The teaching and learning of listening and vocabulary in EFL classes at a Chinese university

<p><b>Listening is an important skill for second language learners of any language. To develop listening skills effectively, research suggests using a more process-oriented than product-oriented approach to teaching listening. That is, placing greater emphasis on developing learner awareness and strategic competence than on answering listening comprehension questions. The present study investigates how listening is taught by two teachers in the context of Chinese tertiary English foreign language (EFL) classes, where listening tends to be taught as a discreet skill. Another focus of the research is how the relationship between vocabulary and listening is understood and addressed in this context. While it is well known that vocabulary knowledge is needed for and can be learnt through listening, less is known about how the vocabulary support is provided and vocabulary knowledge is gained in such listening classes.</b></p> <p>This research involved three main areas of investigation. The first area investigated the teaching of listening. It involved a content analysis of listening materials in the textbook (e.g., listening texts and listening activities), followed by classroom observations of listening instruction practices, and post-lesson interviews with the teachers and their learners about their beliefs about teaching and learning listening. Findings showed that a product-oriented approach dominated the textbook materials, the classroom practices and the beliefs of the teachers and learners.</p> <p>The second area concerns the vocabulary demands of these listening classes. This involved a corpus-based analysis of the frequency and kinds of vocabulary in the textbook, followed by measurement of the learners’ vocabulary size (i.e., the Vocabulary Size Test by Nation & Beglar, 2007) and knowledge (i.e., a recognition task in the Yes/No format). The corpus analyses results showed that: (1) vocabulary knowledge of 3000-word families was required to comprehend the textbook; (2) high frequency vocabulary made up the majority of the words in the textbook. The VST results showed that, on average, the learners’ written receptive size ranged from 5000 to 7000-word families. The pre-lesson Yes/No task results showed that the students had difficulty recognizing a substantial number of the words they met in the textbook.</p> <p>The third area investigated the nature of vocabulary support and vocabulary learning in the listening class. Firstly, an analysis of the teachers’ classroom practices from observation data relating to vocabulary was carried out. Secondly, interview data from the teachers was examined for evidence of their beliefs about vocabulary and listening. Thirdly, post-lesson interview data with learners and data from a post-test repeat of the vocabulary recognition task were examined to find out more about the learners’ perceptions of vocabulary in listening class and the vocabulary learning gains they made in these classes. Findings revealed that the learners relied on the glossaries to prepare for listening classes. They also expected vocabulary instruction from the teachers, so long as it did not distract from listening activity completion. Both teachers primarily used translation to provide vocabulary support, but differed markedly in the amount of vocabulary support they provided. In both classes, significant vocabulary gains were found in a comparison of the pre-and-post lesson Yes/No task results. The vocabulary-related episodes in the listening classes were a notable influence on these learning gains.</p> <p>This research has pedagogical implications for the EFL listening classroom. The findings highlight the mutually reinforcing influences of textbook design and teacher beliefs on how listening is taught. These influences, in turn, shape how learners perceive the process of developing their L2 listening skills. With respect to vocabulary and listening, the findings also suggest that even where the lexical demands of listening appear to be well within the vocabulary level of the learners, there is considerable potential for vocabulary learning from listening classes. Teachers and learners alike are likely to benefit from systematically building on this potential. Future research could further investigate L2 learners’ behaviors and perceptions in the listening class, and examine their vocabulary knowledge in the spoken form.</p>

The teaching and learning of listening and vocabulary in EFL classes at a Chinese university

<p><b>Listening is an important skill for second language learners of any language. To develop listening skills effectively, research suggests using a more process-oriented than product-oriented approach to teaching listening. That is, placing greater emphasis on developing learner awareness and strategic competence than on answering listening comprehension questions. The present study investigates how listening is taught by two teachers in the context of Chinese tertiary English foreign language (EFL) classes, where listening tends to be taught as a discreet skill. Another focus of the research is how the relationship between vocabulary and listening is understood and addressed in this context. While it is well known that vocabulary knowledge is needed for and can be learnt through listening, less is known about how the vocabulary support is provided and vocabulary knowledge is gained in such listening classes.</b></p> <p>This research involved three main areas of investigation. The first area investigated the teaching of listening. It involved a content analysis of listening materials in the textbook (e.g., listening texts and listening activities), followed by classroom observations of listening instruction practices, and post-lesson interviews with the teachers and their learners about their beliefs about teaching and learning listening. Findings showed that a product-oriented approach dominated the textbook materials, the classroom practices and the beliefs of the teachers and learners.</p> <p>The second area concerns the vocabulary demands of these listening classes. This involved a corpus-based analysis of the frequency and kinds of vocabulary in the textbook, followed by measurement of the learners’ vocabulary size (i.e., the Vocabulary Size Test by Nation & Beglar, 2007) and knowledge (i.e., a recognition task in the Yes/No format). The corpus analyses results showed that: (1) vocabulary knowledge of 3000-word families was required to comprehend the textbook; (2) high frequency vocabulary made up the majority of the words in the textbook. The VST results showed that, on average, the learners’ written receptive size ranged from 5000 to 7000-word families. The pre-lesson Yes/No task results showed that the students had difficulty recognizing a substantial number of the words they met in the textbook.</p> <p>The third area investigated the nature of vocabulary support and vocabulary learning in the listening class. Firstly, an analysis of the teachers’ classroom practices from observation data relating to vocabulary was carried out. Secondly, interview data from the teachers was examined for evidence of their beliefs about vocabulary and listening. Thirdly, post-lesson interview data with learners and data from a post-test repeat of the vocabulary recognition task were examined to find out more about the learners’ perceptions of vocabulary in listening class and the vocabulary learning gains they made in these classes. Findings revealed that the learners relied on the glossaries to prepare for listening classes. They also expected vocabulary instruction from the teachers, so long as it did not distract from listening activity completion. Both teachers primarily used translation to provide vocabulary support, but differed markedly in the amount of vocabulary support they provided. In both classes, significant vocabulary gains were found in a comparison of the pre-and-post lesson Yes/No task results. The vocabulary-related episodes in the listening classes were a notable influence on these learning gains.</p> <p>This research has pedagogical implications for the EFL listening classroom. The findings highlight the mutually reinforcing influences of textbook design and teacher beliefs on how listening is taught. These influences, in turn, shape how learners perceive the process of developing their L2 listening skills. With respect to vocabulary and listening, the findings also suggest that even where the lexical demands of listening appear to be well within the vocabulary level of the learners, there is considerable potential for vocabulary learning from listening classes. Teachers and learners alike are likely to benefit from systematically building on this potential. Future research could further investigate L2 learners’ behaviors and perceptions in the listening class, and examine their vocabulary knowledge in the spoken form.</p>

Psychosocial Features for Hate Speech Detection in Code-switched Texts

This study examines the problem of hate speech identification in codeswitched text from social media using a natural language processing approach. It explores different features in training nine models and empirically evaluates their predictiveness in identifying hate speech in a ~50k human-annotated dataset. The study espouses a novel approach to handle this challenge by introducing a hierarchical approach that employs Latent Dirichlet Analysis to generate topic models that help build a high-level Psychosocial feature set that we acronym PDC. PDC groups similar meaning words in word families, which is significant in capturing codeswitching during the preprocessing stage for supervised learning models. The high-level PDC features generated are based on a hate speech annotation framework [1] that is largely informed by the duplex theory of hate [2]. Results obtained from frequency-based models using the PDC feature on the dataset comprising of tweets generated during the 2012 and 2017 presidential elections in Kenya indicate an f-score of 83% (precision: 81%, recall: 85%) in identifying hate speech. The study is significant in that it publicly shares a unique codeswitched dataset for hate speech that is valuable for comparative studies. Secondly, it provides a methodology for building a novel PDC feature set to identify nuanced forms of hate speech, camouflaged in codeswitched data, which conventional methods could not adequately identify.

Psychosocial Features for Identifying Hate Speech in Social Media Text

This study uses natural language processing to identify hate speech in social media codeswitched text. It trains nine models and tests their predictiveness in recognizing hate speech in a 50k human-annotated dataset. The article proposes a novel hierarchical approach that leverages Latent Dirichlet Analysis to develop topic models that assist build a high-level Psychosocial feature set we call PDC. PDC organizes words into word families, which helps capture codeswitching during preprocessing for supervised learning models. Informed by the duplex theory of hate, the PDC features are based on a hate speech annotation framework. Frequency-based models employing the PDC feature on tweets from the 2012 and 2017 Kenyan presidential elections yielded an f-score of 83 percent (precision: 81 percent, recall: 85 percent) in recognizing hate speech. The study is notable because it publicly exposes a rich codeswitched dataset for comparative studies. Second, it describes how to create a novel PDC feature set to detect subtle types of hate speech hidden in codeswitched data that previous approaches could not detect.

THE LEMMA DILEMMA

Recently there has been some debate about the appropriacy of different lexical units in pedagogy and research (e.g., Brown et al., 2020; Dang & Webb, 2016a; Kremmel, 2016; Laufer & Cobb, 2020; McLean, 2018; Nation, 2016; Nation & Webb, 2011; Vilkaitė-Lozdienė & Schmitt, 2020). The lexical unit (word types, lemmas, flemmas, word families) needs to be considered when developing wordlists, vocabulary tests, and vocabulary learning programs. It is also central to the lexical profiles of text and corpora, which indicate the vocabulary learning targets associated with understanding different types of discourse. Perhaps most importantly, the lexical unit of words found in vocabulary learning resources such as word lists and tests may affect their pedagogical value. The aim of this article is to highlight aspects of research and pedagogy that are affected by lexical units and describe issues that should be considered when operationalizing words in studies of vocabulary and learning resources.

Word Roots in English: Learning English Words through Form and Meaning Similarity

<p>The research first proposes a vocabulary learning technique: the word part technique, and then tests its effectiveness in aiding vocabulary learning and retention. The first part of the thesis centers around the idea that the knowledge of the first 2000 words language learners already possess may give them easier access to words of other frequency levels because the root parts of the low frequency new words share form and meaning similarities with the high frequency known words. The research addresses the issue at two stages: to quantify the information concerning the number of words able to be accessed through the analysis of the word roots, and to analyze the pedagogical usefulness of the accessible words. A Comprehensive Etymological Dictionary of the English Language (Klein, 1966) was used as the source to show the possible formal and meaning connections among words. All the words in the first 2000 word list were first looked up individually and all the cognates provided under each of these words were collected and placed under each of the high frequency words if they meet the requirement that their roots share more than one letter and/or more than one phoneme with the roots of the first 2000 known words. After the data was roughly gathered, three criteria were applied to filter the data, namely, the frequency criterion, the meaning criterion and form criterion. In applying the frequency criterion, words with frequency levels lower than the tenth thousand were removed from the data. In applying the meaning criterion, hints were given to show the semantic relations between the higher frequency words and the first 2000 thousand words. The hints were then rated on the scale for measuring meaning transparency. Words that were rated at level 5 on the scale were considered inaccessible; words that were rated at levels 1, 2a, 2b, 2c, and 3a were considered easy to access. In applying the form criterion, calculations were done for each semantically accessible word to show their phonological similarity and orthographic similarity in relation to the known word. The words whose phonological or orthographical similarity scores were larger than 0.5 were considered to be phonologically or orthographically easy to access. Finally the "find" function of Microsoft Word was used to check the data by picking up any words that might have been missed in the first round of data gathering. The above procedures resulted in 2156 word families that are able to be accessed through the meaning and form relations with the first 2000 words in their root parts. Among the 2156 word families, 739 can be accessed easily and are therefore more pedagogically useful and 259 can be accessed, but with difficulty. 21 pedagogically useful form constants were selected because they can give access to more unknown lower frequency words than other form constants. In the second part of the thesis, an experiment was conducted to test the effectiveness of the word part technique in comparison with the keyword technique and self-strategy learning. The results show that with the experienced Chinese EFL learners, the keyword technique is slightly inferior to the word part technique and the self-strategy learning.</p>

Word Roots in English: Learning English Words through Form and Meaning Similarity

<p>The research first proposes a vocabulary learning technique: the word part technique, and then tests its effectiveness in aiding vocabulary learning and retention. The first part of the thesis centers around the idea that the knowledge of the first 2000 words language learners already possess may give them easier access to words of other frequency levels because the root parts of the low frequency new words share form and meaning similarities with the high frequency known words. The research addresses the issue at two stages: to quantify the information concerning the number of words able to be accessed through the analysis of the word roots, and to analyze the pedagogical usefulness of the accessible words. A Comprehensive Etymological Dictionary of the English Language (Klein, 1966) was used as the source to show the possible formal and meaning connections among words. All the words in the first 2000 word list were first looked up individually and all the cognates provided under each of these words were collected and placed under each of the high frequency words if they meet the requirement that their roots share more than one letter and/or more than one phoneme with the roots of the first 2000 known words. After the data was roughly gathered, three criteria were applied to filter the data, namely, the frequency criterion, the meaning criterion and form criterion. In applying the frequency criterion, words with frequency levels lower than the tenth thousand were removed from the data. In applying the meaning criterion, hints were given to show the semantic relations between the higher frequency words and the first 2000 thousand words. The hints were then rated on the scale for measuring meaning transparency. Words that were rated at level 5 on the scale were considered inaccessible; words that were rated at levels 1, 2a, 2b, 2c, and 3a were considered easy to access. In applying the form criterion, calculations were done for each semantically accessible word to show their phonological similarity and orthographic similarity in relation to the known word. The words whose phonological or orthographical similarity scores were larger than 0.5 were considered to be phonologically or orthographically easy to access. Finally the "find" function of Microsoft Word was used to check the data by picking up any words that might have been missed in the first round of data gathering. The above procedures resulted in 2156 word families that are able to be accessed through the meaning and form relations with the first 2000 words in their root parts. Among the 2156 word families, 739 can be accessed easily and are therefore more pedagogically useful and 259 can be accessed, but with difficulty. 21 pedagogically useful form constants were selected because they can give access to more unknown lower frequency words than other form constants. In the second part of the thesis, an experiment was conducted to test the effectiveness of the word part technique in comparison with the keyword technique and self-strategy learning. The results show that with the experienced Chinese EFL learners, the keyword technique is slightly inferior to the word part technique and the self-strategy learning.</p>