• Journal of the Institute of Electronics and Information Engineers
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• v.50 no.11
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• pp.153-161
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• 2013

Recently, there has been a tremendous increase in the availability of educational materials for foreign language learning. As part of this trend, there has been an increase in the amount of electronically mediated materials available. However, conventional educational contents developed using computer technology has provided typically one-way information, which is not the most helpful thing for users. Providing the user's convenience requires additional off-line analysis for diagnosing an individual user's learning. To improve the user's comprehension of texts written in a foreign language, we propose an intelligent learning tool based on the analysis of the user's eyeball movements, which is able to diagnose and improve foreign language reading ability by providing necessary supplementary aid just when it is needed. To determine the user's learning state, we correlate their eye movements with findings from research in cognitive psychology and neurophysiology. Based on this, the learning tool can distinguish whether users know or do not know words when they are reading foreign language sentences. If the learning tool judges a word to be unknown, it immediately provides the student with the meaning of the word by extracting it from an on-line dictionary. The proposed model provides a tool which empowers independent learning and makes access to the meanings of unknown words automatic. In this way, it can enhance a user's reading achievement as well as satisfaction with text comprehension in a foreign language.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.55 no.1
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• pp.83-105
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• 2009

Modern poetry begins as criticism of modernity and, by so doing, rejects its idea of time. Modernity emphasizes sequential, linear, and irreversible time and progress. Williams rejects the modern view of time, and attempts to substitute literature for history assuming that literature can take us into the immediacy of time. His poetry asserts the true moment of experience as an immediacy, of words co-existent with things. He suggests that modernity and its idea of time already led to World War I and could clearly lead to an actual, manmade apocalypse with continued technological progress. Already in the 1920s, Williams sensed that he was living in a world where such an end could come all true, which is why Spring and All, his greatest early achievement, begins with a parody of the modern apocalypse. Throughout the work, Williams criticizes "crude symbolism" and expresses his longing to annihilate "strained associations," for he believes that the metaphoric or symbolic association is related to order, the center, and the traditional concept of time itself. The metonymic model of Spring and All substitutes a self-reflexive, open-ended, and indeterminate structure of time for the linear and closed one. Instead of supplying an end, Williams only asserts the rebirth of time and attempts to arrive at immediacy while attacking the mediacy of traditional art. His characteristic use of fragmentation and abrupt juxtapositions disrupts the reader's generic, conceptual, syntactic, and grammatical expectations. His radical poetic experiments, such as the isolation of words and the disruption of syntax, produce a sense of immediacy and force the reader to confront the presence of the poem. His destruction of traditional forms, of the tyrannous designs of history and time, opens up rather than closes the possibility of signification, and takes us into a moment of beginning while disallowing temporal distancing. Spring and All, as a criticism of the modern idea of time, asks us to view Williams's work not as an ahistorical text but as a cultural subversion of modernity.