Earticle

The present study compares the effects of two types of instruction on text comprehension and the learning of the form, meaning, and grammar of English nouns and verbs in a text: affective input enhancement (Affective IE), which enhances the affective processing of the topic of a second language (L2) text before it is read, without focusing on the linguistic aspects of the text (n = 40); and conceptual input enhancement (Conceptual IE), which enhances the conceptual processing of content words in an L2 text before it is read (n = 43). The results showed that (1) the Affective IE group evaluated the text topic more positively than the Conceptual IE group, (2) the Affective IE group outperformed the Conceptual IE group in the free-recall task as an index of text comprehension, (3) the Conceptual IE group outperformed the Affective IE group in the learning of the meaning of nouns in the text, and (4) the Affective IE and Conceptual IE groups were equally effective in facilitating the learning of the noun forms and the form, meaning, and grammar of verbs in the text. These findings suggest that Affective IE facilitates text comprehension and L2 learning.

The low input saliency of English personal pronouns causes persistent difficulties in second language acquisition despite their highly frequent nature. The present study aims to examine how different types of input-based instruction improve the learning of English personal pronouns in young learners. Grounded on the main tenets of the formal and functional approaches, we incorporated visual enhancement (VE) and a meaning-oriented task (MT) to input-based learning. A total of 87 young Korean elementary students were administered four types of instructional treatments: input-only, input-plus-VE, input-plus-MT, and input-plus-both. Results of the pre- and the posttest indicated that the most significant improvements were found for the students who received both VE and MT. This finding suggests that the acquisition of English personal pronouns is facilitated when L2 input is provided in conjunction with both formal and functional approaches.

Motivated by different notion of task criteria in the Limited Attention Capacity Hypothesis and the Cognition Hypothesis, the purpose of this study is to investigate how planning and task complexity affect second language (L2) learners’ spoken performance. The study’s motivation is as follows: 1) the effects of online planning (as task condition) and task complexity (as task characteristics) and their interactions were examined; and 2) instead of repeated and redundant measures for complexity, accuracy, and fluency (CAF), multi-layered CAF measure indices were used to capture a careful performance. The study’s subjects were 77 undergraduates divided into four groups: no planning in simple task, no planning in complex task, online planning in simple task, and online planning in complex task. Online planning was modified from Yuan and Ellis’s (2003) and Wang’s (2009) studies, while task complexity was manipulated by [±elements] and [±reasoning]. The study employed 11 general and specific measure indices for CAF and found that no planning condition significantly enhanced overall accuracy and verb-related specific accuracy or speed and repair fluency regardless of task complexity. Meanwhile, task complexity significantly improved phrasal syntactic complexity regardless of planning. Based on these findings, the study explored two competing theories on L2 speaking.

This study investigates the impact of extensive reading (ER) program, which integrates extensive reading with in-class follow-up writing activities, on Turkish EFL learners’ L2 reading/writing and foreign language self-concept (FLSC). In this research, conducted in a Turkish university, experimental design was used and the experimental group was exposed to ER for six weeks different from the control group. Data was collected by means of L2 reading and writing tests and Foreign Language Self-concept Scale (FLSCS) (Er, 2007) given at the beginning and at the end of the intervention, and by means of focus group interviews carried out with 10 randomly chosen experimental group students. Analyses of the data showed a significant difference between control and experimental groups regarding their L2 reading and writing performance. The difference between the groups’ FLSC was found to be insignificant, though within group analyses indicated that ER affected the students’ FLSC positively. Qualitative data, interviews, supported the quantitative data and revealed that the project also improved students’ motivation and self-confidence as well as various aspects of L2 language ability and fostered their positive self images as EFL learners. The insights gained from the study provide important implications for English language teaching programmes in EFL context.

Driven by Coxhead’s question “What vocabulary do ESP learners need?”, this study aims to investigate the quality of vocabulary use by measuring lexical richness (lexical diversity, lexical sophistication and lexical density) of speech production in ESP classroom context. The data was collected from 100 first year university students while performing a speaking task. Drawing on D_tools and AntWordProfiler, we made measures of diversity and sophistication. TagAnt was applied for calculating percentages of lexical density. Furthermore, a scale-based approach was employed for technical identification. The results revealed that vocabulary produced by the students was mainly from GSL1000 word list. Lexical density of the speech was 43.72% and the lexical diversity was moderately rich with a value of D 58.8. This study suggests needs of productive vocabulary in ESP classroom contexts. The results of this study imply that ESP students need a great awareness that they are parts of a particular group. To achieve the goal of learning, they are required possession of disciplinary knowledge and skills of the area they belong.

The present study attempts to have a deeper understanding of collocation knowledge of Iranian EFL learners and to find out whether there is a significant difference in the knowledge of lexical collocations among Iranian EFL learners at four academic levels. It also attempts to examine factors which might affect their performance on collocations. A total of 115 students majoring in English language at four academic levels participated in this study. They were given an 80-item multiple-choice test of English collocations. Descriptive statistics, one-way ANOVA, and post hoc test were used to analyze the data. The results of ANOVA revealed that there was variability in the collocational knowledge within and between the four academic levels. The results of post hoc test showed that there were statically significant differences in the mean scores of the four academic levels, with the exception of sophomores and juniors. These differences are more clearly seen if the freshmen and the seniors are compared. The thorough examination of data also indicated that factors such as interlingual, intralingual, cultural, and frequency of collocations are of influence on the students’ knowledge of collocations. The findings might have immediate implications for EFL learners and teachers as well as material designers.

This study first sought to develop a survey (Teacher Critical Pedagogy, TCP) to evaluate L2 teachers’ degree of critical pedagogy. Second, it investigated the relationship between L2 teachers’ degree of critical pedagogy and reflective thinking with their pedagogical success. Third, it explored the extent to which teachers’ critical pedagogy and reflective thinking contributed to their pedagogical success. To these ends, factor analysis with the data collected from a sample of 397 Iranian EFL teachers was used through AMOS software to confirm the validity of the critical pedagogy questionnaire. Then, validated version of TCP, Kember, Leung, Jones, and Loke’s (2000) Reflective Thinking for Teachers, and Moafian and Pishghadam’s (2009) Characteristics of Successful Teachers questionnaires were administered to a sample of 53 EFL teachers and 503 EFL students in language institutes in Isfahan, Iran, to assess the teachers’ critical pedagogy and reflective thinking as well as their pedagogical success as evaluated by their students. Correlational and multiple regression analysis revealed a significant and positive relationship between the teachers’ critical pedagogy and reflective thinking with their pedagogical success. Moreover, critical pedagogy and reflective thinking predicted the teachers' pedagogical success to a considerable extent. Findings provide implications for L2 teachers and teacher educators.

This study investigated L2 English listeners’ intelligibility and comprehensibility ratings of L2 English recordings of L1 Korean speakers’ speech. Specifically, it considered which segmentals and features resulting from Korean phonotactics cause a breakdown in Korean speakers’ L2 English intelligibility and comprehensibility for Mandarin L1-background L2 English speakers. As Korean speakers use English as a lingua franca primarily with their L1 Mandarin speaking neighbours, recordings of scripted and unscripted speech of Korean university students were sent to L1 Mandarin raters in mainland China and Taiwan, who rated utterances for intelligibility and comprehensibility. Findings showed that the most frequently mistranscribed features were epenthesis (inclusion of extra vowels to separate clustered consonants), substitution of nasals for plosives between vowels and sonorant consonants, and the consonant-vowel combination [wʊ]. Findings also suggest that less problematic features, such as [əʊ], /r/, and the distinction between [ʊ] and [u], are at times aided by similar realisations by L2 listeners.

Auto-generated captions on YouTube have proven useful in helping viewers better understand the words being spoken. However, at times they fail to contain accurate captions. In these cases, they lead to confusion. The aim of this paper is to identify and analyze errors in the auto-generated captions of 20 commencement speeches on YouTube. These speeches were presented over a period of 12 years by speakers from different walks of life. The researchers selected ten male and ten female icons. Only the first 10 minutes of the speeches were utilized for this investigation. All the captioned errors were collected and analyzed. Upon completion of the analysis, it was discovered that the frequency of errors in each speech ranged between 10 and 46 cases, with an average of one error occurring about every 26 seconds. Among the different error categories, nouns record the highest number with 144 cases (31.3%). The second is verbs with 93 cases (20.2%), then prepositions with 37 cases (8.1%). Among the four subcategories, namely omission, addition, substitution, and word order, substitution recorded the highest amount of errors with 357 cases (77.6%). Furthermore, the errors were classified into two major groups. The first, involving function words, appeared in 169 cases (36.7%). The second, involving content words, appeared in 291 cases (63.3%). The results of this research suggest that a continuous development of the voice recognition software that automatically generates captions is necessary for more efficient and accurate data that will help viewers and listeners better comprehend the video contents.

This study attempts to initiate discussions on integrating the concepts of smart classroom and active learning into general English course design. It examines students’ learning outcomes after studying a general English course involving ICT integration, integrated-skills approach, and formative assessment, developed from the concepts of smart classroom and active learning. The data were collected during the 3rd academic term (January-May 2018) that consisted of students’ pre- and post-tests scores on vocabulary, listening, grammar, reading and writing. There were 983 students (77.8% female and 22.2% male) involved with various educational backgrounds and English proficiency levels. The data were examined by using paired-samples t-test, independent t-test, one-way ANOVA and analyses of students’ improvement by changes of levels. The results indicate significant differences in students’ scores in total and across skills. These results shed light on curriculum and course design with regards to the integration of ICT, integrated-skills approach, and formative assessment.

The present study examines how proficiency in the second language (L2) affects language learners’ ability to post-edit texts that are machine-translated from the learners’ native language (L1) to L2. More specifically, the study investigates how L2 proficiency level affects the degree to which Korean learners of English can discern the accuracy of L1-to-L2 machine-translated (MT) text and whether it affects the level of errors (word, phrase, clause, sentence) that are corrected in the post-editing process. Fifty-nine Korean university students’ proficiency was measured using a cloze test and a writing test. They were then given a source text (Korean) and a machine-translated text (English) and were asked to detect and correct as many errors as they can. The overall results of the study showed that L2 proficiency does have a significant effect on how language learners post-edit machine-translated output. With increasing proficiency, the number of corrections increased especially above the word-level, and significant group differences could be found in post-editing patterns of the MT text. The findings have important pedagogical implications for integrating MT activities in L2 classrooms with learners of different proficiency levels.

It has been controversial whether phonetic-fine details of the lexical items are encoded and accessed in L1 or L2 speakers’ lexicon and how the variants of the reduced word forms are recognized. To address these issues, in this study we carried out the perceptual word recognition experiment, i.e., AB identification test with English native speakers and Korean nonnative English speakers. Two types of synthesized listening stimuli were created from two types of the original word forms by shortening or lengthening the durations of the reduced vowels: words containing the reduced vowels and words without them in the first syllables. First, the results show that a wider variety of tokens of the variants of reduced word forms differing only in the durations of the reduced vowels were recognized with substantially high rates as those with the reduced vowels for English L1 speakers than for Korean L2 English speakers. These findings indicate that phonetic-fine detail information of the reduced word forms with respect to the vowel durations is represented and reconstructed in the lexicon for L1 and L2 speakers’ lexicon although their representational robustness varies depending on L1 or L2 status. Furthermore, we show that the degrees of vowel reduction exert the differential effects on the reconstruction or identification of English words according to the word-initial C(V)C types and L1 or L2 status. It also turns out that depending on the presence/absence of the reduced vowels in the words, Korean L2 English speakers are less sensitive or oversensitive to the vowel duration when they recognize the words.