The use of LE 了 in Mandarin Chinese oral discourse

LE is the mostly widely studied aspect markers in Chinese. In addition to perfective aspect marker to indicate action completion, LE can also serve as sentence final particle to indicate a currently relevant state. This study investigates how Chinese NSs use LE in oral discourse and the factors that influence their use. The data were collected from three discourses including informal conversations, elicited narratives, and teacher classroom speech. Multivariate analysis of 2,359 tokens revealed that verb complement type and verb type have the strongest effects, followed by LE position, serial verb relationship, sentence type, discourse context, and time word presence/absence.

NBC Model for Early Prediction of At-Risk Students in Course

Increase in computer usage for different purposes in different fields has made the computer important to learn things. Machine learning made systems to learn things and work accordingly on their own. Among the different fields that use machine learning, the education field is one. In the education field, machine learning has led to the advent of a digital-enabled classroom, speech recognition, adaptive learning techniques, and development of artificial instructor. Along with this, the prediction has its importance. In the education field, the main problem is students drop out. The machine learning predictive modeling approach can be used to identify the students who are at-risk and inform the instructor and students before reducing the dropouts. The main intention of this paper is to model a system that could be a solution to reduce the drop-outs and increase the education standards in students by early predicting their risk in a course

Using the First Language (L1) as a Resource in EFL Classrooms: Nepalese University Teachers’ and Students’ Perspectives

While challenging the widely held belief that students in English as a foreign language (EFL) classroom prefer their teachers not use the first language (L1), the study examined attitudes of university teachers and students towards using L1 and reasons for giving up on English and reverting to Nepali in English-medium lessons. Drawing on a mixed-method study that used survey questionnaire (N= 50) and interviews (N=15), the researcher identified a number of classroom speech acts that are performed by teachers’ and students’ in their L1. The findings revealed that both teachers and students had a positive attitude towards using L1; however, they held the belief that the overuse of L1 may impede language learning. Although the teachers seemed to discourage the use of Nepali (L1) in lessons aimed at developing learners’ communicative competence, they used Nepali to help learners comprehend complex concepts of grammar and lexis. Although the excessive use of Nepali was seemingly associated with teachers’ lack of communicative competence and creativity in delivering EFL lessons, students preferred their teachers to use the L1.Journal of NELTA , Vol. 22, No. 1-2, 2017 December

Engaging Your Growth Mindset for a Successful School Year

This manuscript will focus on the value of a growth mindset, the belief that our abilities are not static, rather, those abilities can be developed upon and improved while utilizing hard work, dedication, and effort. In this article, we describe the value of a growth mindset for speech-language pathologists in schools who support language and literacy skills of students with disabilities and strive to increase academic success in the general education classroom. Speech-language pathologists in a school-based setting can use the principles of growth mindset, putting in into practice for themselves and to foster growth mindset within their students. We present recommendations and examples of implementing a growth mindset during the school year. Additionally, resources are provided for further understanding of growth mindset and the research behind growth mindset principles.

The influence of classroom input and community exposure on the learning of variable grammar

As pointed out by Carroll (Carroll), our team has investigated the influence of input on the spoken French competence of older Ontario bilinguals. Our research has examined the learning of invariant and variable aspects of French grammar. We focus here on the learning of variation, since it is an under-researched topic not covered by Carroll. Our research examines adolescent speakers of Ontario French from French-medium schools (e.g., Mougeon & Beniak, 1991), same-age immersion students (e.g., Mougeon, Nadasdi & Rehner, 2010) and advanced learners from a bilingual university (e.g., Mougeon & Rehner, 2015). Two key dimensions of input are teacher classroom speech and frequency of use of French in the community for the Franco-Ontarian students and amount of extra-curricular interactions with Francophones for the FSL students. Having collected corpora from these student groups, we compared the output of learners with primarily classroom-based input with that of learners with broader ranging (extra-) curricular input. The availability of teacher in-class recordings for these learner groups has been crucial in identifying additional factors influencing these students’ output.

The Development of the Mealings, Demuth, Dillon, and Buchholz Classroom Speech Perception Test

PurposeOpen-plan classroom styles are increasingly being adopted in Australia despite evidence that their high intrusive noise levels adversely affect learning. The aim of this study was to develop a new Australian speech perception task (the Mealings, Demuth, Dillon, and Buchholz Classroom Speech Perception Test) and use it in an open-plan classroom to assess how intrusive noise affects speech perception.MethodThe first part of this article describes how the online 4-picture choice speech perception task materials were created. The second part focuses on the study involving twenty-two 5- to 6-year-old children in an open-plan classroom who completed the task while other classes engaged in quiet and noisy activities.ResultsChildren's performance accuracy, number of responses, and speed were lower in the noisy condition compared with the quiet condition. In addition, children's speech perception scores decreased the farther away they were seated from the loudspeaker. Overall, the children understood and were engaged in the task, demonstrating that it is an appropriate tool for assessing speech perception live in the classroom with 5- to 6-year-old children.ConclusionsThe results suggest that the Mealings, Demuth, Dillon, and Buchholz Classroom Speech Perception Test is a helpful tool for assessing speech perception in classrooms and that it would be beneficial to use in future research investigating how classroom design and noise affect speech perception.

Heterogeneous Speech Prediction Using LDA Classifiers

Classroom speech intelligibility has become one of the main concerns in schools and other learning institutions development nowadays. This is because the qualities of student’s perceptions towards teacher are essentials in learning development. Measures have been introduced by the acoustical association to tackle the speech intelligibility problems in the classroom such as room renovations. Room’s acoustics standards have been introduced in several countries but still the questions on whether the standards fits on every classroom in different countries are still arise. Studies have also shown that most of the researches that have been conducted were only focusing on the conventional type classroom which depends only on the teacher’s vocal power. This paper will formulate the measurement protocol on measuring the speech intelligibility in the sound reinforced (multiple speaker) classroom. Finally it was found that the speech intelligibility in the sound reinforced classroom is better than the conventional classroom by using Linear Discriminant Analysis.

Reasons for Students’ Code-Switching Between Informal Indonesian and English in ELT Contexts

This descriptive and analytical study aimed at exploring the phenomenon of code-switching between Informal Indonesian (INF-I) and English exhibited in the classroom speech of the students at English Education Department of Faculty of Education and Teachers Training Lancang Kuning University in Pekanbaru-Riau. The main discussion of code-switching (CS hereafter) is the students’ reasons for employing CS. The data was collected by recording the students’ speech which was then transcribed as conversational data and by conducting unstructured interview. The research was conducted particularly in formal situations; in Speaking I classes involving sixty students of the first year. This study found that in formal situations such as in ELT contexts, the students’ reasons for CS were as compensatory strategy for the deficiency, as a language negotiation, as extended explanation, as an expression of solidarity, as flexibility of expression and as translation. These all reasons were primarily pertinent to fulfill communicative needs and communicative strategies.