Referring to arbitrary entities with placeholders

A speaker/writer uses a placeholder (PH) to fill in the syntactic slot of a target word when she has no immediate access to the word or prefers to avoid explicitly mentioning it for contextual reasons. In the present article, I point out a hitherto understudied usage of PHs: a speaker/writer who does not have in mind a specific target form may use a PH to refer to an arbitrary entity (e.g. person, object, action, event, proposition). I substantiate this claim by analysing a variety of original data on Japanese wh-derived PHs. Further evidence for this claim comes from a cross-linguistic survey of wh-derived PHs in Korean and demonstrative-derived PHs in Romanian and Bulgarian. I show that the arbitrary-referential function is observed in PHs in all these languages, regardless of their origins (i.e. wh word, demonstrative) and their categories (i.e. nominal, verbal).

Intelligent personal assistants and L2 pronunciation development: focus on English past -ed

This study investigates an Intelligent Personal Assistant’s (IPA) ability to assist English as a Second Language (ESL) learners in developing their phonological awareness, perception, and production of the allomorphy in regular past tense marking in English (e.g. talk[t], play[d] and add[ɪd]). The study addresses the following questions: Can the pedagogical use of IPAs improve learners’ pronunciation of -ed allomorphy in terms of phonological awareness, perception, and production? What are learners’ attitudes toward IPAs? The results suggest that participants improved in their ability to articulate their phonological awareness regarding the target form, and that their attitudes toward the technology was positive in terms of the four measures adopted to assess their experience (i.e. learnability, usability, motivation, and willingness to use). We discuss these findings and emphasize the pedagogical potential of IPAs for the development of L2 pronunciation, as well as their ability to personalize learning and consequently extend the reach of the language classroom.

The role of grammar in spelling homophonous regular verbs

Can a lack of grammatical knowledge alone be held accountable for the spelling errors that are made for homophonous verb forms and do these errors occur because spellers do not apply their grammatical knowledge? Three experiments with secondary school pupils were conducted on Dutch weak prefix verbs. The results confirmed that pupils made many spelling errors and also have great problems identifying the verb forms’ functions. Moreover, a direct correlation was revealed between a pupil’s identification of the form’s grammatical function and its spelling. These results indicate that many errors result from pupils’ inability to determine the grammatical functions of the forms. If pupils know the form’s function, they are more likely to also spell the form correctly. If they do not, they often choose the form’s homophone, especially if the homophone is more frequent than the target form. Spelling education thus needs a strong grammatical basis.

The complex relationship between conscious/unconscious learning and conscious/unconscious knowledge: The mediating effects of salience in form–meaning connections

This study investigates how implicit and explicit learning and knowledge are associated, by focusing on the salience of target form–meaning connections. The participants were engaged in incidental learning of artificial determiner systems that included grammatical rules of [± plural] (a taught rule), [± actor] (a more salient hidden rule), and [± animate] (a less salient hidden rule). They completed immediate and delayed post-tests by means of a two-alternative forced-choice task with subjective judgments of source attributions. Awareness during the learning phase was identified through analysis of thinking aloud protocols. The results did not support a one-to-one relation between either explicit learning and conscious knowledge, or implicit learning and unconscious knowledge; rather, they indicated that implicit and explicit learning are intricately linked to conscious and unconscious knowledge mediated by the salience of form–meaning connections in target items. This result also suggests the possibility of the later emergence of knowledge without any conscious awareness of it.

A Study on Direct Corrective Feedback in Improving Students' Writing Performance and Motivation at MTs YP KH Syamsuddin Ponorogo

This research is aimed to foster students’ motivation in improving writing performance by implementing direct corrective feedback. Direct error correction identifies both the error and the target form. Providing corrective feedback is an essential part of language learning because it influences students’ learning and achievement. Feedback helps both teachers and students to meet their goals in teaching and learning. Feedback and motivation are two perceptions which control the students’ English as foreign language improvement and progress in learning. This research applied a descriptive qualitative research method. Data gathered through observation, interview, questionnaire, and relevant documents. The research was conducted in the seventh C grade of MTs YP KH Syamsuddin Ponorogo. Thirty five students participated in this research by filling out a questionnaire, and interviewed to obtain more information related to their responses to the questionnaire. The finding of this research indicates that the implementation of direct corrective feedback in improving students’ writing performance and motivation in writing teaching learning process was divided into two ways: oral and written. There was also such improvement on students’ motivation. The students’ responses toward the implementation of direct corrective feedback in improving the students’ writing performance were positive because it made them feel comfort in the learning process.

Unified Approach to the Motion Design for a Snake Robot Negotiating Complicated Pipe Structures

A unified method for designing the motion of a snake robot negotiating complicated pipe structures is presented. Such robots moving inside pipes must deal with various “obstacles,” such as junctions, bends, diameter changes, shears, and blockages. To surmount these obstacles, we propose a method that enables the robot to adapt to multiple pipe structures in a unified way. This method also applies to motion that is necessary to pass between the inside and the outside of a pipe. We designed the target form of the snake robot using two helices connected by an arbitrary shape. This method can be applied to various obstacles by designing a part of the target form specifically for given obstacles. The robot negotiates obstacles under shift control by employing a rolling motion. Considering the slip between the robot and the pipe, the model expands the method to cover cases where two helices have different properties. We demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed method in various experiments.

Soft on errors? The correcting mechanism of a Skolt Sami speller

The article discusses correcting of typos due to erroneous use of the so-called soft sign in Skolt Sami, one of the most common orthographic symbols, and the most common source of typographic errors. The discussion is based upon the suggestion mechanism of an existing open source Skolt Sami speller. The discussion shows that with an improved suggestion mechanism, the speller is able to restore a single soft sign error in over 97 % of the cases, and remove a hypercorrect soft sign as first correction in 90 % of the cases. Allowing the target form to be within top-5, the correction performance is well above 99 %. Improving the suggestion mechanism also had a positive impact of its overall performance, rising the percentage of target forms within top-5 from 74.1 % to 84.7 %.

INDIRECT WRITTEN CORRECTIVE FEEDBACK (WCF) IN TEACHING WRITING

Indirect Written Corrective Feedback (WCF) is a type of feedback on linguistic errors without giving the correct target form. This type of feedback is recommended under the consideration that teachers are not editors, but facilitators who provide hints to assist students work on their own text. This research investigated the students’ affective reactions toward indirect WCF in the process of learning writing. It was also purposed to investigate its impact on students’ writing quality. The subject of the research was the first-year students of English Study Program. The method of the research was descriptive qualitative. The instruments of interview and writing assignment were deployed as the data. It was found there were positive affective reactions toward the implementation of Indirect WCF. Students thought that it was useful, helpful, motivating, corrective, and informative. Nevertheless, a few students felt that the time given was too short and demanded for more accurate and clear correction codes. It was also found that Indirect WCF helped the participant students gain better quality of their paragraph writing indicated in the significant reducing number of errors after receiving feedback. Though the most types of linguistic errors were found in the case of tenses, students were able to minimize those errors into a few.

Washback effects of multiple-choice, cloze and metalinguistic tests on EFL students writing

The washback effects of different test formats on the writing performance of students have always been of great importance. However, this area of research has not fully touched upon by researchers of second language testing. Despite the importance of the issue, there is a dearth of empirical studies to unravel the effects of different types of tests on learning. To shed some light on the current issue, the present study intends to look into the washback effects of tests on students who are learning and using some special grammatical points in writing tasks. In order to fulfil this project, we made a set question in three formats of cloze, multiple-choice and metalinguistic on a grammatical form(i.e. present perfect and present perfect continuous)to use after each session of teaching (2 sessions of training) as an activity. The researchers devised and validated three tests on the target form; each test contained 20 questions and was in different formats of cloze, multiple-choice or metalinguistic. At the end of this two-session trainings, two focused writing tasks were implemented. The results indicated that supporting teaching grammatical points with metalinguistic tests yields the highest positive washback on students writing. Finally, some practical implications were suggested.

Landmark-based homologous multi-point warping approach to 3D facial recognition using multiple datasets

Over the years, neuroscientists and psychophysicists have been asking whether data acquisition for facial analysis should be performed holistically or with local feature analysis. This has led to various advanced methods of face recognition being proposed, and especially techniques using facial landmarks. The current facial landmark methods in 3D involve a mathematically complex and time-consuming workflow involving semi-landmark sliding tasks. This paper proposes a homologous multi-point warping for 3D facial landmarking, which is verified experimentally on each of the target objects in a given dataset using 500 landmarks (16 anatomical fixed points and 484 sliding semi-landmarks). This is achieved by building a template mesh as a reference object and applying this template to each of the targets in three datasets using an artificial deformation approach. The semi-landmarks are subjected to sliding along tangents to the curves or surfaces until the bending energy between a template and a target form is minimal. The results indicate that our method can be used to investigate shape variation for multiple datasets when implemented on three databases (Stirling, FRGC and Bosphorus).