Using an ANN based computational model to simulate and evaluate Chinese students’ individualized cognitive abilities which are important to their English acquisition

Experience study shows the different experiment plans and scripts in the second language learning researches will diversify the conclusions. More than that, the lacking of the simulation tool also has prevented the researchers from investigating the individualized patterns that cognitive abilities may form to a single learner. Therefore, it is very necessary to evaluate and simulate the cognitive differences that are important to English(L2) learning under a same standard scale. In this paper, we propose an ANN computational model based method to simulate individuals’ learning trajectories related to three cognitive abilities. Our experiment result shows, the ANN computational model not only can accurately reflect the participant students’ individualized differences, but also can evaluate the compound effects of three cognitive related factors under a same scale. Based on the reliable results produced by this computational model, English teachers are suggested to use this ANN computational model based method in their second language teaching activities to predict the learners’ future possible overall English competences based on a virtual base line.