ERIC Number: EJ1156604
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2014
Pages: 12
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-1939-1382
EISSN: N/A
Available Date: N/A
An Automatic Reference Aid for Improving EFL Learners' Formulaic Expressions in Productive Language Use
Chen, Mei-Hua; Huang, Chung-Chi; Huang, Shih-Ting; Chang, Jason S.; Liou, Hsien-Chin
IEEE Transactions on Learning Technologies, v7 n1 p57-68 Jan-Mar 2014
Formulaic language is important to language acquisition; however, English language learners are often reported to have problems with formulaic expressions. Several lists of formulaic sequences have been proposed, mainly for developing teaching and testing materials. However, their limited numbers and insufficient usage information seem unable to benefit formulaic language use. To address these issues we have developed GRASP, a reference aid for formulaic expressions, to promote learners' productive competence. Users are allowed multi-word inputs to target their desired phrases or collocations. Utilizing natural language processing techniques, our system categorizes and displays the structures and sequences in a hierarchical way. The corresponding example sentences are also provided. The formulaic structures serve as a quick access index. The formulaic sequences and corpus examples illustrate the real world language use. Importantly, automatic summarization from language data lends support to the idea of data-driven learning. A single-group pre-posttest design was adopted to assess the effectiveness of GRASP on 150 Chinese-speaking college freshmen. The results indicated that our reference aid made a substantial contribution to students' performance on formulaic expression use in a sentence completion task, compared with the existing tools. Notably, the less proficient students showed marked improvement.
Descriptors: Brain Hemisphere Functions, Chinese, College Freshmen, Language Usage, Phrase Structure, Linguistic Input, Language Processing, Diagnostic Tests, Computational Linguistics, English (Second Language), Second Language Learning, Pretests Posttests, Classification, Instructional Effectiveness, Language Tests, Second Language Instruction, Teaching Methods, Computer Assisted Instruction, Language Patterns, Foreign Countries, Control Groups, Experimental Groups, Comparative Analysis
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. 445 Hoes Lane, Piscataway, NJ 08854. Tel: 732-981-0060; Web site: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/RecentIssue.jsp?punumber=4620076
Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Research
Education Level: Higher Education
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Identifiers - Location: Taiwan
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A
Author Affiliations: N/A