著者

SPRING Ryan

出版者

The Japan Association for Language Education and Technology

雑誌

外国語教育メディア学会機関誌 (ISSN:21857792)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.60, pp.1-24, 2023 (Released:2023-10-18)

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Automatically calculated measures correlated with L2 productive skill can be useful in rating speaking and writing, but many can be too complicated for L2 teachers and learners to understand, some are overly topic-specific, and others exhibit too much multicollinearity to aid predictive models. Therefore, novel measures of L2 productive skills that are relatively simple and valid across topics are still required. This paper examines the use of measures based on the number of discourse markers that signal a writer is providing evidence or details for main ideas. I created an automated tool that counts these words and phrases, and then calculates several transformations, finding that counts of two discourse marker lists (SDM and IDM scores), but not transformations were predictive of L2 writing scores and TOEFL ITP® scores for L1 Japanese EFL learners across two data sets with different writing topics. Furthermore, I found that these measures could add a small amount of power to a predictive model when combined with other measures of length and complexity and that this tendency was steady across the data sets. However, the results also indicate that the two lists of discourse markers were quite different and that the creation of a new master list that combines the best elements of both would be helpful for both EFL teaching and rating in the future.

著者

Yu KANAZAWA

出版者

The Japan Association for Language Education and Technology

雑誌

外国語教育メディア学会機関誌 (ISSN:21857792)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.57, pp.1-30, 2020 (Released:2020-10-16)

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This study investigated how different modes of micro-level emotion have different impacts on foreign language (LX) memory formation in shallow/perceptual processing. Participants were instructed to orally imitate the words they heard and saw while trying to replicate the emotional tone of the presented sound. Each word corresponded to either positive (LexVal+), neutral (LexVal=), or negative (LexVal-). The valence data for each word were retrieved from the proto-ANEW-JLE (Kanazawa, 2016b; for LX) and ANEW database (Bradley & Lang, 1999; for L1). The emotional prosody of each auditory prime voice clip was either positive (PercVal+), unemotional (PercVal=), or negative (PercVal-). The test session consisted of a free recall memory test, where the numbers of correct responses (dependent variables) were calculated according to (a) PercVal and (b) LexVal (independent variables). It was revealed that (a) PercVal- had a significant facilitatory effect compared to PercVal=; whereas the facilitatory effect of PercVal+ was not statistically significant. (b) LexVal+ and LexVal- were significantly better recalled than LexVal=. Contrary to Kanazawa’s (2016b) positivity effect under the deep/semantic condition, the present results were more congruent with the negativity effect (Bąk, 2016). The results and the rationale further corroborated the Deep Positivity Hypothesis (Kanazawa, 2018; 2020a).

著者

Nobuyoshi MIYASAKO

出版者

The Japan Association for Language Education and Technology

雑誌

外国語教育メディア学会機関誌 (ISSN:21857792)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.45, pp.15-34, 2008 (Released:2017-07-28)

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This paper empirically examines the validity of the oral reading hypothesis (Miyasako, 2007): oral reading practice improves reading comprehension of Japanese learners of English. Following the review of our oral reading model, four assumed functions of oral reading practice and the hypothesis, two studies are reported that mainly investigated into the effect of oral reading practice on reading comprehension of Japanese senior high school students. The first within-group study shows that students with lower reading proficiency would improve their reading comprehension through oral reading practice. The second between-groups study shows that English instruction focused on oral reading would be more effective in the improvement than regular English instruction, supporting the first finding. Based on the discussion of the findings it is revealed that the hypothesis was partially supported. Also revealed is future research that should be conducted with a view to fully examining the validity of the hypothesis.

著者

Akiyo HIRAI Yusuke KONDO Ryoko FUJITA

出版者

The Japan Association for Language Education and Technology

雑誌

外国語教育メディア学会機関誌 (ISSN:21857792)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.58, pp.17-41, 2021 (Released:2021-08-18)

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This study examines the accuracy of an automated speech scoring system. The system graded English language learners’ retelling performances according to five features, and its scores were compared to those given by both non-native and native English-speaking (NNES and NES) raters. The results show that, of the five features, words per second was the most consistent predictor of both NNES and NES evaluations. However, the NNES rater tended to pay more attention to exact word similarities between the speech utterances and the original text, while the NES raters focused more on similarities of meaning and gave credit to rephrased expressions. Additionally, the correspondence between the automated scores and those given by human raters was moderate (exact agreement = 48% to 65%; rs = .48 to .52), though less than that between the NNES and NES scores (rs = .70). These results indicate that the automated scoring system for retelling performances may be applicable to low-stakes tests if the speech transcription of learners’ utterances is obtained.

著者

Yasuhiko Sugawara

出版者

The Japan Association for Language Education and Technology

雑誌

Language Laboratory (ISSN:04587332)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.36, pp.33-50, 1999 (Released:2017-07-28)

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Dictation is widely used as a teaching technique in listening comprehension classes as well as a testing device in many experiments. Although the positive effect of this technique has been reported, specific explanation about its effect is yet seen: How should it be used? ; For what level is it effective? In order to have a clearer idea about the effect of this long used teaching technique, the author of this article carried out an experiment using Japanese university students: The subjects were divided into two groups; dictation and control groups. They listened to two types of texts; elementary and intermediate levels. Each text was played three times; without any pause for the first and the third playings, and with 10 second pause after each sentence for the second. After the third playing, they were asked to write down what they thought they had understood from the text in their first language. The results were that the control group performed significantly better than the dictation group for the elementary text (t=2.67, p<0.01), but for the intermediate text, no significant differences were found between the groups (t=0.72, n.s.). Regarding the relation between the dictation and recall test scores, a statistically significant correlation was found only for the difficult text (r=0.7433, p<0.01), but not for the easy text in the dictation group although all the test scores correlated with each other in the control group. This article will discuss why such results were obtained and will reconsider whether dictation is a proper teaching technique to promote learner's listening comprehension.