scholarly journals In What Order Should Learners Learn Japanese Vocabulary? A Corpus-based Approach

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Tatsuhiko Matsushita
Keyword(s):  
Literary Texts ◽  
Expected Return ◽  
Lower Efficiency ◽  
Advanced Level ◽  
Parts Of Speech ◽  
Main Research ◽  
Domain Specific ◽  
Academic Texts ◽  
Reading Text ◽  
Text Length

<p>This thesis attempts to answer the following two main research questions:1) In what order should learners of Japanese as a second language learn words and characters in order to be able to read Japanese? 2) How will the order vary according to the purpose of learning? To answer these questions, a Vocabulary Database for Reading Japanese (VDRJ) and a Character Database of Japanese (CDJ) were first developed from the Balanced Contemporary Corpus of Written Japanese (BCCWJ) 2009 monitor version (NINJAL, 2009) which contains book texts and internet-forum site texts with 33 million running words in total. Word and character rankings for international students, non-academic learners and general written Japanese were included in these databases. These rankings were proven to be valid for their respective purposes as they provided higher text coverage for the target texts than other texts.  After analysing the use of vocabulary and characters in Japanese, three groups of domain-specific words, namely common academic words, limited-academic-domain words and literary words were extracted. In order to test the expected efficiency for learning these groups of words, an index entitled Text Covering Efficiency (TCE) in different types of texts was proposed. The TCE represents the expected return per unit of text length from learning a group of words. As such, the TCE score in the target text domain should determine the order in which words in this domain are most efficiently learned. Indeed, the extracted common academic words and limited-academic-domain words showed significantly higher text coverage and TCE scores in academic texts than in other texts. Literary words also provided high text coverage and high TCE scores in literary texts, despite a lower efficiency level than that of academic vocabulary in academic texts. Learning domain-specific words is expected to be much more efficient than learning other words at the intermediate level. At the advanced level or above, learning domain-specific words will be further more efficient in some domains such as the natural sciences. In sum, the TCE has been shown to provide useful information for deciding on the learning order of various groups of words.  Other findings based on the analyses using the databases and word lists include the features of some indices for dispersion and adjusted frequency, lexical features of different media and genres, indexicality of the distributions of word origins and parts of speech, and the discrepancy between learning orders of words and Kanji. A Lexical Learning Possibility Index for a Reading Text (LEPIX) was also proposed for the simplification of a text as a vocabulary learning resource.</p>

scholarly journals In What Order Should Learners Learn Japanese Vocabulary? A Corpus-based Approach

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Tatsuhiko Matsushita
Keyword(s):  
Literary Texts ◽  
Expected Return ◽  
Lower Efficiency ◽  
Advanced Level ◽  
Parts Of Speech ◽  
Main Research ◽  
Domain Specific ◽  
Academic Texts ◽  
Reading Text ◽  
Text Length

<p>This thesis attempts to answer the following two main research questions:1) In what order should learners of Japanese as a second language learn words and characters in order to be able to read Japanese? 2) How will the order vary according to the purpose of learning? To answer these questions, a Vocabulary Database for Reading Japanese (VDRJ) and a Character Database of Japanese (CDJ) were first developed from the Balanced Contemporary Corpus of Written Japanese (BCCWJ) 2009 monitor version (NINJAL, 2009) which contains book texts and internet-forum site texts with 33 million running words in total. Word and character rankings for international students, non-academic learners and general written Japanese were included in these databases. These rankings were proven to be valid for their respective purposes as they provided higher text coverage for the target texts than other texts.  After analysing the use of vocabulary and characters in Japanese, three groups of domain-specific words, namely common academic words, limited-academic-domain words and literary words were extracted. In order to test the expected efficiency for learning these groups of words, an index entitled Text Covering Efficiency (TCE) in different types of texts was proposed. The TCE represents the expected return per unit of text length from learning a group of words. As such, the TCE score in the target text domain should determine the order in which words in this domain are most efficiently learned. Indeed, the extracted common academic words and limited-academic-domain words showed significantly higher text coverage and TCE scores in academic texts than in other texts. Literary words also provided high text coverage and high TCE scores in literary texts, despite a lower efficiency level than that of academic vocabulary in academic texts. Learning domain-specific words is expected to be much more efficient than learning other words at the intermediate level. At the advanced level or above, learning domain-specific words will be further more efficient in some domains such as the natural sciences. In sum, the TCE has been shown to provide useful information for deciding on the learning order of various groups of words.  Other findings based on the analyses using the databases and word lists include the features of some indices for dispersion and adjusted frequency, lexical features of different media and genres, indexicality of the distributions of word origins and parts of speech, and the discrepancy between learning orders of words and Kanji. A Lexical Learning Possibility Index for a Reading Text (LEPIX) was also proposed for the simplification of a text as a vocabulary learning resource.</p>

INITIAL STEP OF SPECIALIZED CORPORA BUILDING: CLEANING PROCEDURES

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vera Yakubson ◽  
Victor Zakharov
Keyword(s):  
Text Processing ◽  
Research Question ◽  
Initial Step ◽  
Main Research ◽  
Academic Texts ◽  
Linguistic Annotation ◽  
Significant Difference ◽  
Cleaning Procedures ◽  
Unique Source ◽  
Future Work

This paper deals with the specialized corpora building, specifically academic language corpus in the biotechnology field. Being a part of larger research devoted to creation and usage of specialized parallel corpus, this piece aims to analyze the initial step of corpus building. Our main research question was what procedures we need to implement to the texts before using them to develop the corpus. Analysis of previous research showed the significant quantity of papers devoted to corpora creation, including academic specialized corpora. Different sides of the process were analyzed in these researches, including the types of texts used, the principles of crawling, the recommended length of texts etc. As to the text processing for the needs of corpora creation, only the linguistic annotation issues were examined earlier. At the same time, the preliminary cleaning of texts before their usage in corpora may have significant influence on the corpus quality and its utility for the linguistic research. In this paper, we considered three small corpora derived from the same set of academic texts in the biotechnology field: “raw” corpus without any preliminary cleaning and two corpora with different level of cleaning. Using different Sketch Engine tools, we analyzed these corpora from the position of their future users, predominantly as sources for academic wordlists and specialized multi-word units. The conducted research showed very little difference between two cleaned corpora, meaning that only basic cleaning procedures such as removal of reference lists are can be useful in corpora design. At the same time, we found a significant difference between raw and cleaned corpora and argue that this difference can affect the quality of wordlists and multi-word terms extraction, therefore these cleaning procedures are meaningful. The main limitation of the study is that all texts were taken from the unique source, so the conclusions could be affected by this specific journal’s peculiarities. Therefore, the future work should be the verification of results on different text collections

scholarly journals EFL students’ responses to learning basic reading and writing skills

2018 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 40-53 ◽  
Author(s):  
Syayid Sandi Sukandi ◽  
Dian Noviani Syafar
Keyword(s):  
English Education ◽  
Writing Skills ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Study Program ◽  
Reading And Writing ◽  
Academic Texts ◽  
Basic Reading Skills ◽  
West Sumatra ◽  
Efl Students ◽  
Teaching Learning

This research presents the responses from Indonesian EFL students to teaching-learning basic reading and writing skills in the context of Indonesian higher education. The 120 respondents, who completed questionnaires, were students enrolled in Writing 1 and Reading 2 courses in the English Education Study Program of the Teachers Academy in West Sumatra [STKIP PGRI Sumatera Barat]. There were four findings from the survey, namely: 1) EFL students preferred studying reading (37%) more than writing (27%), 2) EFL students read about the same amount of literary texts (25%) as they did popular texts (23%) and academic texts (22%), 3) grammar and spelling are the most difficult aspects for EFL students to learn with 33% having difficulty with basic reading skills, and 53% with basic writing skills, and finally 4) EFL students prefer to open a dictionary when they encounter difficult words in reading a text (62%) and do the same when they have difficulties in expressing their thoughts in writing English (38%). These findings show that EFL students have a variety of responses in terms of learning basic reading and writing in EFL English. In addition, the findings show that the tendency of EFL students to prefer reading to writing is relatively high.

scholarly journals Creating Motivational Language Learning Experiences during the “Critical Period”

2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 26
Author(s):  
Junqing Jia
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Language ◽  
Language Learning ◽  
Language Proficiency ◽  
Critical Period ◽  
Domain Knowledge ◽  
Advanced Level ◽  
Domain Specific ◽  
Language Learning Motivation ◽  
Domain Expertise ◽  
High Level

Few studies have touched upon language learning motivation of advanced-level learners of Chinese, even fewer have proposed a pedagogical framework to understand and create motivational pathways. This paper aims to fill the gap by addressing a critical period of foreign language training where students are transforming from learning the foreign language to learning domain knowledge in the foreign language. Having drawn upon Confucian concepts and contextualized curricular examples, this paper proposes a framework suggesting that learners at this stage experience a less discussed psychological complexity due to their high level of language proficiency and lack of multilingual domain capacities. They are also gradually transforming into autonomous language users who expand their social milieu through demonstrating domain expertise. As such, the pedagogical implications place an emphasis on helping advanced-level Chinese learners to establish domain-specific vision and linguistic capability so that they can perform in multicultural contexts. In particular, motivational pathways during this stage should be constructed to encourage learners to constantly reflect on their recent past self and establish visions of the future one.

scholarly journals Apresentando o copa-trad versão 2.0 um sistema com base em corpus paralelo para pesquisa, ensino e prática da tradução

2020 ◽  
Vol 73 (1) ◽  
pp. 297-316
Author(s):  
Carlos Eduardo Silva ◽  
Lincoln Fernandes
Keyword(s):  
Machine Translation ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Translation Research ◽  
Parts Of Speech ◽  
Automatic Translation ◽  
Pos Tagging ◽  
Legal Texts ◽  
Version 2.0 ◽  
Translation Systems

This paper describes COPA-TRAD Version 2.0, a parallel corpus-based system developed at the Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina (UFSC) for translation research, teaching and practice. COPA-TRAD enables the user to investigate the practices of professional translators by identifying translational patterns related to a particular element or linguistic pattern. In addition, the system allows for the comparison between human translation and automatic translation provided by three well-known machine translation systems available on the Internet (Google Translate, Microsoft Translator and Yandex). Currently, COPA-TRAD incorporates five subcorpora (Children's Literature, Literary Texts, Meta-Discourse in Translation, Subtitles and Legal Texts) and provides the following tools: parallel concordancer, monolingual concordancer, wordlist and a DIY Tool that enables the user to create his own parallel disposable corpus. The system also provides a POS-tagging tool interface to analyze and classify the parts of speech of a text.

scholarly journals Tratamiento del ordo en la teorización poética medieval

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ana Calvo Revilla
Keyword(s):  
Great Influence ◽  
Literary Text ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Grammar Instruction ◽  
Parts Of Speech ◽  
The Road ◽  
Medieval Poetry ◽  
Textual Construction ◽  
Artes Praedicandi ◽  
Ars Poetica

Although medieval artes poetriae authors, because of their grammatical and versificatory orientation and the importance they attributed to elocutio, paid less attention to the parts of speech than the attention paid by authors of artes praedicandi or artes dictaminis, however, they did not neglect the dispositive aspects of literary discourse, and strengthened the textual character that began to dominate in Poetics under the dominance of Rhetoric. Although dispositio was not a part of grammar instruction in the XIII century – heir to the grammatical concept of Quintilian –, nevertheless, as a result of the rhetoricalisation process undergone by medieval poetry, other medieval artes poetriae, following in the footsteps of Horace’s Ars poetica, paid great attention to the operative organisation of literary text. Despite the familiarity with classical rhetorical treatises, when medieval poetry scholars dealt with the various ways to start a poem, they did not make use of these sources, as these were written having the forensic oratory as a model, and concentrated their study on techniques that make the defence of legal causes effective, developing the doctrine of exordium to present the case to the receiver and get the favourable disposition of the auditorium. We will pay attention to the sources of artes poetriae in the binomial ordo naturalis/ordo artificialis doctrine and we will analyse the consolidation that textual construction receives in Poetria nova. In this work Geoffrey of Vinsauf provides an extensive treatment on dispositio and the procedures to move from the objective and actual order, which follows the road of nature – ordo naturalis – to the poetic order – ordo artificialis. This distinction will have a great influence on the structure of narrative material. This study provides interesting data about the importance of the structure of literary texts in medieval times and provides a solid theoretical framework to understand the structure of the literary text and thus of textual linguistics.

scholarly journals Learners’ models enhance the development of learners’ reading and thinking strategies

2017 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 1
Author(s):  
Joyce Merawati
Keyword(s):  
Action Research ◽  
Reading Skills ◽  
Tertiary Education ◽  
English Department ◽  
Good Readers ◽  
Individual Model ◽  
Parts Of Speech ◽  
Academic Reading ◽  
Academic Texts ◽  
Thinking Strategies

This study was conducted to find the efficient way to teach academic reading skills to non-English department students at tertiary education. Based on the previous study, it was found that the students found difficulty in reading academic texts because of their limited vocabulary. Reading experts state that “good readers are good guessers”[1].Further,He claims that the strategies of guessing meaning from context is important strategy in reading. Considering these statements, this study investigated reading class by teaching the strategies of guessing meaning from context. Since this study was conducted to solve the students’ perceived problem when reading academic texts, it applied three-cycle qualitative inductive action research together with the students. These three cycles were: Cycle 1, the lecturer provided individual model of strategies, namely identifying parts of speech, finding clues from contexts, and identifying word parts; Cycle 2, the lecturer showed various models and gave practices; and Cycle 3, some selected students demonstrated their models to the class. Throughout this study, the students were encouraged to write journals explaining the strategies applied when they were guessing the meanings of words. The data was analyzed from the students’ journals collected at the end of each cycle. The results indicated that the students’ models were more efficient than the lecturer’s. Learning and showing the strategies of guessing words from context encouraged the students to develop their deep thinking strategies when reading academic texts. The focus of this paperis on the treatments to introduce the word guessing strategies to the students in brief.  

scholarly journals Zeugma as a Method of Pragmatic Focusing in a Literary Text (Based on the Material of the German Language)

Discourse ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 118-126
Author(s):  
Ju. G. Timralieva
Keyword(s):  
Literary Text ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
German Language ◽  
Emotional States ◽  
Reference Element ◽  
Parts Of Speech ◽  
Morphological Variations ◽  
Rhetorical Figure ◽  
The Rich ◽  
Semantically Heterogeneous

Introduction.The article analyses the specifics of the functioning of the zeugma in artistic speech. Despite the popularity of this rhetorical figure since ancient times and its use in various spheres of communication, there is still no complete clarity about the essence of this linguistic phenomenon.Methodology and sources.The article considers various interpretations of the zeugma, determines its place in the circle of other rhetorical figures, conducts a structural analysis of zeugmatic constructions, identifies its syntactic and morphological variations, analyzes the stylistic potential. As an empirical material, lyrical and prose texts of German-language literature of the XIX–XX centuries are used, including works by H. Heine, A. Döblin, G. Trakl, G. Benn, K. Edschmid, H. Böll and other authors.Results and discussion.As a rhetorical figure, zeugma is built on the conflict of syntax and semantics, representing several syntactically homogeneous, but semantically heterogeneous elements. Zeugma, as a rule, has a nuclear word in its composition, in which, in conjunction with various actants, different meanings/shades of meanings are actualized, although “non-nuclear” zeugmas are also found. The role of the reference element is most often a verb-predicate, less often the core of the construction becomes an adjective, participle, adverb, noun. The elements of the paratactic series are usually nouns (homogeneous subjects, additions, circumstances), but the analysis also reveals cases of illogical combinations represented by other parts of speech, as well as examples with heterogeneous morphological forms within the same zeugmatic construction. The functional analysis of the zeugma demonstrates the rich stylistic potential of this rhetorical figure, which acts as a means of humor and satire in literary texts, serving to convey emotional states, semantic saturation of the utterance, and the increment of new meanings.Conclusion. Zeugma acts as a significant method of pragmatic focusing in a literary text, being especially widely represented in modernist literature, characterized by semantic multilayering and intensity of artistic expression.

scholarly journals The role of metaphorized verbal combinations in presenting the mental behaviour of a person in contemporary British prose

2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (22) ◽  
pp. 150-156
Author(s):  
Alla Diadechko ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Abilities ◽  
English Language ◽  
Cognitive Theory ◽  
Theory Of Knowledge ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Contextual Approach ◽  
Parts Of Speech ◽  
Human Thought ◽  
Basic Ideas

Metaphors, being a special cognitive and semantic device, demonstrate the flow of the human thought. Among all parts of speech the verb can be singled out for its powerful ability to metaphorize. The paper addresses those verbal metaphorizers which come up in the contemporary literary English language to predicate the nouns related to human mental behavior. The contextual approach applied to the whole study has proved some basic ideas of the cognitive theory of knowledge. The study has identified some basic cognitive abilities, powers, states, feelings and emotions, and the ways they are presented in the literary texts in order to be guessed and understood by the readers.

scholarly journals Relation between Consumer Innovativeness Behavior and Purchasing Adoption Process: A Study with Electronics Sold Online

2017 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 64 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anderson Neckel ◽  
Ricardo Boeing
Keyword(s):  
Online Survey ◽  
Explanatory Power ◽  
Adoption Process ◽  
Research Approach ◽  
Research Focus ◽  
Consumer Innovativeness ◽  
Electronic Products ◽  
Main Research ◽  
Domain Specific ◽  
Qualitative Phase

This paper aims at analyzing the influence of consumer innovativeness behavior on the purchasing adoption process of products sold on the internet. Through a theoretical framework, the Domain Specific Innovativeness (DSI) and New Involvement Profile (NIP) scales were used in the study. The research approach has a mixed methodology, having both qualitative and quantitative approaches. In the qualitative phase, two focus group were conducted, with the objective of aligning the scales with the main research focus, and in the quantitative phase, an online survey with 448 respondents was applied. Data processing was based on multiple linear regression and results shows that the construct of the consumer innovativeness behavior has an explanatory power (R²) of 59.8% relative to the purchasing adoption process by the consumer. The consumers with a stronger innovativeness behavior showed to have similar characteristics when it came to purchasing innovative electronic products, making it easier to lead them to consumption.

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