abstracttask-based language teaching is considered an effective way to achieve a harmony between grammar and communication. the present study investigates two different ways of teaching modal verbs: task-based versus traditional approaches. to this purpose, an oxford placement test was administered to select 40 homogeneous participants out of a larger population who took this test. the selected...

with regard to the impossibility of preparing learners for each situation that they might encounter in their life, it is more logical to teach them how to cope with unexpected challenges. helping learners ‘learn how to help themselves’ can be facilitated by means of tasks and activities in the classroom context. this paper presents some of the find- ings of a study on iranian young learners bet...

When (φn) is a sequence of positive functions in L1(R) such that the convolutions φn ? f converge in L1-norm to f for all f ∈ L1(R), then these convolutions may or may not converge almost everywhere too. There is always a subsequence (φnk ) such that at least φnk ? f converges almost everywhere to f for all f ∈ Lp(R), 1 < p < ∞. A special case of this is when the functions φn are the dilations ...

Here we extends a work of A. Couvreur on the Hamming distance of the dual of an evaluation code to its generalized Hamming weights. We prove the following result. Fix integers r ≥ 2, m > 0 and e ≥ 1. Let Z ⊂ P be a zero-dimensional scheme such that deg(Z) ≤ 3m + r − 3. If r > 2 assume that Z spans P and that the sum of the degrees of the non-reduced connected components of Z is at most 2m+ 1. W...

Native Language Identification (NLI) is the task of automatically identifying the native language (L1) of an individual based on their language production in a learned language. It is typically framed as a classification task where the set of L1s is known a priori. Two previous shared tasks on NLI have been organized where the aim was to identify the L1 of learners of English based on essays (2...

For 1 dimension reduction in l1, the method of Cauchy random projections multiplies the original data matrix A ∈ R with a random matrix R ∈ R (k ≪ min(n,D)) whose entries are i.i.d. samples of the standard Cauchy C(0, 1). Because of the impossibility results, one can not hope to recover the pairwise l1 distances in A from B = AR ∈ R, using linear estimators without incurring large errors. Howev...

Learning a second language (L2) is a complex task that often takes years before functional communicative skills are attained, and that rarely results in native-like proficiency. One of the biggest challenges for an L2 learner is acquiring the sounds and sound patterns of a new language. Beginner learners struggle with both perception and production of novel sounds, and even years of practice do...

The acquisition of a foreign phonetic contrast requires the second language (L2) learner to attend to those acoustic dimensions that are informative for the distinction and to manipulate values along those dimensions during production. The discovery of informative dimensions in L2 can be complicated by the contrasts present in the native (L1) language. A well-known example is the difficulty tha...

Given two densities f and g, we consider the problem of transporting a fraction m ∈ [0, min{‖f‖L1 , ‖g‖L1}] of the mass of f onto g minimizing a transportation cost. If the cost per unit of mass is given by |x − y|2, we will see that uniqueness of solutions holds for m ∈ [‖f ∧ g‖L1 , min{‖f‖L1 , ‖g‖L1}]. This extends the result of Caffarelli and McCann in [8], where the authors consider two den...

ABSTRACT This study examines L2 Portuguese speech produced by eight native Cantonese speakers from Macao, China. The aims of this are to investigate (1) whether the rhythm in is more source-like (more similar Cantonese) or target-like Portuguese), and (2) differs across three different tasks: a reading task, retelling an interpreting task. Seven metrics, i.e., %V, ΔC, ΔV, VarcoC, VarcoV, rPVI_C...