• Title/Summary/Keyword: Vocabulary knowledge

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English Sounds to Japanese Ears

  • Yuichi Endo
    • Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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    • 2000.07a
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    • pp.47-58
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    • 2000
  • For the learners of English as a foreign language, oral repetition of model sentences is an e essential practice to improve their listening and speaking abilities of English. Skill training of both speech perception and production is involved in this practice. This paper reports on an observation of production e$\pi$ors in such practice made by Japanese college students in my class. The teaching material used is intended for acquainting the learners with basic English rhythm and intonation p patterns. The students were required to repeat each sentence in a series of conversations after a model reading. Although the vocabulary and expressions were rather limited, I monitored different kinds of errors in their repetition. Putting aside intonation, their difficulties are classified into five types; 1. Omission of words or morphemes, 2. Addition of unnecessary words or morphemes, 3. Replacement of words, 4. Japanization of English sounds, 5. Wrong rhythm caused by improper stress assignment. Accurate listening, especially to weakly stressed syllables and to assimilated sounds, as has often been pointed out, is the most difficult part in perception for them. Japanese sound system interferes in production of English sounds. More often than not their knowledge of grammar or the context does not work at all to guess the words they are hearing

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Development of Theory of Mind in Preschoolers Who Grow up in Two Conflicting and Unbalanced Cultures

  • Qu, Li;Shen, Pinxiu
    • Child Studies in Asia-Pacific Contexts
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    • v.3 no.2
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    • pp.123-137
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    • 2013
  • Individuals rely on Theory of Mind (ToM) to represent themselves, others, and socio-cultural norms. Distinctive Western and Eastern developmental patterns of ToM have been reported in monocultural children. Relatively little is known about bicultural children, especially those children who grow up in two conflicting and unbalanced cultures. We hypothesized that the development of ToM in these bicultural preschoolers would follow the pattern of the dominant culture. To examine this hypothesis, we recruited English-speaking Chinese Singaporean preschoolers. In Study 1, we tested 3- to 5-year-olds (N = 120) with 5 ToM tasks, including diverse desires, diverse beliefs, knowledge access, and false belief, as well as a vocabulary task. In Study 2, we tested 5-year-olds (N = 30) with a picture-choice version of these ToM tasks. Both studies supported our hypothesis by revealing that the development of ToM in these bicultural children followed the pattern of the dominant culture. Additionally, we found that 5-year-old bicultural children are still developing false belief, and their verbal ability correlated with their ToM.

Validation of the Nursing Outcomes Classification (NOC) to Nursing in Korea (간호결과 분류체계의 타당성 검증 - 지역사회 간호결과를 중심으로 -)

  • Lee, Eun-Joo
    • Research in Community and Public Health Nursing
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    • v.13 no.3
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    • pp.523-531
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    • 2002
  • Purpose: The purpose of this study was to assess the importance and sensitivity to nursing interventions of six sensitive nursing outcomes selected from the Nursing Outcomes Classification. The outcomes in this study were Self-Care: Activities of Daily Living, Self-Care: Instrumental Activities of Daily Living, Treatment Behavior: Illness or Injury, Knowledge: Health Promotion, Caregiver Performance: Direct Care, and Caregiver Physical Health. Method: Data were collected from 97 visiting nurses working in public health centers located in a province and a capital city. The Fehring method was used to estimate outcomes and indicators for content validity. Simultaneous multiple regression and stepwise regression were used to evaluate relationships between each outcome and its indicators. Results: Results confirmed the importance and nursing sensitivity of the outcomes and their indicators. Multiple regression revealed key indicators of each outcome. Self-Care: Instrumental Activity of Daily Living needed to be revised. Neither all of the indicators nor the indicators showing the highest importance and contribution ratio were selected as independent variables for the stepwise regression model. The R2 of the regression models ranged from 29 to 56% in importance by selected indicators and from 56 to 83% in contribution. Conclusion: Further research is needed for the revision of outcomes and their indicators.

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Analysis on Vocabulary Used in School Newsletters of Korean elementary Schools: Focus on the areas of Busan, Ulsan and Gyeongnam (한국 초등학교 가정통신문의 어휘 특성 연구 -부산·울산·경남 지역을 중심으로-)

  • Kang, Hyunju
    • Journal of Korean language education
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    • v.29 no.2
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    • pp.1-23
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    • 2018
  • This study aims to analyze words and phrases which are frequently used in newsletters from Korean elementary schools. In order to achieve this goal, high frequent words from school newsletters were selected and classified into content and function words, and the domains of the words were looked up. For this study 1,000 school newsletters were collected in the areas of Busan, Ulsan and Gyeongnam. In terms of parts of speech, nouns, especially common nouns, most frequently appeared in the school newsletters followed by verbs and adjectives. This result shows that for immigrant women who have basic knowledge on Korean language, it is useful to give translated words to get the message of school letters. Furthermore, school related terms such as facilities, regulations and activities of school and Chinese-based vocabularies are found in school newsletters. In case of verbs, the words which contain the meaning of requests and suggestions are used the most. Adjectives which are related to positive value and evaluation, and describing weather and season is frequently used as well.

A Study on the Report Assessment Patterns of International Undergraduate Students and Instructors (대학보고서에 대한 외국인 학부 유학생과 교수자의 평가 양상 연구)

  • Jang, Mijung;Park, Jung-eun
    • Journal of Korean language education
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    • v.29 no.3
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    • pp.293-324
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    • 2018
  • The purpose of this study was to identify differences in the report assessment patterns of international undergraduate students and instructors. Based on two sample reports, the following differences were confirmed between international students and instructors' assessments of reports. First, instructors and students showed no differences in their assessments of the well-formatted report. However, the two groups exhibited differences in their assessments of the report that was not well formatted in that students evaluated the report more highly than instructors did. Second, instructors and students exhibited notable differences in their assessments of items such as citation, logic, and expression. This may have been because students lacked knowledge on citation methods and the use of grounds for arguments based on citation methods and topics. Third, students and instructors showed differences in their areas of focus when evaluating reports. Instructors mostly focused on the main topics of each report, whereas students focused on supporting details for the main topics. Based on these findings, instructors need to emphasize the following areas in educating international undergraduate students on report writing. First, they should stress proper source citation. They should provide frequent guidance on how to accurately cite sources. Second, they should help students to first think about the overall form and content of their reports. Instructors should emphasize that having a logical overall report structure and content that is relevant to the subject is more important in general than grammar or accuracy of vocabulary.

The Effects of Corpus Use on Learning L2 Collocations of Light Verbs and Nouns

  • Yoshiho Satake
    • Asia Pacific Journal of Corpus Research
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    • v.4 no.2
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    • pp.41-55
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    • 2023
  • In data-driven learning (DDL), learners explore a corpus to understand vocabulary and grammar. Although many studies have emphasized the role of DDL in second language (L2) acquisition, L2 light verbs have been largely under-explored. To bridge this gap, this study focused on the learning outcomes of L2 light verbs among 29 intermediate-level Japanese university students. The research zeroed in on six prevalent light verbs in English: "make," "do," "take," "have," "give," and "get." Over nine weeks, the participants engaged with verb-noun collocations using worksheets that juxtaposed Japanese translations of the target collocations with their English equivalents, with the verbs omitted. With the aid of Wordbanks Online, they filled in the blanks and constructed accurate sentences. Before this activity, a 20-minute tutorial was given to the participants on how to interpret the concordance lines. The effectiveness of the DDL method was evaluated using pre-tests, immediate post-tests, and delayed post-tests. The results showed that DDL significantly improved the participants' knowledge of the target collocations of light verbs and nouns; the post-test and delayed post-test scores were significantly higher than the pre-test scores. The results showed that, overall, DDL contributed to memorizing the collocations of light verbs and nouns; however, DDL had different effects on the memorization of collocations across different light verbs. The extent of work on the worksheet is not the only factor in its retention, and observing concordance lines may promote learners' memorization of light-verb collocations.

Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages

  • Koroloff, Carolyn
    • English Language & Literature Teaching
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    • no.5
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    • pp.49-62
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    • 1999
  • Education systems throughout the world encourage their students to learn languages other than their native one. In Australia, our Education Boards provide students with the opportunity to learn European and Asian languages. French, German, Chinese and Japanese are the most popular languages studied in elementary and high schools. This choice is a reflection of Australias European heritage and its geographical position near Asia. In most non-English speaking countries, English is the foreign language most readily available to students. In Korea, the English language is actively promoted by the Education Department and, in less official ways, by companies and the public. It is impossible to be anywhere in Korea without seeing the English language alongside or intermingled with Korean. When I ask students why they are learning English, I receive answers that include the word globalization and the importance of English throughout the world. When I press further and ask why they personally are learning English, the students mention passing exams, usually high school tests or TOEIC, and the necessity of passing the latter to obtain a good job. Seldom do I ever hear anything about communication: about the desire to talk with other people in English, to read novels or poetry in English, to understand movies or pop-songs in English, to chat on the Internet in English, to search for information on the Internet in English, or to email pen-pals in English. Yet isnt communication the only valid reason for learning a language? We learn our native language to communicate with those around us. Shouldnt we set the same goal for learning a foreign language? In my opinion communication, whether it is reading and writing or speaking and listening, must be central to language learning. Learning a language to pass examinations is meaningless unless those examinations are a reliable indicator of the ability of the student to communicate. In previous eras, most communication in a foreign language was through reading novels or formal letters. This required a thorough knowledge of grammar and a large vocabulary. Todays communication is much less formal. Telephone conversations, tele-conferences, faxes and emails allow people to communicate regularly and informally. Reading materials are also less formal as popular novels and newspapers are available world-wide. Movies and popular songs have added to the range of informal communication available. Finally travel has ensured that people from different cultures will meet easily and regularly. This informal communication requires less emphasis on grammar and vocabulary and more emphasis on comprehension and confidence to speak. Placing communication central to language learning has important implications for the Education system and for teachers.

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Comparison of Cognitive Loads between Koreans and Foreigners in the Reading Process

  • Im, Jung Nam;Min, Seung Nam;Cho, Sung Moon
    • Journal of the Ergonomics Society of Korea
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    • v.35 no.4
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    • pp.293-305
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    • 2016
  • Objective: This study aims to measure cognitive load levels by analyzing the EEG of Koreans and foreigners, when they read a Korean text with care selected by level from the grammar and vocabulary aspects, and compare the cognitive load levels through quantitative values. The study results can be utilized as basic data for more scientific approach, when Korean texts or books are developed, and an evaluation method is built, when the foreigners encounter them for learning or an assignment. Background: Based on 2014, the number of the foreign students studying in Korea was 84,801, and they increase annually. Most of them are from Asian region, and they come to Korea to enter a university or a graduate school in Korea. Because those foreign students aim to learn within Universities in Korea, they receive Korean education from their preparation for study in Korea. To enter a university in Korea, they must acquire grade 4 or higher level in the Test of Proficiency in Korean (TOPIK), or they need to complete a certain educational program at each university's affiliated language institution. In such a program, the learners of the Korean language receive Korean education based on texts, except speaking domain, and the comprehension of texts can determine their academic achievements in studying after they enter their desired schools (Jeon, 2004). However, many foreigners, who finish a language course for the short-term, and need to start university study, cannot properly catch up with university classes requiring expertise with the vocabulary and grammar levels learned during the language course. Therefore, reading education, centered on a strategy to understand university textbooks regarded as top level reading texts to the foreigners, is necessary (Kim and Shin, 2015). This study carried out an experiment from a perspective that quantitative data on the readers of the main player of reading education and teaching materials need to be secured to back up the need for reading education for university study learners, and scientifically approach educational design. Namely, this study grasped the difficulty level of reading through the measurement of cognitive loads indicated in the reading activity of each text by dividing the difficulty of a teaching material (book) into eight levels, and the main player of reading into Koreans and foreigners. Method: To identify cognitive loads indicated upon reading Korean texts with care by Koreans and foreigners, this study recruited 16 participants (eight Koreans and eight foreigners). The foreigners were limited to the language course students studying the intermediate level Korean course at university-affiliated language institutions within Seoul Metropolitan Area. To identify cognitive load, as they read a text by level selected from the Korean books (difficulty: eight levels) published by King Sejong Institute (Sejonghakdang.org), the EEG sensor was attached to the frontal love (Fz) and occipital lobe (Oz). After the experiment, this study carried out a questionnaire survey to measure subjective evaluation, and identified the comprehension and difficulty on grammar and words. To find out the effects on schema that may affect text comprehension, this study controlled the Korean texts, and measured EEG and subjective satisfaction. Results: To identify brain's cognitive load, beta band was extracted. As a result, interactions (Fz: p =0.48; Oz: p =0.00) were revealed according to Koreans and foreigners, and difficulty of the text. The cognitive loads of Koreans, the readers whose mother tongue is Korean, were lower in reading Korean texts than those of the foreigners, and the foreigners' cognitive loads became higher gradually according to the difficulty of the texts. From the text four, which is intermediate level in difficulty, remarkable differences started to appear in comparison of the Koreans and foreigners in the beginner's level text. In the subjective evaluation, interactions were revealed according to the Koreans and foreigners and text difficulty (p =0.00), and satisfaction was lower, as the difficulty of the text became higher. Conclusion: When there was background knowledge in reading, namely schema was formed, the comprehension and satisfaction of the texts were higher, although higher levels of vocabulary and grammar were included in the texts than those of the readers. In the case of a text in which the difficulty of grammar was felt high in the subjective evaluation, foreigners' cognitive loads were also high, which shows the result of the loads' going up higher in proportion to the increase of difficulty. This means that the grammar factor functions as a stress factor to the foreigners' reading comprehension. Application: This study quantitatively evaluated the cognitive loads of Koreans and foreigners through EEG, based on readers and the text difficulty, when they read Korean texts. The results of this study can be used for making Korean teaching materials or Korean education content and topic selection for foreigners. If research scope is expanded to reading process using an eye-tracker, the reading education program and evaluation method for foreigners can be developed on the basis of quantitative values.

A New Approach to Automatic Keyword Generation Using Inverse Vector Space Model (키워드 자동 생성에 대한 새로운 접근법: 역 벡터공간모델을 이용한 키워드 할당 방법)

  • Cho, Won-Chin;Rho, Sang-Kyu;Yun, Ji-Young Agnes;Park, Jin-Soo
    • Asia pacific journal of information systems
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    • v.21 no.1
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    • pp.103-122
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    • 2011
  • Recently, numerous documents have been made available electronically. Internet search engines and digital libraries commonly return query results containing hundreds or even thousands of documents. In this situation, it is virtually impossible for users to examine complete documents to determine whether they might be useful for them. For this reason, some on-line documents are accompanied by a list of keywords specified by the authors in an effort to guide the users by facilitating the filtering process. In this way, a set of keywords is often considered a condensed version of the whole document and therefore plays an important role for document retrieval, Web page retrieval, document clustering, summarization, text mining, and so on. Since many academic journals ask the authors to provide a list of five or six keywords on the first page of an article, keywords are most familiar in the context of journal articles. However, many other types of documents could not benefit from the use of keywords, including Web pages, email messages, news reports, magazine articles, and business papers. Although the potential benefit is large, the implementation itself is the obstacle; manually assigning keywords to all documents is a daunting task, or even impractical in that it is extremely tedious and time-consuming requiring a certain level of domain knowledge. Therefore, it is highly desirable to automate the keyword generation process. There are mainly two approaches to achieving this aim: keyword assignment approach and keyword extraction approach. Both approaches use machine learning methods and require, for training purposes, a set of documents with keywords already attached. In the former approach, there is a given set of vocabulary, and the aim is to match them to the texts. In other words, the keywords assignment approach seeks to select the words from a controlled vocabulary that best describes a document. Although this approach is domain dependent and is not easy to transfer and expand, it can generate implicit keywords that do not appear in a document. On the other hand, in the latter approach, the aim is to extract keywords with respect to their relevance in the text without prior vocabulary. In this approach, automatic keyword generation is treated as a classification task, and keywords are commonly extracted based on supervised learning techniques. Thus, keyword extraction algorithms classify candidate keywords in a document into positive or negative examples. Several systems such as Extractor and Kea were developed using keyword extraction approach. Most indicative words in a document are selected as keywords for that document and as a result, keywords extraction is limited to terms that appear in the document. Therefore, keywords extraction cannot generate implicit keywords that are not included in a document. According to the experiment results of Turney, about 64% to 90% of keywords assigned by the authors can be found in the full text of an article. Inversely, it also means that 10% to 36% of the keywords assigned by the authors do not appear in the article, which cannot be generated through keyword extraction algorithms. Our preliminary experiment result also shows that 37% of keywords assigned by the authors are not included in the full text. This is the reason why we have decided to adopt the keyword assignment approach. In this paper, we propose a new approach for automatic keyword assignment namely IVSM(Inverse Vector Space Model). The model is based on a vector space model. which is a conventional information retrieval model that represents documents and queries by vectors in a multidimensional space. IVSM generates an appropriate keyword set for a specific document by measuring the distance between the document and the keyword sets. The keyword assignment process of IVSM is as follows: (1) calculating the vector length of each keyword set based on each keyword weight; (2) preprocessing and parsing a target document that does not have keywords; (3) calculating the vector length of the target document based on the term frequency; (4) measuring the cosine similarity between each keyword set and the target document; and (5) generating keywords that have high similarity scores. Two keyword generation systems were implemented applying IVSM: IVSM system for Web-based community service and stand-alone IVSM system. Firstly, the IVSM system is implemented in a community service for sharing knowledge and opinions on current trends such as fashion, movies, social problems, and health information. The stand-alone IVSM system is dedicated to generating keywords for academic papers, and, indeed, it has been tested through a number of academic papers including those published by the Korean Association of Shipping and Logistics, the Korea Research Academy of Distribution Information, the Korea Logistics Society, the Korea Logistics Research Association, and the Korea Port Economic Association. We measured the performance of IVSM by the number of matches between the IVSM-generated keywords and the author-assigned keywords. According to our experiment, the precisions of IVSM applied to Web-based community service and academic journals were 0.75 and 0.71, respectively. The performance of both systems is much better than that of baseline systems that generate keywords based on simple probability. Also, IVSM shows comparable performance to Extractor that is a representative system of keyword extraction approach developed by Turney. As electronic documents increase, we expect that IVSM proposed in this paper can be applied to many electronic documents in Web-based community and digital library.

The Design of Component Repository Management System for Semantic Web (시멘틱 웹 기반 컴포넌트 저장소 관리 시스템 설계)

  • Kim, Yang-Hoon;Jang, Joon-Sik;Kim, Guk-Boh
    • Journal of Korea Multimedia Society
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    • v.11 no.2
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    • pp.237-246
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    • 2008
  • According to the development of information & web technology and the amount of information increases, there have been numerous problems exposed. Although, software engineers try to overcome the limitations by using software agent and web service, there hasn't been satisfactory result in the paradigm of current software agent being a provider to the user's demand. Moreover, the latest configuration of software development is based on CBD (Component Based Development). However, to construct new component using CBD costs great deal of expenses and therefore, a new model which can acquirecomponent information on the web promptly and accurately with low expenses is required. In this paper, the repository management system which acquires and manages on the Semantic web is designed and compare them to the existing component repository management and present its analysis result. In addition, to overcome the limitations of existing component repository system; low accuracy of search result, restrictive search vocabulary and faulty information, the specific plan is presented to perform a knowledge search for the component.

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