• Title/Summary/Keyword: Language ability

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Visual Thinking Tools in Enhancing ESL Students' Writing Ability

  • Rafik-Galea, Shameem
    • English Language & Literature Teaching
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    • v.11 no.2
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    • pp.67-89
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    • 2005
  • Writing is a difficult skill for many people, both for children and adult alike and generally most people find it difficult to write down their thoughts effectively. Numerous studies have revealed that teachers find it frustrating to teach writing and many failed to help ESL students develop their writing ability. The theoretical emphasis on process oriented writing instruction has, in general brought about positive changes in the way writing is taught and has become widely accepted in the teaching of English as a second or foreign language (ESL/EFL). Although the interpretation and implementation of the process approach varies considerably from instructor to instructor, nevertheless, the emphasis on process writing has brought about significant and beneficial changes in teachers' orientations to writing. Despite the theoretical recognition of writing as a recursive process, many ESL/EFL classrooms continue to teach writing as a linear sequence of planning, pre-writing, writing, revising and editing and has not enhanced ESL/EFL students writing ability to the desired level. There appears to be a missing link in helping students to crystallize their thoughts before writing. Studies have shown that incorporating visual thinking tools into the process approach of ESL writing can enhance students' ability to write. This paper reports the findings of an exploratory study on the effects of using visual thinking tools in enhancing ESL students writing.

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Effects on Extension of Mathematical Communication Ability by Applying of Computational-Strategy Games (계산 전략 게임 적용이 수학적 의사소통 능력 신장에 미치는 영향)

  • 박병서
    • Education of Primary School Mathematics
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    • v.3 no.2
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    • pp.133-142
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    • 1999
  • When the game is used in mathematics loaming, students take pleasure of game in themselves and communicate through interaction with other students naturally. It is important because the game is activity for intellectual growth and social development. Also students have had affirmative attitude about mathematics by Emu. The communication in mathematics loaming helps that linking informal and intuitive thinking of students with abstract and basic mathematical language and that it also helps changing from the dependent situation to teacher to the self-directive teaming of students. The purpose of this thesis is to effect on extension of mathematical communication ability to the second grade of elementary school students by applying of computational-strategy games. It has conclusion as follows. Application of computational-strategy games had effected on extension of mathematical communication ability importantly. When students have mathematical communication through computational-strategy games, at the beginning, the words which students used was long, incorrect, and unnecessary words. But at the later, students became to use clear, correct concise words as they connect their routine language with mathematical symbol. Therefore we can make sure that mathematical communication ability of the second grade students' is extended by applying of computational-strategy games.

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A Study on Correlation Analysis of EPL and Programming Ability for the Gifted Children in IT (교육용 프로그래밍 언어와 정보영재아동의 프로그래밍능력의 상관관계분석 연구)

  • Jun, Woochun
    • Journal of The Korean Association of Information Education
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    • v.16 no.3
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    • pp.353-361
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    • 2012
  • In current knowledge-based society, development and growth of IT industry is essential for a nation's competitiveness since economic power depends on IT industry in many countries. Thus, it is necessary to identify and foster gifted children in IT as early as possible. The purpose of this paper is to identify if EPL is proper language for testing programming ability of the gifted children in IT. Scratch language is selected as an EPL. For the experiment, gifted children from a gifted institution at some university are selected and their programming test scores are gathered and analyzed. Based on statistical analysis, the conclusion is that Scratch language is not proper for testing programming ability for the gifted children in IT. This result will be helpful for selection examinations, curriculum for gifted education in IT.

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Role of Self-Theories in English as a Foreign Language: A Comparison between Korean and Pakistani Students (EFL 학습자의 자기이론: 한국과 파키스탄 비교연구)

  • Aziz, Mudassar;Shin, Tae-Seob
    • Korean Journal of Comparative Education
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    • v.23 no.5
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    • pp.1-18
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    • 2013
  • Self-theories regarding general intelligence and English ability were measured from two countries (Korea and Pakistan) and their relationships with self-reported overall academic achievement and English language achievement were examined. No significant mean differences between the two countries were found regarding college students' self-theories. There were significant mean differences in overall academic achievement and English achievement between the two countries. Both the overall academic achievement and English achievement were significantly correlated with various self-theories while taking both samples together. Achievement measures were predicted by self-theories of general intelligence and English language ability. The current study highlighted the relationship between self-theories about general intelligence and English language ability and their relationship with self-reported achievement in two cultural contexts. This research also introduced new instruments to measure self-theories that can be used in studying self-theories in different domains.

Speech and language disorders in children (소아에서 말 언어장애)

  • Chung, Hee Jung
    • Clinical and Experimental Pediatrics
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    • v.51 no.9
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    • pp.922-934
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    • 2008
  • Developmental language disorder is the most common developmental disability in childhood, occurring in 5-8% of preschool children. Children learn language in early childhood, and later they use language to learn. Children with language disorders are at increased risk for difficulties with reading and written language when they enter school. These problems often persist through adolescence or adulthood. Early intervention may prevent the more serious consequences of later academic problems, including learning disabilities. A child's performance in specific speech and language areas, such as phonological ability, vocabulary comprehension, and grammatical usage, is measured objectively using the most recently standardized, norm-referenced tests for a particular age group. Observation and qualitative analysis of a child's performance supplement objective test results are essential for making a diagnosis and devising a treatment plan. Emphasis on the team approach system in the evaluation of children with speech and language impairments has been increasing. Evidence-based therapeutic interventions with short-term, long-term, and functional outcome goals should be applied, because there are many examples of controversial practices that have not been validated in large, controlled trials. Following treatment intervention, periodic follow-up monitoring by a doctor is also important. In addition, a systematized national health policy for children with speech and language disorders should be provided.

Differences in self-efficacy between block and textual language in programming education using online judge (자동평가시스템을 활용한 프로그래밍 교육에서 블록형 언어와 텍스트형 언어 간 자기효능감의 차이)

  • Chang, Won-Young;Kim, Seong-Sik
    • The Journal of Korean Association of Computer Education
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    • v.23 no.4
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    • pp.23-33
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    • 2020
  • Online judge provides compilation, execution, and immediate feedback on the source submitted by the learner, and ensures the accuracy and reliability of the evaluation, but it's difficult to select the language according to the level of the learner because most of them provide only textual language. In this study, a block language for online judge was developed and applied to high school classes, and the difference in self-efficacy between the block language and the textual language group was confirmed. It was found that Block language group have more ability expectation to overcome disgust experience than textual language group and Textual language group have significant decrease in ability expectation to start activity and to continue activity. It implies that Block language has an effect on self-efficacy for afterward programming activities, and methods of teaching, learning and evaluation should be devised in the case of textual language so that student's self-efficacy does not deteriorate at the initial and ongoing stage of activity. The results of this study are meaningful in that it provide various implications of methods for enhancing self-efficacy in high school class of programming.

A study on Korean multi-turn response generation using generative and retrieval model (생성 모델과 검색 모델을 이용한 한국어 멀티턴 응답 생성 연구)

  • Lee, Hodong;Lee, Jongmin;Seo, Jaehyung;Jang, Yoonna;Lim, Heuiseok
    • Journal of the Korea Convergence Society
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    • v.13 no.1
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    • pp.13-21
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    • 2022
  • Recent deep learning-based research shows excellent performance in most natural language processing (NLP) fields with pre-trained language models. In particular, the auto-encoder-based language model proves its excellent performance and usefulness in various fields of Korean language understanding. However, the decoder-based Korean generative model even suffers from generating simple sentences. Also, there is few detailed research and data for the field of conversation where generative models are most commonly utilized. Therefore, this paper constructs multi-turn dialogue data for a Korean generative model. In addition, we compare and analyze the performance by improving the dialogue ability of the generative model through transfer learning. In addition, we propose a method of supplementing the insufficient dialogue generation ability of the model by extracting recommended response candidates from external knowledge information through a retrival model.

Research Trends in Large Language Models and Mathematical Reasoning (초거대 언어모델과 수학추론 연구 동향)

  • O.W. Kwon;J.H. Shin;Y.A. Seo;S.J. Lim;J. Heo;K.Y. Lee
    • Electronics and Telecommunications Trends
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    • v.38 no.6
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    • pp.1-11
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    • 2023
  • Large language models seem promising for handling reasoning problems, but their underlying solving mechanisms remain unclear. Large language models will establish a new paradigm in artificial intelligence and the society as a whole. However, a major challenge of large language models is the massive resources required for training and operation. To address this issue, researchers are actively exploring compact large language models that retain the capabilities of large language models while notably reducing the model size. These research efforts are mainly focused on improving pretraining, instruction tuning, and alignment. On the other hand, chain-of-thought prompting is a technique aimed at enhancing the reasoning ability of large language models. It provides an answer through a series of intermediate reasoning steps when given a problem. By guiding the model through a multistep problem-solving process, chain-of-thought prompting may improve the model reasoning skills. Mathematical reasoning, which is a fundamental aspect of human intelligence, has played a crucial role in advancing large language models toward human-level performance. As a result, mathematical reasoning is being widely explored in the context of large language models. This type of research extends to various domains such as geometry problem solving, tabular mathematical reasoning, visual question answering, and other areas.

Annotation of a Non-native English Speech Database by Korean Speakers

  • Kim, Jong-Mi
    • Speech Sciences
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    • v.9 no.1
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    • pp.111-135
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    • 2002
  • An annotation model of a non-native speech database has been devised, wherein English is the target language and Korean is the native language. The proposed annotation model features overt transcription of predictable linguistic information in native speech by the dictionary entry and several predefined types of error specification found in native language transfer. The proposed model is, in that sense, different from other previously explored annotation models in the literature, most of which are based on native speech. The validity of the newly proposed model is revealed in its consistent annotation of 1) salient linguistic features of English, 2) contrastive linguistic features of English and Korean, 3) actual errors reported in the literature, and 4) the newly collected data in this study. The annotation method in this model adopts the widely accepted conventions, Speech Assessment Methods Phonetic Alphabet (SAMPA) and the TOnes and Break Indices (ToBI). In the proposed annotation model, SAMPA is exclusively employed for segmental transcription and ToBI for prosodic transcription. The annotation of non-native speech is used to assess speaking ability for English as Foreign Language (EFL) learners.

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Korean Children's Perception of English Language Acquisition and Cultural Adaptation in Australia

  • Park, Joo-Kyung
    • English Language & Literature Teaching
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    • v.13 no.4
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    • pp.127-152
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    • 2007
  • Recently, the number of students to choose to study in Australia has been increasing significantly. The purpose of this study is to examine how Korean primary school children perceive their own English language learning and cultural adaptation in Australia. A questionnaire survey was conducted with 34 Korean children aged 8-13 who were attending primary schools in Brisbane, Queensland. The study results show that they made diverse efforts to learn English language and culture in Australia, such as making English-speaking friends, watching TV/video/DVD, reading English books, and studying with a foreign tutor. Their English listening and writing abilities were thought to be improved most, followed by speaking, reading and cultural understanding after studying in Australia. The subjects were mostly satisfied with their study and life in Australia but they had difficulties with communicating in English, homesickness, foods, weather, insects, and discrimination. In particular, they had problems with understanding classes conducted all in English and participating in the classroom activities due to their low level of English ability and understanding of Australian classroom culture. The findings of this study have pedagogical implications for educators both in Australia and Korea.

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