This paper describes how our FILTWAM software artifacts for face and voice emotion recognition will be used for assessing learners' progress and providing adequate feedback in an online game-based communication skills training. This constitutes an example of in-game assessment for mainly formative purposes. During this training, learners are requested to mimic specific emotions via a webcam and...

Little research has been conducted to investigate highly advanced ESL learners’ written production of suggestions when addressing interlocutors of lower social power. The present study fills this gap by examining non-native speaking (NNS) composition instructors’ pragmatic choices of suggestions as compared to those made by their native speaking (NS) counterparts when providing written feedback...

This experimental study evaluated the possible effects of textual input- based enhancement on the acquisition of passive form on Iranian pre-intermediate EFL learners. Sixty Iranian EFL learners at the pre-intermediate level of proficiency were randomly assigned into three groups; two experimental group and one comparison group. The first experimental group received passages in which the passiv...

Previous research suggests that children learning a variety of languages acquire similar early noun vocabularies and do so by similar and universal processes. We report here results from two studies that show differences in the early noun learning of Englishand Japanesespeaking children. Experiment 1 examined the relative numbers of animal names and object names in vocabularies of English-speak...

English-speaking children are known to be delayed in their comprehension of passive sentences (Slobin, 1966; Turner & Rommetveit, 1967; Bever, 1970; Maratsos & Ambramovitch, 1975; Maratsos, Fox, Becker, & Chalkley, 1985; Gordon & Chafetz, 1990; Fox & Grodzinsky, 1998; Hirsch & Wexler, 2004a). Additionally, it has been noted that children’s level of passive comprehension is in part determined by...

Active machine learning research shows that training of classifiers can be improved when the learning algorithm itself selects training data (e.g., choosing examples for which it is uncertain). Recent work with humans documents similar improvements whereby ”active” learners who can select their own training examples are faster at learning simple classification rules than ”passive” learners who ...

The function word “le” in Chinese serves as both a sentence final particle (le1) and an aspect marker (le2). As an aspect marker indicating the completion of action, “le” has been observed to be frequently misused by learners of Chinese, among which the overgeneralization of “le” a past-tense marker is the most glaring. Based on “NTNU Chinese learners’ written corpus”, we analyzed the usage and...

Mispronunciation is still among the frailties of language learners the world over. The present study reports an all-out investigation into pronunciation training for the Persian-speaking EFL learners at the intermediate level of language proficiency. More specifically, the present study investigated (a) the underlying causes of mispronunciation at the level of segmental features, (b) the crucia...