Applied Linguistics - Science topic

MCQ.

Thank you for your answers. My focus is applied linguistics, specifically critical discourse analysis.

Boshra A Arnout , you are welcome. Do report bugs to me if you find any.

Hello,

I would be really grateful if you can share with me some sources that support the use of interventions with the case study approach.

Greetings.

We recently completed an analysis on scaffoldig argumentation through writing; it was accepted for publication. We link "scaffolds" of arguing with various student "schemata". Please let us know if you would like a pre-copy.

Best wishes Till Julian Nesta Woerfel

Reda Ekmabruk, in English, the terms "binary" and "nonbinary," where pronoun use is concerned, come up *only* in the context of preferred usage for certain transsexxuals. The use of "they" in sentences like "Everybody/somebody thinks they're the smartest" has been part of the English language throughout its history. A few centuries ago, prescriptive grammarians declared this usage illogical and dictated that what was correct was to say "his" in such a context, with the understanding that *in this kind of context only*, "his" was gender-neutral. In relatively recent years, "they" in this kind of context has become the norm. *More recently than this*, certain trans people have openly objected to seeing everyone as either male or female; this practice is what "binary" means here. The medical profession has recognized for a long time that gender is in fact *not* binary, in the sense that all babies are born unambiguously male or female; not being unambiguously one or the other is determined genetically, e.g., by having an extra X chromosome (XXY rather than XX or XY). What medicine did until very recently was to perform surgery on such babies, usually to remove "male" genitalia to make the babies visually appear closer to female. Of course, they couldn't make them totally female, and as the LGBT movement has grown, trans people *and often their parents* have objected to this practice, which to them is mutilation in the service of a cultural rather than a medical need. Trans people I've known have in fact identified as male or female where pronoun preference was concerned, but not all have; these are the people who ask to be referred to as "they/them/their/theirs/themself" (so that one would say, e.g., "Lee likes their new school," which, *unlike the other example I've given*, is a genuinely new usage in English. This is the timely issue that Merriam-Webster's was addressing. Complicating matters is the fact that "themself" has existed for a long time as a nonstandard version of "themselves," so that schoolchildren are taught that its use is nonstandard. This is a distinct matter. Those who learned English in the classroom have probably been taught that it's nonstandard, pure and simple, and so are probably unfamiliar with this dialect variation. "Theirself" exists as well, and is similarly considered nonstandard.

See this thread: https://www.researchgate.net/post/Which_journals_in_applied_linguistics_have_short_turnaround_times_How_long_was_your_longest_wait?_ec=topicPostOverviewAuthoredQuestions&_sg=Di0z5leiw9gH6M3_U4SOZcwIkjyjFkM3yEVzLCUBqAHWUeRUqqgrDJuSI2e1pmudsys1HTZspAO3lt65

Hi. Maybe you can try SAS Writing Reviser. I had more features than grammarly and it's free. I use it with my students as it helps them learn to pay attention to their own writing.

A growing number of studies, including Mkhelif’s which is to come, have recently provided evidence indicative of an important role of frequency in the acquisition of EFL vocabulary items.

Are there any other relevant factors/features that are related to the methods of teaching or to the L2 vocabulary items?

Dear Mozumder,

Here are some blog articles that you might find useful.

Following blog provides a review of all the major paraphrasing tools.

Following blog compares various paraphrasing tools by passing a piece of text through them.

Following blog explains the scholarly paraphrasing facility of REF-N-WRITE Academic Writing tool.

Hope this helps.

I just finished my dissertation in which a few interviews were in foreign language. This is what I did, and it worked like a charm.

1. Code all interviews in their original language - without translation. In this, you will not loose the meaning.

2. Translate only those parts of the foreign-language-interviews, what you would like to it as quotes. This is so much easier.

Relevant corpora can be made use of, but is that enough?

Violeta Cautin-Epifani te envío por privado! :)

It's always a good idea to have a very clear justification for your research design and methods before collecting data, but now that you've already done it, you might look to a textbook on mixed methods to reflect on your rationale for the approach you've taken (e.g. see Creswell and Plano Clark, 2017).

Similarly, it would have been a good idea to consider construct validity to some extent before actually administering the questionnaire (e.g. face validity, at least), but perhaps you can go back to the construct(s) you were trying to measure and look more explicitly at whether and how your items measure all aspects of that/those construct(s)?

The lesson learned here, really, is not to jump ahead too quickly to data collection, and to make sure you have your justifications for design and methods fully fleshed-out before proceeding.

Yes, we can make science more clear and powerful with new language, but we can't neglect English because English currently plainly settled as the principle language of universal logical correspondence, specialists keep on distributing their work in different dialects than English too.We encourage mainstream researchers to attempt to handle this issue and propose potential methodologies both for incorporating non-English scientific knowledge viably and for upgrading the multilingualism of new and existing information accessible just in English for the clients of such learning.

Since morphemes such as '-ism', 'un-', 'bi-' stand for semantic concepts, albeit somewhat ambiguously, e.g. 'un-' can mean 'not', or 'reverse (an action)', you should look at Laurence Urdang's two books Prefixes and Other Word-Initial Elements of English and Suffixes and Other Word-Final Elements of English. Both were published by the Gale Research Company, the latter in 1983 and the former in 1984. Both are out of print but secondhand copies are available from ABE Books Secondhand, or possibly from your university library.

Prefixes lists 2860 elements, Suffixes, 1545.

In addition, you could examine C.K. Ogden's 1930 Basic English (Cambridge: The Orthological Institute) which provides a core vocabulary of 850 words. These words overlap to a degree with the 200 concepts listed by Morris Swadesh (1950 and 1971) and Cliff Goddard's Natural Semantic Metalanguage (Google Cliff Goddard or NSM).

Since many artificial languages e.g. Esperanto, Eh May Gee Chah (by Hankes) and Nobel (by Randic) start with a core vocabulary and elements which can modify that vocabulary, it would be worth researching these, too.

For further information, e-mail: I.C.Maun@exeter.ac.uk

I think both knowledge and skills are required for foreign language learners. Some may say that knowledge is not needed as a child speaks fluently though he has not learnt any vocabulary or grammatical rules. I can debate here that a child learn grammar and vocabulary informally from the people surrounding him. He does't go to school but he intensively learn vocabulary in his contact with family and neighbors. For a second language learner, he has a short time at his classroom to acquire his foreign language, so he should learn both knowledge and skills and teachers should spend their efforts in integrating knowledge and skills in their teaching as focusing on knowledge only will lead to a learner who can not speak while focusing on skills only will make a students frustrated as he lacks knowledge that fuel him to speak. So teachers of foreign language should think about how to move from knowledge to skills in their teaching and make sure that students can use knowledge they have learnt in their communication.

For literature on the socio-cultural perspective in metaphor research, I recommend that you read the work by e.g. Kövecses, Musolff and Charteris-Black. They have different takes on the relation between the socio-cultural, discourse and the cognitive, but provide relevant perspectives on the subject.

Sorry, but your exercise still being inductive. Please review the theory about SEM and regression, there are a lot written and evaluated... In this way it is just pseudoscience...

Many thanks, Agnieszka Will geb. Gronek !

I hope grad students read this who are assigned large stacks of research essays outside their own areas.

Here are the three key parts in outline form (from my Ph.D. professor):

METHODS (note number of subjects in experiment and who is funding if noted in this or INTRO.) Who funded the study is most important when cnsidering possible biased findings or not.

DISCUSSION OF DATA AND EXPERIMENT (skim this unless needed for evaluating the text. May have difficult material such as advanced equations ans innumerbale names of chemical reactions, etc.)

CONCLUSION

The Intro, methods, and conclusion can re written in understandable langauge. If more is needed, get help from a person of that speciality.

أعتقد أن للتعليم القرآني عموما سواء أكان عبارة عن مدارس نظامية أم في صورة كتاتيب وزوايا وحلقات مسجدية ...إلخ دورا هاما في تعليم العربية وترسيخ ملكتها لدى منتسبي هذا النوع من التعليم، وذلك من خلال البيئة الاصطناعية من الانغماس في النص القرآني سماعا وتكرارا وتدبرا وحفظا ... مما يساعد على عملية الاكتساب للغة وإن لم تكن مقصودة عينا، وهو ما تؤكده النظرية السلوكية في تعليم وتعلّم اللغات، وغيرها من النظريات مثل نظرية تشوكمسكي العقلية ونظرية الفطرة والممارسة لعبد الدنان...إلخ

Every language offers a look at the world so that when you learn another language, you also open another door to see the world.

The periodicity of the journal: four-monthly.

The research area known as sociolinguistics studies the relationship between language and society.

An important objective for researchers into sociolinguistics is to record, explain and understand linguistic variations and diversity in communities that differ socially and geographically.

Sociolinguists are interested in how we use language to signal our social background, our sense of inclusion or distance, or our sense of power or powerlessness.

Variation is a key concept within sociolinguistics. This concept is vital for understanding and explaining linguistic changes – both those made by individuals, those occurring between individuals and those occurring between groups.

By studying the language usage of older and younger language users we can obtain knowledge, among other things, about the linguistic evolution taking place in a particular place or environment.

One example of such linguistic evolution is the convergence in Norwegian between the sounds "kj" (as in Kjell) and "sj" (as in skjell). This is a change that is taking place in many of the larger towns throughout Norway.

Sociolinguists are also concerned with how people speak to each other, how we create meaning and how we become socialised through the use of language.

The field of interactive sociolinguistics studies how people vary their manner of speech depending on whom they are talking to, what they are talking about or the situations they find themselves in. The language we use shows whom we identify ourselves with and how we wish to be perceived.

It is true . Language is life. And life is a theater . Because no person can live a normal life without it . But the most important point I think is that , how language items are used and in what situation they are appropriate .(use.+ usage)

I like this types for level four , (LLS)

Is there an English class this Thursday night ? - Yes there is ! The class starts at 5, it usually goes on till about 7. Then there's a questions and answers session. That will go on as long as folks stick around. Would you be interested ? - Definitely. Could you put my name down please ? - Sure ! - Thank you ! Would I need to bring anything ? - Just a notebook. There will be hand-outs.

Thank you very much indeed and Emre Guvendir!

We are creating the discussions and use English so it is a resource in a positive sense. Why English? Of course it is the matter of power but it's been historical process and no sense in condemning it now - we have to deal with it, and leave space for other languages including minor languages and in science too. There is an author writing on linguistic imperialism - Robert Philipson - he published a lot on that.

I personally think major languages representing major economies will be used in all processes during our way to Industry 4.0 and I assume within the Industry 4.0 era minor languages will be in the most vulnerable position and might not survive that era. However if they do survive and reach the next stage - Society 5.0 - they will have a chance as the technology will be supposed to serve human needs first, not businesses and languages as well as age and gender will stop being a tool for personal social and professional development - but that is the distant perspective and more of a hypothetical view

The fields of linguistics are lot and you need to decide which one you are interested in. Then, google what you need.

Sometimes the journal itself disapear

I believe using L1 in EFL/ESL classroom is beneficial. According to Lin (2008), the use of L1 in L2 classroom is helpful for:

I could imagine that there are some tests in Rebecca T. Cover's chapter "Semantic fieldwork on TAM" in "Methodologies in Semantic Fieldwork", edited by

M. Ryan Bochnak and Lisa Matthewson. Conceptually, the important thing is of course to make up one's mind on whether "all futures are modal" or not - in the latter case you will have to chose your test sentences very carefully, guaranteeing that informants are really sure that the main proposition does hold at some later time.

Dear sir, could you please do us a favor and distribute this to your friends and students?

Many thanks in advance.

@Ashkan_Latif

This actually used in Lebanon, Egypt, Iraq, and some Arabian peninsula countries even out of medical society.

In Egypt they use (metnervis) which means get nervous...

regards..

Hi there,

You can check journal ranks in Applied Linguistics at the site below:

Regards,

Andrea

So the first step would be to 'lock down' the terms / lexicalizations. You can do a bit of explorative reading to get to them, of course. But you should not just build up the totality of the corpus as you go. That will skew tha data to some direction. Don't try to go wide by getting many terms. Try to get deep by getting a few terms in as much different contexts as you could possibly lay your hands on. Typically you'd want your corpus to reflect the balance of contexts in the actual discourse. But, often enough, insights are gained by the odd low-count contex . So do try to get them in, even if at an expense of balance.

Then, 'lock down' corpus size. Corpora grow to be virtual behemoths these days (up to millions and tens of millions tokens). If you'd like to retain the option to close-read when necessary you'd want to go on the low end -or design for sub-corpora. Sub-corpora are extra nice, because they can allow for keyness analyses (texts where your terms are key would be more likely to elaborate on them). So, get your size fixed and go reach it, without changing your mind about what should go in and what shouldn't midway. Ideally, you'd want to crowd-source that part; it both speeds up the procedure and keeps you impartial. Set up a Train-Test split (dedicate part of your data to derive your scheme from and part to test it on). You can also go for a cross-testing arrangment.

Perform standard collocation and collostructional analyses with your terms as KWICs and wide enough spans on both sides on your Train set. See if any interesting n-grams -including skip-grams- with discriminative power pop-up (n-grams mostly showing up with one but not the other term). Run collocation analyses on items in them too. If an n-gram strongly selects a term as collocate both ways and not another, well done, you've found a disambiguating feature. Add the feature to a lexicon. You'd want at least one disambiguating feature for every term touple. Once there's a scheme in place, evaluate it against the Test set. Observe where it hits and where it misses. Go back and refine as necessary.

Dear Jamal,

Please have a look at these useful links.

Good luck!

hi. it depends . in my opinion, non-native speakers achieve some parts of pragmatic competence better than other parts. because they need using language in context. therefore, for non-native speakers , due to not less exposure to different structures in context, their judgment is not necessarily right in spite of a lot of exceptional cases. generally speaking, non-native and native speakers' views are different because of the diversity in the mount and type of exposure to structures enhancing pragmatic competence.

I totally agree with Nael Hijjo and I strongly believe that any serious linguist would. Nevertheless, it is always positive challenge to discuss about it. First of all, we should define "difficult to learn", in terms of oral aspect, written aspect, grammar etc. Mandarin Chinese is an analytical language (grammatically isolating), which uses little or no inflection to indicate grammatical relationships, so from this point of view it is considered one of the easiest languages to learn. But then we have tones, and phonetics and things get more complicated. So one should specify "difficulty" with clear scientific criteria. If we step out of the strictly objective scientific area, should I be asked to make a list in order of "difficulty", and following my own multilingual experience, Mandarin Chinese would definitely be in the middle. I would probably top list Japanese, Hungarian and Slovenian, for almost exclusively grammatical reasons.

Pair work but mostly Group work is ideal in this scenario. Let say we have a class of 60 students, one can divide them into six groups and assign a group leader for each group who would be responsible for the participation of his/her group members. Then we can assign the group a variety of activities, for instance, group discussions. The type of topic can range form academic to social topics.

Regards

I need the official and the exact number

I don't think so. There is no one language that is easier or harder than the other. It is a common misconception that people believe that Mandarin is a difficult language to learn. All languages are the same but it is related to the motivation of the learner when learning a language. E.g.: A worker from India working in China will learn Mandarin quickly because in order to get a job, s/he must know how to communicate with the people.

Dear Hamza,

I have come across some papers that enumerate principles to be followed in interdisciplinary researches. I cannot quite recollect the authors now. But you are looking for this I can later find that out.

If you are looking for didactic advantages in an educational setting in early schooling, I believe it will have adverse effects on clarity of thought. But, at a later stage, interdisciplinary method of teaching might bring in a width of knowledge and allow mobility for the students between disciplines more smoothly.

The debate over translingualism and code meshing is one alternative to what you suggest. If you take the role of what one may call Pakistani-English not as a dialect of standard English but as a language in itself, then you can see the role that applied linguists are playing in terms of exploring the relationship between language and power or social context. In this way, language is connected to grammar and communication, but the problem is how do you incorporate that in the classroom. That's why in some journals, applied linguists are required to discuss the teaching implications of their research, even though their insights may or may not be of value to ELT.

This is a very difficult question to answer. First at all we must define "the research" and second what do we mean by "Artificial Intelligence". AI is not a science in the traditional sense. It is a collection of approaches modeled inside a field of one science (mathematics, physics, biology .....social sciences......) or inside a fiels of two or several sciences (examples : genetic algorithms, convolutional neural network). These approaches raise problems and try to solve them. Once a model proposed, it is transformed in an algorithm and this algorithm is injected on the machine. If the machine can take in charge a number of tasks more and more "sophisticated" that human brain can solve, it become an artificial intelligence system.

So, it's not only the problem of data, it is the problem of the model, the approach, the algorithm and its running on the machine.

I think that is the epistemological path for an AI system to be an AI system.

As for the research, it is a research on all vertex of above path. The difference is that there are different types pf research. The research in mathematics, are different from the research in computer science and eve in the different sub-field of computer science.

This is my position.

this link is useful

https://www.coursera.org/learn/human-language

regards

Yes, To my knowledge, Mr Paul Mc Fedries gathers loads of texts to spot out and classify neologisms, In my studies I referred to lots of his data and I find it relevant

Hello again,

I have collected a new version of data, applied mixed models, implemented in XLSTAT package, and obtained the attached results. I also joined the ANOVA test results.

NB: I chose the mixed models statistics mainly because I have had some randomness in choosing my samples: two groups of 25, from a population of about 300 students.

Could you please help in interpreting the attached results?

Thanks a lot.

I would write it this way: I am doing a research project and the question is "Do students' perceptions of the (non)-native-like status of a teacher's accent significantly predict their teacher's credibility evaluations?”

I assume the reference is to an individual teacher, not a group of teachers. If it is more than one teacher, however, the apostrophe would stay after the 's'.

Thanks for being so open about grammar corrections. Glad you found the correct questionnaire, too. Good luck with the project!

Kindly check this link:

Corpus-based versus corpus-driven linguistics

"The distinction between corpus-based and corpus-driven language study was introduced by Tognini-Bonelli (2001). Corpus-based studies typically use corpus data in order to explore a theory or hypothesis, aiming to validate it, refute it or refine it. The definition of corpus linguistics as a method underpins this approach.

Corpus-driven linguistics rejects the characterisation of corpus linguistics as a method and claims instead that the corpus itself should be the sole source of our hypotheses about language. It is thus claimed that the corpus itself embodies a theory of language (Tognini-Bonelli 2001: 84-5)".

Hi David,

Check out https://smallworldofwords.org/project/

We're working on a new Japanese version (together with Terry Joyce), but other languages are already quite developed.

Hello,

Most certainly, choice of diction and sentence patterns has a great bearing on the quality of academic writing. Both sentential and suprasentential features of text production are important. However, as you have rightly pointed out, the sentential features are a prerequisite to extra sentential elements of texture. As Robert Louis Stevenson, the great American writer admits, the novice writers should begin writing by first getting involved in reading target texts extensively . However, they must act as "diligent apes" paying attention to sensitive matters of style and jotting down those elements that play an important role in the development of the text. In early experiences of their writing, the novice authors must follow the conventions used by their favorite experienced authors ,however, as their writing skills develop, they should gradually adopt their own writing style.

Best regards,

R. Biria

Thomas N. Huckin's Chapter on Critical Discourse Analysis provides an in-depth analysis of a newspaper articles through text framing, the notion of foregrounding and backgrounding, topicalization and the agent-patient relations.

There exists a large body of literature on contrastive/intercultural rhetoric that, I believe, will be helpful. Whether you do or don't speak the native language of your students, it helps to be aware of the likely challenges in their Academic English due to the Chinese-English differences not only in the grammar, but also in the rhetorical patterns, punctuation, citation practices, etc. I may be biased though, as a linguist. ;)

Applied Linguistics needs more promotion in the academic media to show its importance. If it is not seen in this media as important then it is not important as I have learnt recently.

Best regards,

Debra

Michael W. Marek , Reza Biria and Mahmood Yenkimaleki Thanks for your worthwhile comments, I found very useful.

Do you know this paper?

Shigeaki Amano, Tadahisa Kondo, and Sachiyo Kajikawa 2001. Analysis on infant speech with longitudinal recordings The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 110, 2703 (2001);

https://doi.org/10.1121/1.4777322

If you refer to the strategies for analizing discourse from a CDA perspective, perhaps chapter 10 of my book "Perspectives on Discourse Analysis: Theory and Practice" could be of help.

All best,

Laura Alba-Juez

Hi Monica!

There was a keynote talk at GALA (Generative Approaches to Language Acquisition) this year about simultaneous trilingualism by Natascha Müller. The main points seemed to be this:

- research is scarce, and include mostly case studies 

- language development seems delayed if looking at languages individually, but not when adding the languages up (very much like early bilinguals)

Abstract with some references here: http://www.uibcongres.org/GALA13/ponencia.en.html?mes=48&ordpon=1

Dear Y. Nazaralian,

Hello. I am a professor of English language and literature from India. Applied Linguistics and Discourse Analysis are my favourite subjects and I think I can contribute my expertise to your book as one of its editors. If interested, you can contact me by writing an email to maheshdey@gmail.com.

Best wishes and thanks.

Sincerely,

Dr. Mahesh K. Dey

 Hello Laszlo Karpati,

The following journals can hopefully provide you with  more linguistically oriented journals addressing your purpose :

1) Language Learning Journal from Elsevier ,

2) Language Teaching , Practice and Critique from Emerald publications , and

3) Journal of Psycholinguistic Research from Springer.

Best of luck,

R. Biria

Hey Philip, not yet. I postponed the analysis, still exploring tools and options. 

Dear Piyush Lakhani,

whether this sentence makes sense or not depends on the context, here are 2 relevant scenarios.

1. If the relevant level of statistical significance in the corresponding study is 0.05 and this particular comparison does not require any correction (see point 2 below), then it's probably a typo, and the correct expression should be "p > 0.05" (not "p < 0.05"). These kinds of typos do happen. 

2. The second scenario is the one Michelle B. Cowley seems to refer to, i.e., where the relevant alpha level for statistical significance is smaller than 0.05.  Some studies define the relevant alpha level as 0.01 (instead of 0.05), so a p-value of 0.03 does not count as significant.  Another scenario of this kind would be a an analysis with multiple groups (say Group A, Group B, and Group C). Here, pair-wise comparisons among all groups involve 3 separate tests (Groups A/B, Groups A/C, Groups B/C). To protect against Type-1 errors, you would need to adjust the alpha-level, e.g., using a Bonferroni correction that requires you to divide the original alpha-level (0.05) by the number of comparisons, such that the new alpha-level is 0.05/3 = 0.0166. Once again, here a p-value of 0.03 for the pairwise comparison between Group A and Group B would be viewed as non-significant (although it is <0.05).

Given these two scenarios, you might want to check which one applies to the study you were referring to.  Apart from this, I agree with Michelle B. Cowley that reporting statistical data with more detail to avoid misunderstandings is a good approach.

I hope this helps.

Cheers, Karsten  

Please, check stanford nlp website for arabic, english and some other languages. Also, www.gate.ac.uk

 

Hello Sophia Polyankina,

A very interesting question since it addresses one of fundamental capacities of humans by which they are able to surpass psychological barriers through what is called "self-transcendence”.  As such, individuals can complement their promptitude for making decisions and performing various actions by considering the potential meanings and values  behind them. By going over and beyond external drives such as lust , power, greed, etc. individuals can  avoid negative feelings of  existential vacuum and are triggered by intrinsic motivation. As you have rightly mentioned, the so-called savoir-être can be measured by psychometric instruments such as questionnaires, interviews, counselling techniques and so on. The most prevalent instrument has been what is known as the Existence Scale (SE), which is a self rating assessment test. However, a researcher- developed questionnaire with   appropriate validity and reliability can also prove useful. All you have to do is to define the construct and specify the sub-domains related to it.  Then, you should write a number of items for each sub-domain to create an adequate pool of items. The e book written by Zoltan Dornyei (2003)  can be very beneficial in this connection.

Best of luck,

R. Biria

Dear EWG,

On metaphor, check the following:

1. Washing the Brain_ Metaphor and Hidden Ideology_Andrew Goatly-John Benjamins (2007)

2. Andrew Ortony, ed. Metaphor and Thought. 2nd ed. (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1993).

Good luck.

Thank you very much for all the answers. I'll take everything into consideration.

I think that young people are VERY concerned about the possibility that they will be judged as less than perfect, in many parts of their lives, not just language learning.  This is why many language learners are reluctant to speak up in class.  This is true in L2, but some young people will not even ask questions in L1 classes, because "I doing want the other students to think I am dumb."

CLRG, AU-KBC Research Centre has released Tamil POS corpus and POS tagger.

More information is available in the following link,

Thank you all very much!

 Thanks, Dr. Doyle, for interesting links related to my answer. The second link did not work, but I have found the correct link is as follows (comparison of the two shows that a spacing after "ioe-" was a problem):

Dear Amir,

I would slightly disagree with the conclusions you draw from Reza's answer. For reading studies, the most important feature is accuracy (and precision) of your eye tracker, e.g. the spatial resolution and spread. A resolution of 1 degree at a viewing distance of 57cm corresponds to 1cm in your stimulus - which might be more than one line vertically. So here you should check if your ET provides a good enough resolution. As Reza mentioned, the type of setup will affect this, and I advice head-fixed subjects for better accuracy.

The sampling rate is not so important if you only plan on analyzing fixation locations, where 100 Hz will suffice. Keep in mind that higher sampling rates will also increase the amount of high frequency noise which in turn then requires more advanced filtering. If, however you also want to study saccades (which is interesting in reading studies), then you should go for at least 240 Hz (see our paper).

TL;DR:

- Spatial resolution is more important for your task (should be low, e.g.<= 0.1deg).

- Sampling frequency is only relevant if you analyse saccades (there it should be >=240Hz).

Greetings, David

Hi dear

Translation is a mature activity and to be able to translate you have to acquire the two languages fully.  Concerning the role of ^{translation in fluency, I think if the translation is oral both of them have mutual importance. But if you mean written translation, I don't think that it has direct effects.  Liqaa} 

I would not depend on software.  

Here is an oral proficiency rubric that I have used.

No. It can include "ser" and "estar".

Dear Pathawee Patchimtis,

Do contact me if you need anymore information.

Cheers,

Whenever I encounter an unknown English word

I try to look up the translation in an online

dictionary like LEO.

My memory partially resides on external data

carriers. I store translations and meanings

of words in a big semantic network.

Wikipedia often has the option to switch between

languages.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Setpoint_(control_system%29

Conjugation tables can be found with Google:

Sometimes you've got to determine which alternative

is a correct or better one. This can be done with "vs."

With wildcards it is possible to find sample sentences.

For pronunciation and meter I recommend

Carl Sagan's Cosmos on Youtube.

Regards,

Joachim

We might have some posters that could be interesting, on cross-linguistic priming.

thank you very much!

Hey Aditi, I will have those ready for you by Sunday, unfortunately I am travelling at the moment and my resources are limited..

Thank you!

Dear Gary Evans,

It is often stated that language is a fortress ; it must be attacked from different sides using all possible means. Using translation as a pedagogical tool is no more an out of place, inappropriate teaching strategy. In point of fact, learners' speed and performance in translating into and out of  a targeted  language can provide  the teachers with a solid ground for evaluating learners'  comprehension  of the language they are learning. However, as professor Nation (2010) states, language teachers should create a balanced use of what he calls four strands in the classroom; namely, meaning focused input, language focused learning, meaning focused output, and L2 fluency development. Clearly, translation is one of the effective techniques for fostering the first two strands; however, for the next two strands , the time-on-task principle calls for spending a maximum amount of time on L2  language use in real time.

Best of luck,

R. Biria

@Liqaa:

I agree that communication and interaction are essential, but there has to be a focus on form as well. There is a growing body of research that confirms that the best way to learn involves a mixture of communicative tasks and focus on form. This question is treated quite thoroughly in Focus on Form in Classroom Second Language Acquisition, edited by Doughty and Williams.

Richard Vaughan is right to criticize methods or teachers that only focus on communicative output in class. However, his declared decision not to carry out any free speaking tasks, because the teacher has to have control of what is taught at all times, is mistaken in my view. ( You can check his position on this by looking at his webpage.) In fact,his own method would improve considerably if he used free conversation, role plays etc to determine what difficulties his students have, and then treated these difficulties reactively in some way. This would make his approach much less lock-step and predictable, by ensuring that at least part of the language content responds to the specific needs of each class.

I think it probably is.

Hello  dear Alzubier,

Generally speaking, to demystify the complexities associated with EFL learners' mental lexicon,  specialists working on lexical issues have designed a number of theoretical frameworks whose main objective is to measure the size or breadth  versus the  depth or quality of vocabulary knowledge. Current studies show that there is a powerful relationship between  the two aspects  so much so some writers like  Vermeer (2001) suggest that these concepts are complementary and simply characterize the functional capacity  of an individual's mental lexicon. Several  instruments have been designed for measuring the lexical knowledge of  EFL learners including professor Nation suggested by Cherie Brown , Wesche and Paribakhat's Vocabulary Knowledge Test (VKT) and Vermeer's picture test. For more information, I refer you to the following links, which can hopefully provide you with what you are looking for.

Best regards,

R. Biria

OK Alright! I do not know Miestamo's work; I'll try to read it. A big hug and good work!

Dear Pragash Muthu Rajan,

Thanks for the valid question. In my opinion, The inter-ethnic communication competence differs from person to person. it appears in various levels. For such circumstances, we have to adopt  various strategies based on the independent potentiality of the learners. Hope it would be helpful.

With regards,

Pavani.A

Each journal may have its own rules, but generally I think that it is better to analyze your data in the original language, and then  translate the sections you wish to quote in your manuscript. Any translation, no matter how good, is like to miss nuances of meaning.  

Journal publications usually do not include the entire data set.

Dear Muna h. hwayed,

Generally speaking, there are fixed patterns  used in all religions to make invocations to God . As you have rightly observed, it would be practical to learn about the repertoire of rules employed for this particular speech function.  From a discourse analysis point of view, you can utilize a religious text addressing invocations, and by applying a discourse analysis approach , you can find the patterns. For instance, the link  below can  provide you with a purposive content with clear examples of making invocations, which you may identify and explain the rules therein.

Best regards,

R. Biria

It sounds like both variables are categorical in nature.  Appropriate descriptive statistics are counts and percentages for each category or combination of categories.

Appropriate plots include bar plots of counts and mosaic plots.

Descriptive statistics for continuous variables make no sense for categorical variables.  These include mean, median, standard deviation, and so on.

Thanks, Natalie

Hi Morteza

I am writing a thesis on automatic scoring systems like you. Program owners prefer to do the scoring themselves instead of presenting these programs to researchers. 

I have been informed that I have e-mailed a few companies in this regard before.

I am also wondering how researchers use these programs in some studies in the literature. Although there are few programs that you can use for free and download, I do not think they will do much. For example, a program called bayesian essay test scoring system (betsy). You can try this program but I did not get a serious result. It may not be possible to find these programs especially if you are working on a language other than English. 

If you have access to any program or have developed a program, can you give me information. For example, which method for automatic scoring leads to better results?

Good luck...

To continue with Larisa'a metaphor, language learners begin to emerge from the chrysalis when they start to be able to think and speak in the L2 without translating. This is a gradual process which takes different amounts of time depending on the number of teaching hours the student receives, the degree of exposure to English outside the classroom and learner characteristics such as tolerance of ambiguity and willingness to take risks; a learner who wishes to play safe will tend to cling onto the L1 as a crutch, without realizing that it is actually an impediment.

Work on learning styles can reduce the overdependence on translation if the student is receptive to the possibility of changing his or her style. However, one of the best ways to overcome the tendency to translate is to read as much as possible in the target language. Reading helps in three ways to overcome the tendency to translate. Firstly, learning to read fluently without translating can prepare students for speaking or writing directly in English. Secondly, reading will greatly improve the knowledge of vocabulary and structures, thus avoiding some of the lexical or structural gaps which force students into translation mode. Finally, on a psychological level, it will help make the foreign language sound more familiar and thus reduce the overdependence on the L1.

It's best for students  to read and listen to materials on topics that they are familiar with , as  topic knowledge can help them to overcome the structural and, above all, lexical difficulties that they will encounter.

I am not a fan of Krashen's Natural Approach: I find both the heavy emphasis on receptive skills to the detriment of productive skills and  the strict separation between learning and acquisition intuitively unconvincing and lacking in sufficient empirical grounding. However, two aspects of his approach can help learners.

Firstly, great benefits can be gained by encouraging students to devote part of their listening and reading time to narrow reading and listening, that is reading or listening which focuses on a single topic or topic area, or even a single author. 

The case for narrow listening

The Case for Narrow Reading

Stephen Krashen Language Magazine 3(5):17-19, (200

Secondly, Krashen is partly right when he states that the level of reading and listening texts should be only slightly above the learner's productive level, as the greater understanding ensuing from this policy will ensure that more language is acquired. However, learners also need to be exposed to more challenging listening and reading texts from time to time, as a means of developing their reading and listening strategies.

Dear Uzma Shuakat,

Generally speaking,  different tasks may be used for gauging semantic development in bilingual children which all try to create and activate a code-switching operation.A  number of classic tasks in bilingualism research  have been proved be valid and reliable measures of semantic development in  bilingual children; namely,  picture naming,word translation, word recognition, passage reading, cross-linguistic priming, Stroop and Simon tasks, and more recently eye-tracking have all been used to study bilingual language representation and processing. Alternatively, modifications  on classic monolingual tasks are also employed in research targeting bilingual children. For instance,  priming tasks are frequently used with monolinguals to study lexical and semantic activation. A s a case in point,  presenting a participant with a particular  prime  and examining his/ her speed-of recognition in a lexical decision task .For more information, I  refer you to the following links, which hopefully satisfy what you are looking for.

Best regards, 

 R. Biria

https://www.psychologicalscience.org/journals/cd/19_1_inpress/Bialystok_final.pdf?lan...

The book _Natural Language Processing: A Paninian Perspective_ by Bharati et al. has a good overview of the issues.  You can find a review of it in the CL journal, Sept. 1995.

For languages with complex inflections and a relatively free word order, dependency grammars are usually better than methods designed for English. You might search for "Hindi dependency grammar".

For the "word hash" that Google translate generates from Latin, see slide 27 of htp://www.jfsowa.com/talks/nlu.pdf .

My request to you is to provide the text in English if your work is about lexical organization even in Typically Developing (TD) population.

Thank you

I think, depending on the type of context you are looking at, you will end up in very different areas of research. You have a least, 3 different types of context for a word. NLP, to my knowledge, is at best looking at 2 of them:

1) word-context, meaning words surrounding your target word

2) supra-sentential context: what has been encoded in sentences prior to the one you're looking at but which may bear on the meaning of your target word (that's where the terms of Dhanji above are coming into play)

3) conversational context: This refers to stuff where the primary locus of language is seen as the person-to-person face-to-face conversation where stuff that I'm saying will sometimes refer to stuff that you're saying and vice versa. Also important here is what is not being said at all or might be hinted at by the strategic use of pauses and `filler' non-words.  Other important issues here are common ground - what do I know that you know - which will determine how I shape my sentences and non-linguistic communication via gestures, body postures, etc..

As far as I know, only contexts 1) and 2) are touched upon by NLP. If you're looking at context 3, you're in the realm of pragmatics and conversation analysis, the former of which kind of is done by linguists, whereas the latter comes from sociology.

The methods there are very different from the one employed by NLP.

A good question, indeed. I would like to add that to establish validity (and there are multiple types) and reliability of a research instrument not only linguistic matters have to be attended to.

What is often overlooked is the issue of cultural appropriateness of research instruments. Respondents may have no difficulty to understand and answer the questions in a foreign/second language but not all of the questions may make a good sense culturally.

I think a researcher would do a wise thing if he or she decides to translate a questionnaire just to see how the items/questions appear in the native language of the respondents and whether all of the questions would make a good sense to the respondents and are really appropriate in this particular cultural context.  

Actually, many studies in psychology assess validity and reliability of the translated research instruments. Good insights for future research can be gained if the translated questionnaires are intended for a wider use (not only for one study's research aims).