We explore the use of segments learnt using Byte Pair Encoding (referred to as BPE units) as basic units for statistical machine translation between related languages and compare it with orthographic syllables, which are currently the best performing basic units for this translation task. BPE identifies the most frequent character sequences as basic units, while orthographic syllables are lingu...

This study examined the effects of aural and written prompts under two planning conditions (i.e. pre-task planning and no planning) on complexity, accuracy, and fluency of test takers' writing production. Forty learners in an English institute, who had already been classified as intermediate according to the Oxford Placement Test, were assigned to two planning conditions (i.e. no planning and p...

This paper examines the relationship between part-of-speech frequencies and text typology in the British National Corpus Sampler. Four pairwise comparisons of part-of-speech frequencies were made: written language vs. spoken language; informative writing vs. imaginative writing; conversational speech vs. ‘task-oriented’ speech; and imaginative writing vs. ‘task-oriented’ speech. The following v...

this study investigated the impact of using the technique of self-monitoring on non-academic efl learners’ composition writing. fifty female students studying english at navid english institute in shiraz, iran were chosen based on the results of a proficiency test. they were all 16-20 years old and were intermediate learners of english who were divided into two control and experimental groups a...

Abstract In Iran, most English teachers’ method of teaching writing is merely to have students do some writing exercises or simply to give them writing tests without any instruction, but writing is not an easy task for students, and teachers should be able to do more to facilitate their students’ writing. One of the ways to aid writing is dynamic assessment via graduated prompt. The graduated p...

the purpose of the present study is to develop appropriate scoring scales for each of the defined stages of the writing process, and also to determine to what extent these scoring scales can reliably and validly assess the performances of efl learners in an academic writing task. two hundred and two students’ writing samples were collected after a step-by-step process oriented essay writing ins...

We present a new cross-lingual task for SemEval concerning the translation of L1 fragments in an L2 context. The task is at the boundary of Cross-Lingual Word Sense Disambiguation and Machine Translation. It finds its application in the field of computer-assisted translation, particularly in the context of second language learning. Translating L1 fragments in an L2 context allows language learn...