing are reported in this paper. The two multi-year collaborative projects have (a) incorporated advanced digital technologies ...
Paraphrasing is an important aspect of language competence; however, EFL learners have long had d... more Paraphrasing is an important aspect of language competence; however, EFL learners have long had difficulty paraphrasing in their writing owing to their limited language proficiency. Therefore, automatic paraphrase suggestion systems can be useful for writers. In this paper, we present PREFER1, a paraphrase reference tool for helping language learners improve their writing skills. In this paper, we attempt to transform the paraphrase generation problem into a graphical problem in which the phrases are treated as nodes ...
This is a research report of a one-year study which addresses whether and in what way grammatical... more This is a research report of a one-year study which addresses whether and in what way grammatical CALL can help English writing instruction in an EFL setting, namely, in Taiwan, R.O.C. The study started with the implementation of CALL courseware which contains ten lessons of grammar exercises. The courseware featured (a) empirically based contents, results from error analysis of Chinese EFL students' common mistakes; (b) a sentence-level drill and practice with various formats of guided Chinese-English translation, error correction, and sentence combining; (c) adaptive remedial instruction for individual students while practicing on-line; (d) integration of error anticipation and keyword matching for answer judging as well as item-specific feedback messages; and (e)verbatim recording of student input. To evaluate the effectiveness of this CALL strategy, we designed an experimental study in which two groups of college freshman EFL majors did the pre-test and post-test tasks with ...
... Nevertheless, Anthony pointed out that experiments shows using Mover to help students study r... more ... Nevertheless, Anthony pointed out that experiments shows using Mover to help students study rhetorical ... they are doing academic while-writing tasks as they can look them up through a search ... of the existing approach on automatic discourse tagging of the texts in the corpus. ...
Various language learning projects using Second Life (SL) have been documented; still, their spec... more Various language learning projects using Second Life (SL) have been documented; still, their specific learning potentials, particularly in English as a foreign language (EFL) context, remain to be explored. The current study aims to add one piece of empirical evidence on how SL can be infused into a computer-assisted language learning (CALL) course for 25 college students through task design
The phenomenon of overused adjectives by non-native speaking learners (NNS) has been pinpointed b... more The phenomenon of overused adjectives by non-native speaking learners (NNS) has been pinpointed by recent research. This study designed five online units for increasing students' awareness of underused specific adjectives for EFL college writing. Five units were developed for five identified overused adjectives: important, beautiful, hard, deep, and big. In each unit, data-driven learning materials, incorporating a bilingual collocation concordancer
This study investigates the influence of using five web-based practice units on English verb-noun... more This study investigates the influence of using five web-based practice units on English verb-noun collocations with the design of a web-based Chinese-English bilingual concordancer (keyword retrieval program) on collocation learning. Thirty-two college EFL students participated by taking a pre-test and two post-tests, and responding to a background questionnaire and an evaluation questionnaire. Results indicated that learners made significant collocation improvement
In order to leave more time for EFL teachers to work on higher-level re- writing tasks, we decide... more In order to leave more time for EFL teachers to work on higher-level re- writing tasks, we decided to develop a computer grammar checker. The first stage of development was devoted to error analysis of 125 writing samples collected from our students. We found 1659 errors and classified them into 14 main types and 93 subtypes. The analysis served as
particularly across various sections of research articles (e.g., abstract, introduction, method, ... more particularly across various sections of research articles (e.g., abstract, introduction, method, etc.) remains anecdotal or observational. Scholars have claimed that genre relations across various research article sections are important for students ofacademic English writing; likewise, the variation across disciplinary boundaries may,also have an impact,on different generic interrelatedness. In this paper, comparisons of genre sets (including abstracts, introductions and discussions) in 12 research articles from a humanities ,area (applied linguistics) and 12 articles from the computer ,science area ,were made ,in order ,to grasp ,a glimpse of subtleties among ,genre sets between ,the two illustrative humanities and science disciplines. The functional move ,structures and the use of hedges
Misuse of English conjunction related to incoherent writing, according to the literature, comes f... more Misuse of English conjunction related to incoherent writing, according to the literature, comes from learners’ first language interference, improper mechanical exercises, and misleading lists of connectors in textbooks demonstrated as if mutually interchangeable without contextual constraints. Form-focused instruction with explicit semantic, stylistic and syntactic properties can help learning of connectors. Additionally, computer learner corpus analysis which identifies systematic interlanguage patterns
In 2002, English learning for Academic Purposes (EAP) was among the urgent agendas of e-learning ... more In 2002, English learning for Academic Purposes (EAP) was among the urgent agendas of e-learning for Taiwan, ROC, while general college English instruction was also under reform at National Tsing Hua University and several others in the same country. To respond to the call for proposals on e-Learning in Taiwan, an innovative project for general English education and another project for academic writing are reported in this paper. The two multi-year collaborative projects have (a) incorporated advanced digital technologies ...
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