This study presents a contrastive analysis of gerundial and infinitival complementation produced by Spanish and German ESL learners and English native speakers. An analysis of more than 1,100 attestations of the target constructions obtained from the International Corpus of Learner English reveals that (i) advanced learners’ construction choices are not necessarily ungrammatical, yet often non-...

Reading ability of an individual is believed to be one of the major sections in language competency. From this perspective, determination of topical writings for second language learners is considered tough exam for language instructor. This mixed i.e. qualitative and quantitative research study aims to address the innovative processes in computerassisted language learning through surveying the...

This study provides details on the motivational factors for using blogs as an essential tool to promote students’ writing skills in ESL classrooms. The study aims to discuss how using blogs may be integrated into classroom activities to promote students’ writing skills as well as polishing their skills. It would also illustrate the features offered in blogs as well as the motivational essence t...

This case study explored how the involvement of two ESL instructors in critical literacy research, including master’s thesis, made them experience different challenges, ideological conflicts and successes. One of them was teaching ESL in secondary classes when she carried out her thesis about critical literacy. She also cooperated with the researcher in a critical literacy study after she had f...

Adult ESL programs in the Australian context are heavily influenced by neo-liberal notions of functional literacy and numeracy. This paper argues that such notions, designed to enable the learner to function within the workplace or community can fail to acknowledge the complexity of ESL program participation for adult learners. This paper reports on a project which explored such complexity. It ...

In this work, we model the writing revision process of English as a Second Language (ESL) students with syntax-driven machine translation methods. We compare two approaches: tree-to-string transformations (Yamada and Knight, 2001) and tree-to-tree transformations (Smith and Eisner, 2006). Results suggest that while the tree-to-tree model provides a greater coverage, the tree-tostring approach o...

An experiment is conducted to investigate rhythm in the ESL production by native Mandarin speakers. Rhythm is characterized not only by the traditional acoustic rhythmic measures of duration, but pitch-based analysis is also used, which include minimum and maximum F0s, pitch range, number of pitch rises and pitch slope. The results show that the ESL production has not met the native-speaking ta...

In order to reuse a register transfer level (RTL)-based IP block, it takes another architectural exploration in which the RTL will be put, and it also takes virtual platforms to develop the driver and applications software. Due to the increasing demands of new technology, the hardware and software complexity of organizing embedded systems is growing rapidly. Accordingly, the traditional design ...

This paper presents a pilot study of the use of phrasal Statistical Machine Translation (SMT) techniques to identify and correct writing errors made by learners of English as a Second Language (ESL). Using examples of mass noun errors found in the Chinese Learner Error Corpus (CLEC) to guide creation of an engineered training set, we show that application of the SMT paradigm can capture errors ...

Current approaches to language pedagogy recognize the fact that ESL learners need explicit help to improve the grammatical accuracy of their writing. This research investigates the utility of an online resource intended to improve advanced-level ESL learners’ writing by increasing their grammatical awareness and ability to correct the grammatical errors in their own writing. This classroom-base...