This study investigated three look-up conditions for language learners to learn unknown target words and comprehend a reading passage when their attention is transferred away to an on-line dictionary. The research questions focused on how each look-up condition impacted the recall and recognition of word forms, word meanings, and passage comprehension. The participants were 84 first-year Japanese medical university students. The recall and recognition of word forms and word meanings, and passage comprehension data were analysed using the Rasch model. Probabilities of p<.05 were considered measurably different for the sample population used in this study, and probabilities of p<.003 were considered statistically significant and generalizable to a larger population. Overall, the results suggest three findings with regard to the on-line dictionary study. First, if only the results that were statistically significant are considered, there might be two conditions to learn words and comprehend reading passages: the spell condition seems to be best for learning the forms and meanings of words, and the control condition for promoting passage comprehension. Second, if the results that were both statistically significant and measurably different are considered, the spell, click, and control conditions might promote the learning of word forms, word meanings, and passage comprehension, respectively. Third, however, the click condition might promote both the learning of word meanings and passage comprehension because its effects were measurably higher to the spell condition on these measures. The results are consistent with the type of processing-resource allocation model for learning the forms and meanings of words and cognitive load theory for comprehending reading passages.

This paper outlines the ongoing construction of a speech corpus for use by applied linguists and advanced EFL/ESL students. In the first part, sections 1–4, the need for improvements in the teaching of listening skills and pronunciation practice for EFL/ESL students is noted. It is argued that the use of authentic native-to-native speech is imperative in the teaching/learning process so as to promote social inclusion. The arguments for authentic language learning material and the use of a speech corpus are contextualised within the literature, based mainly on the work of Swan, Brown and McCarthy. The second part, section 5, addresses features of native speech flow which cause difficulties for EFL/ESL students (Brown, Cauldwell) and establishes the need for improvements in the teaching of listening skills. Examples are given of reduced forms characteristic of relaxed native speech, and how these can be made accessible for study using the Dublin Institute of Technology’s slow-down technology, which gives students more time to study native speech features, without tonal distortion. The final part, sections 6–8, introduces a novel Speech Corpus being developed at DIT. It shows the limits of traditional corpora and outlines the general requirements of a Speech Corpus. This tool – which will satisfy the needs of teachers, learners and researchers – will link digitally recorded, natural, native-to-native speech so that each transcript segment will give access to its associated sound file. Users will be able to locate desired speech strings, play, compare and contrast them – and slow them down for more detailed study.

In this paper, we propose a statistical evaluation method of pronunciation proficiency and intelligibility for presentations made in English by native Japanese speakers. We statistically analyzed the actual utterances of speakers to find combinations of acoustic and linguistic features with high correlation between the scores estimated by the system and native English teachers. Our results showed that the best combination of acoustic features produced correlation coefficients of 0.929 and 0.753 for pronunciation and intelligibility scores, respectively, using open data for speakers at the 10-sentence level. In an offline test, we evaluated possibly-confusing pairs of phonemes that are often mispronounced by Japanese speakers of English. In addition, we developed an online real-time score estimation system for Japanese learners of English using offline techniques to evaluate the pronunciation and intelligibility scores in real-time with almost the same ability as English teachers. Finally, we show that both the objective and subjective evaluations improved after learning with our system.

Drawing on existing research with a holistic stance toward multimodal meaning-making, this paper takes an analytic approach to integrating eye-tracking data to study the perception and use of multimodality by teachers and learners. To illustrate this approach, we analyse two webconference tutoring sessions from a telecollaborative project involving pre-service teachers and learners of Mandarin Chinese. The tutoring sessions were recorded and transcribed multimodally, and our analysis of two types of conversational side sequences shows that the integration of eye-tracking data into an ecological approach provides richer results. Specifically, our proposed approach provided a window on the participants’ cognitive management of graphic and visual affordances during interaction and uncovered episodes of joint attention.

This article focuses on designing and evaluating conversation practice in a second language (L2) with a robot that employs human spoken and non-verbal interaction strategies. Based on an analysis of previous work and semi-structured interviews with L2 learners and teachers, recommendations for robot-led conversation practice for adult learners at intermediate level are first defined, focused on language learning, on the social context, on the conversational structure and on verbal and visual aspects of the robot moderation. Guided by these recommendations, an experiment is set up, in which 12 pairs of L2 learners of Swedish interact with a robot in short social conversations. These robot–learner interactions are evaluated through post-session interviews with the learners, teachers’ ratings of the robot’s behaviour and analyses of the video-recorded conversations, resulting in a set of guidelines for robot-led conversation practice: (1) societal and personal topics increase the practice’s meaningfulness for learners; (2) strategies and methods for providing corrective feedback during conversation practice need to be explored further; (3) learners should be encouraged to support each other if the robot has difficulties adapting to their linguistic level; (4) the robot should establish a social relationship by contributing with its own story, remembering the participants’ input, and making use of non-verbal communication signals; and (5) improvements are required regarding naturalness and intelligibility of text-to-speech synthesis, in particular its speed, if it is to be used for conversations with L2 learners.

This paper reports on ongoing research aimed at characterizing a signature pedagogy (Shulman, 2005) of technology-enhanced task-based language teaching (TETBLT). To achieve this goal, we initially identified 15 pedagogical principles and practices distinctive of TETBLT. This initial set of principles and practices were motivated by second language acquisition theories (Doughty & Long, 2003), methodological approaches in foreign language teaching (Kramsch, 2014), and state-of-the-art publications on computer-assisted language learning (Chapelle & Sauro, 2017). During the first phase of the study, we consulted an initial group of 34 experts in the field, using the Delphi technique to achieve gradual consensus about the set of principles. After analyzing the first set of responses (N = 23) to the principles, which attained a degree of agreement averaging 71% and ranging from 48% to 96%, we refined the principles incorporating the feedback received and sent out a second questionnaire, which allowed us to reach a consensus about a set of eight robust pedagogical principles for TETBLT.

This paper reports action research into the use of electronic mail as a channel for giving feedback to English L2 writers in a sequence of writing process oriented technical communication courses. Four teachers used electronic mail feedback (EMF) regularly with 81 students on honours degree courses In information Systems and Computer Science. Electronic mail was used during planning and drafting stages in extended simulations of technical communication situations in concert with class meetings, workshop sessions, one-on-one and small group conference and with audiotaped summative feedback upon completion of major assignments.

Teachers and students reported in response to a questionnaire and in interviews that they found EMF significantly advantageous in that it supports prompt, complete, and instrumental commentary on student work, empowers students to use English for authentic communication, and helps build positive relationships between students and native speaking teachers. All participants agreed that the extra channel of communication contributed to students' motivation to use invention techniques freely, to take risks with language and style in drafting, and to make substantive changes to text in drafting. Students reported that the objectivity of EMF was face saving, allowing them to use critical commentary from their teachers more productively. They also said that they found their teachers' use of EMF was a powerful demonstration of their willingness to make themselves available as mentors to their students.

This article investigates commercial software design practices as they specifically relate to foreign language education. Commercial educational software companies currently produce the majority of language learning software available on the market. Commercial ventures producing CALL software share many design practices that call into question their educational validity. The design practices of commercial CALL software companies are incongruent with the goals of foreign language education. The problems associated with commercial CALL ventures can be seen in the cultural aspects of the programs, particularly when dealing with issues of cultural authenticity and representation. Practices that create these cultural problems are investigated and outlined in this article. The results of these problems are also highlighted to allow for better identification of problematic design practices. The identification of these problems is associated with educational software evaluation theory. A brief outline of educational software evaluation theory is given, as well as a proposal for a new framework for CALL software evaluation that incorporates issues of representation to better address the inaccuracies found in many commercial CALL software products.

This paper examines the range of different factors which in our experience contribute to student resistance to the use of computers for language learning. These problems relate to aspects of the computing environment, social and psychological factors and issues relating to the curriculum and teaching methods. We have made basic suggestions about ways of overcoming these resistances. However our principal finding is that the most effective and coherent way of fostering student adoption of CALL is to develop a computer based learning environment, which draws on the success of communications software and the Internet, based on the computer conferencing program First Class.

How can state-of-the-art computational linguistic technology reduce the workload and increase the efficiency of language teachers? To address this question, we combine insights from research in second language acquisition and computational linguistics to automatically generate text-based questions to a given text. The questions are designed to draw the learner’s attention to target linguistic forms – phrasal verbs, in this particular case – by requiring them to use the forms or their paraphrases in the answer. Such questions help learners create form-meaning connections and are well suited for both practice and testing. We discuss the generation of a novel type of question combining a wh- question with a gapped sentence, and report the results of two crowdsourcing evaluation studies investigating how well automatically generated questions compare to those written by a language teacher. The first study compares our system output to gold standard human-written questions via crowdsourcing rating. An equivalence test shows that automatically generated questions are comparable to human-written ones. The second crowdsourcing study investigates two types of questions (wh- questions with and without a gapped sentence), their perceived quality, and the responses they elicit. Finally, we discuss the challenges and limitations of creating and evaluating question-generation systems for language learners.

This paper presents a method for the assessment of oral fluency in Business English according to a two corpora-based lexical approach. The original query for our research is the possibility of estimating the level of oral skills among Business English (BE) learners by contrasting their word use in oral presentations with corpus data frequencies. Use of Information Technology (IT) resources and electronic BE corpora is thus measured in the evaluative approach to identify significant performance changes between learners who have used such electronic resources and learners who have not.

This paper reports on the experimental use of a broadband computer network hypermedia environment for language learning (French, English and Spanish). Using Web-based resources, students engage in a collaborative task over a network which offers high quality video-conferencing, application sharing and access to authentic multimedia resources. One of the main aims was to establish the practicalities of providing learners of languages with opportunities to engage in reciprocal peer tutoring. After outlining the pedagogical assumptions, and describing the set-up of the network-based learning environment, the trials are analysed, and the effectiveness of network-based language learning in supporting collaborative learning is discussed.

This article describes the anatomy and dynamics of an online professional development activity, the Moodle fishbowl. The fishbowl was designed as an opportunity for experienced EFL educators to witness and make sense of instructional conversation strategies that they might themselves use as they migrate their EFL courses to blended and eventually fully online venues, venues where the roles and dynamics of interaction are decidedly different than those in the live classroom. A major emphasis in this professional development sequence was to raise faculty awareness of the unique affordances on which they, as experienced language educators, might capitalize through observation of authentic examples of responsive online instructional strategies. To that end, three-week-long collaborations were established between participating faculty's EFL students and a ‘cultural expert’ in the US. The cultural experts were doctoral students in language technology who employed instructional conversation strategies with the EFL students as part of informal, authentic asynchronous threaded discourse topics. The role of the faculty in training was to observe these conversations by looking into the metaphorical fishbowl, reflect on the anatomy and impact of these online instructional conversations, and report back to the group as a whole. The following narrates the rationale, processes and outcomes of this Moodle fishbowl professional development sequence and suggests future considerations in supporting language educators as they move some or all of their instruction online.

This article investigates whether authentic native speaker (NS) to NS speech can be made available to the learner listener through the use of a novel slow-down tool. Results from various preliminary tests seem to indicate that the use of a slow-down algorithm in many cases, and in particular in samples with a higher speed rate and word count, leads to an improvement in subjects’ ability to perceive and understand what was being uttered in the samples. Tests revealed that even NS listeners, as opposed to non-native (NN) listeners, prefer to hear authentic NS speech which is either unscripted or is influenced by regional accent, at a slowed down speed. It also seems that ‘unexpected’ words (such as words with high contextual value, but which cannot be processed in a top-down fashion because of the size of the sound snippet) are initially not understood at the original speed of delivery, even in a scripted and carefully pronounced pedagogic sample. Samples containing chunks or formulaic sequences, however, appear to be easily understood at 100% by the majority of NS listeners due to the holistic processing of these language units.

This study offers a comprehensive bibliometric analysis of artificial intelligence (AI) applications in the field of second language (L2) teaching and applied linguistics, spanning from the early developments in 1995 to 2022. It aims to uncover current trends, prominent themes, and influential authors, documents, and sources. A total of 185 relevant articles published in Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI) indexed journals were analyzed using the VOSviewer bibliometric software tool. Our investigation reveals a highly multidisciplinary and interconnected field, with four main clusters identified: AI, natural language processing (NLP), robot-assisted language learning, and chatbots. Notable themes include the increasing use of intelligent tutoring systems, the importance of syntactic complexity and vocabulary in L2 learning, and the exploration of robots and gamification in language education. The study also highlights the potential of NLP and AI technologies to enhance personalized feedback and instruction for language learners. The findings emphasize the growing interest in AI applications in L2 teaching and applied linguistics, as well as the need for continued research to advance the field and improve language instruction and assessment. By providing a quantitative and rigorous overview of the literature, this study contributes valuable insights into the current state of research in AI-assisted L2 teaching and applied linguistics and identifies key areas for future exploration and development.

In this paper we consider how corpora may be of use in the teaching of grammar of the pre-tertiary level. Corpora are becoming well established in teaching in Universities. Corpora also have a role to play in secondary education, in that they can help decide how and what to teach, as well as changing the way in which puplis learn and providing the possibility of open-ended machine-aided tuition. Corpora also seem to provide what UK goverment sponsored reports on teaching grammar have called for – a data-driven approach to the subject.

This study reports on a corpus analysis of samples of spoken discourse between a group of British and Taiwanese adolescents, with the aim of exploring the statistically significant differences in the use of grammatical categories between the two groups of participants. The key word method extended to a part-of-speech level using the web-based corpus analytical tool, Wmatrix, highlights those linguistic domains which deserve particular attention. Specifically, it reveals the lexical and grammatical categories that occur unusually frequently or unusually infrequently in the English learners’ discourse when compared with the language used by the native speakers of English in the sample. The research findings delineate the pedagogical merit of key domain analysis and thus help to inform English as a foreign language teachers and materials developers in the design of courses emphasising spoken interaction.

Synchronous written chat and instant messaging are tools which have been used and explored in online language learning settings for at least two decades. Research literature has shown that such tools give second language (L2) learners opportunities for language learning, e.g., the interaction in real time with peers and native speakers, the written mode of language, and the time available for planning and monitoring utterances. However, since the majority of the empirical work on chat and instant messaging has been conducted under experimental conditions, relatively little research has investigated how interaction in chat influences language learning opportunities under the conditions of an online academic language course where students have unequal status because of their different language background and level of L2 proficiency. This article presents an explorative study of the interaction in chat in a web-based academic language course between students with different L1s and different levels of L2. The aim is to shed light on how student interaction in an institutional context benefits the language learning environment in a manner that promotes L2 learners’ attention to linguistic items in their input and output, and that allow opportunities for functional practising. Based on a mainly quantitative analysis, this article illustrates how L2 learners’ participation, the complexity of their utterances, and their opportunities for self-correction and corrective feedback are influenced by group formation.

The argument for a pedagogy of input oriented learning for the development of speaking competence (Sharwood-Smith, 1986; Bardovi-Harlig and Salsbury, 2004; Eslami-Rasekh, 2005) has been of increasing interest in Applied Linguistics circles. It has also been argued that multimedia applications, in particular DVDs, provide language learners with multimodal representations that may help them ‘to gain broad access to oral communication both visually and auditory’ (Tschirner, 2001: 305). Thus this paper focuses on an exploratory study of teaching oral interaction through input processing by means of multimodal texts.

The paper is divided into a number of interconnected sections. First, we outline briefly what teaching conversation implies and examine the important role of oral comprehension in the development of conversational interaction. In fact, it has been suggested that effective speaking depends very much on successful understanding (Oprandy, 1994). In this paper we pay special attention to the crucial role of context in understanding oral interactions. Therefore, we outline the theory of context in English Language Teaching (ELT). The discussion draws on approaches to teaching conversation and it also offers a brief reflection about the need for materials which might convey the sociocultural and semiotic elements of oral communication through which meaning is created.

We then discuss the decisions taken to propose a new multimodal approach to teaching conversation from a three-fold perspective: (a) the selection of texts taken from films, and the benefits of using DVDs (digital versatile disc); (b) the development of a multimodal analysis of film clips for the design of activities; and (c) the promotion of a conversation awareness methodology through a bank of DVD clips to achieve an understanding of how native speakers actually go about the process of constructing oral interactions.

In sum, the main thrust of this paper is to pinpoint the advantages of using multimodal materials taken from DVDs, as they provide learners with broad access to oral communication, both visual and auditory, making classroom conditions similar to the target cultural environment (Tschirner, 2001).

How realistic is it to achieve good quality language learning and teaching using technology? This paper looks at the advantages and disadvantages of using CD-ROMs and Web-based materials in the quest for providing meaningful interactive language learning strategies to students. It will demonstrate that the advantages outweigh the disadvantages, at least in terms of pedagogy, and that there is no need to reject technology despite difficulties and frustrations because the latest developments in technology, especially on the WWW, have significantly increased the potential for even more authentic interaction in the classroom. Illustrations from our Vietnamese course are included.