Various word-processing system have been developed to identify grammatical errors and mark learners’ essays. However, they are not specifically developed for Malaysian ESL (English as a second language) learners. A marking tool which is capable to identify errors in ESL writing for these learners is very much needed. Though there are numerous techniques adopted in grammar checking and automated...

While boosting has been extensively studied, considerably less attention has been devoted to the task of designing good weak learning algorithms. In this paper we consider the problem of designing weak learners that are especially adept to the boosting procedure and specifically the AdaBoost algorithm. First we describe conditions desirable for a weak learning algorithm. We then propose using s...

Discourse connectives are often reported to be difficult for second language learners, yet the causes of these difficulties are still not fully understood. In this paper, we test the ability of German-speaking learners to process and understand a connective with a complex form-function mapping in their L2-French, namely "en effet," a connective that does not have an exact translation equivalent...

Research on how individuals monitor their level of comprehension during study paints a picture of learners as being insensitive to many of the factors or conditions of learning that can enhance long-term retention and transfer. In previous research, however, deWinstanley and Bjork (2004) demonstrated that learners--if made sensitive to the memorial benefits of generation in the context of an in...

This study investigates the degree to which referential context information influences structural ambiguity resolution preferences in non-native sentence comprehension, using both an off-line questionnaire and an on-line self-paced reading task. The critical target sentences contained prepositional phrases (PPs) modifying either the verb phrase (VP) or the preceding noun phrase (NP), as in Bill...

We believe hypermedia environments need to be defined by their capacity to in teract effectively with the limitations and constraints of students' cognitive informat ion processing system. In this study, we contrasted four navigational platforms to test t h e hypothesis that the development of configurational knowledge increases learners ' abilities to (a) find information in a hypermedia envir...

Animation can provide learners with explicit dynamic information that is either implicit or unavailable in static graphics. However, the inclusion of temporal change in a visual display introduces additional and qualitatively different information processing demands. For learners to be successful in building high-quality mental models from animated instruction, they must extract thematically re...

In this article, we present an adaptive mobile learning system to provide learners with adaptive learning contents according to learners' abilities and learning preference by the specifications of mobile devices. We used both Bayesian inference and content adaptation technologies to construct a dynamic learner model and to create adaptive contents for learners in a Web-based mobile learning env...

Adult second language (L2) learners are faced with a particular challenge relative to child L2 learners—adults arrive at the language learning situation with a fully-formed and ingrained first language (L1) system in place. As a result, adult learners are particularly influenced by the transfer of information from L1 to L2 (e.g., MacWhinney, 2005). Although transfer assists learning in some dom...