English Sentences Research Articles

Analysis of Passives in English-to-Korean Machine Translation Systems’ Output*

Artificial intelligence (AI)-based tools for teaching and learning English as a foreign language have become increasingly functional, leading to the growing use of AI translators and chatbots in fields of English education and research. This study investigated the potential of English-to-Korean machine translators (MTs) as media of interactive language learning to support Korean EFL learners’ reading comprehension development. Using translation data from research articles on English passives involving NP movement, this study evaluated how well two popular MTs could translate English passive sentences into Korean. This study analyzed MTs’ output in two ways: (i) whether the product’s meaning was accurate, and (ii) what type of Korean passive the product was. First, it calculated rates of semantically accurate and grammatically appropriate translations, both actives and passives produced by the two MTs. Second, it calculated rates of three different types of Korean passives produced by MTs. Results demonstrated that currently available English-to-Korean MTs could produce semantically correct translations at high rates in the form of Korean passives. Active voice constructions also showed significant rates. These findings suggest that MTs have strong potential as tools for English reading pedagogy.

언어자료기반 학습법(DDL)을 적용한 초등학교 6학년 영어 문장 쓰기 학습 효과 연구

This study investigates the effect of the DDL (Data-Driven Learning) approach on the English sentence writing ability of 6th graders in elementary school. To this end, a total of seven English textbooks were used to build a corpus. Five teachers were then asked to conduct five lessons using a weak version of DDL in their 6-grade EFL classrooms. Students were asked to complete a pre- and post-test and a pre- and post-survey, and a selected number of students and four of the five teachers had in-depth interviews with the researcher. The results are as follows: First, DDL using the textbook corpus was found to be adequate for helping elementary students improve their sentence-writing ability. Second, DDL had a significant effect on upper, middle, and lower level groups of students. Third, the students felt that DDL was neither unfamiliar nor difficult. Fourth, teachers with little teaching experience found it easy to conduct their classes using the DDL approach. This study implies that DDL is an effective approach to teaching communicative functions and language forms in the elementary English classroom and can be useful for all levels of elementary students.

A Study of Intonation of English Sentences of College Students Whose Mother Tongue is Beijing Dialect Taking Interrogative Sentences as Examples

During the last decade, college students paid more attention to their intonation of oral English when they need to communicate with foreigners. However, very little research has been focused on the situation of learners with Beijing dialect. The aim of this study was to investigate the negative transfer of Beijing dialect on interrogative sentences in three different contexts while indicating the possible reasons and solutions to the negative transfer. The research objects of this paper were all students with Beijing accent at Capital Normal University. Comparative analysis of data, questionnaire and interview methods were used in the research. Results of the assessment showed that subjects generally consciously emphasized the pitch of the sentence focus, but their intonation fluctuated little on the whole. At the same time, they are not good at using falling and rising intonation to verify the information. Furthermore, they were more inclined to use a rising tone for different types of questions. This suggested that both learners and teachers should pay more attention to training time, language environment and psychological factors during training.

Going for -ing or -en? A Puzzle about Adjectival Participles for Learners of English

Abstract This study investigates how learners of English process adjectival participles in both attributive and predicative positions within sentences in order to identify whether difficulties associated with participles stem from learner-specific or English-specific characteristics. A Chinese-speaking group and a mixed language group participated in Study 1 that used the target sentence in English as L2 without contextual cues. A subgroup of the Chinese participants took part in Study 2 that used target sentences with contextual cues. Results showed that the two groups’ performance was different in the use of pre-nominal attributive adjectival participles after controlling for English proficiency (Study 1). Contextual cues did not facilitate Chinese learners’ performance (Study 2). The target word frequency effects disappeared when contextual cues were provided. These findings suggest that the complexities of adjectival participles reside not only in the linguistic characteristics of English, but also in the learner characteristics of L1 background and English proficiency.

Campur Kode pada Unggahan Akun Instagram @ganjar_pranowo : Kajian Sosiolingusitik

This research focuses on code mixing that occurs in uploads to the Instagram account @ganjar_pranowo. Data were obtained from Instagram social media relating to multilingual and bilingual interaction processes that occur in society. All data was obtained and presented using a descriptive qualitative approach. The research method used is descriptive qualitative, with data collection techniques using listening techniques. The method used to write data is the equivalent method with the translational equivalent technique. The data consists of uploading sentences in Indonesian, Javanese and English on the Instagram account of Ganjar Pranowo (@ganjar_pranowo). There are 11 data showing internal code mixing, consisting of 6 forms of words, 4 forms of phrases and 1 form of sentences. In internal code mixing, all data is in Javanese. There are 15 data showing external code mixing which are divided into 8 data in the form of words and 7 data in the form of phrases. External code mixing consisted of 14 data in English and only 1 data in another foreign language, namely Korean. The entire function of code mixing on the Instagram account @ganjar_pranowo is to familiarize and attract readers' attention.

Philosophical Interpretation of Lexical and Sentential Ambiguity in English-Arabic Translation

Translation debates have continued to be passionately argued. The study of the connection between philosophy and translation on the one hand and ambiguity in translation on the other hand have both been growing. The connection between philosophy and translation is unavoidable and inevitable. Notwithstanding, philosophers have not tackled the question of translation directly; translation in general has been tackled indirectly by some philosophers. Ambiguity in translation is a fertile field to investigate. Translation of some written sentences is problematic since they are translated from different contexts in culture. This paper aims to (1) study the connection between philosophy and translation on the one hand, and then (2) connect the philosophical interpretation of ambiguous sentences and their effect on the translation from English into Arabic. This paper also aims at (3) discussing the question that is hissing in the translator’s mind in order to translate an ambiguous sentence: whether to lean on syntactic or semantic dis-ambiguation. As a result, this paper hypothesizes that lexemes meaning, interpretation, and thus translation is not only sentence bound but clear cotext and context bound. Therefore, to test this hypothesis, in my research, the study selects some sentences from some research and dictionaries which are believed to be ambiguous. The examples I have selected may not cover all ambiguous English sentences, for ambiguous sentences are still turning up, however, I have tried to cover frequently used sentences. I will look at some common difficulties in the interpretation of lexical items. Then, the ambiguity of these sentences will be removed by using these sentences with the same ambiguous lexemes in clear cotext and context. After removing the ambiguity, the sentences will be translated into Arabic to show the impact of both cotext and context on translation.

Exposure to nonnative-accented speech reduces listening effort and improves social judgments of the speaker

Prior research has revealed a native-accent advantage, whereby nonnative-accented speech is more difficult to process than native-accented speech. Nonnative-accented speakers also experience more negative social judgments. In the current study, we asked three questions. First, does exposure to nonnative-accented speech increase speech intelligibility or decrease listening effort, thereby narrowing the native-accent advantage? Second, does lower intelligibility or higher listening effort contribute to listeners’ negative social judgments of speakers? Third and finally, does increased intelligibility or decreased listening effort with exposure to speech bring about more positive social judgments of speakers? To address these questions, normal-hearing adults listened to a block of English sentences with a native accent and a block with nonnative accent. We found that once participants were accustomed to the task, intelligibility was greater for nonnative-accented speech and increased similarly with exposure for both accents. However, listening effort decreased only for nonnative-accented speech, soon reaching the level of native-accented speech. In addition, lower intelligibility and higher listening effort was associated with lower ratings of speaker warmth, speaker competence, and willingness to interact with the speaker. Finally, competence ratings increased over time to a similar extent for both accents, with this relationship fully mediated by intelligibility and listening effort. These results offer insight into how listeners process and judge unfamiliar speakers.

Do structure predictions persevere to multilinguals’ other languages? Evidence from cross-linguistic structural priming in comprehension

AbstractMany cross-language sentence processing studies showed structural priming, which suggests a shared representation across languages or separate but interacting representations for each language. To investigate whether multilinguals can rely on such representations to predict structure in comprehension, we conducted two visual-world eye-tracking priming experiments with Cantonese–Mandarin-English multilinguals. Participants were instructed to read aloud prime sentences in either Cantonese, Mandarin, or English; then they heard a target sentence in Mandarin while looking at the corresponding target picture. When prime and target had different verbs, there was within-language structural priming only (Mandarin-to-Mandarin, Experiment 1). But when prime and target had translation-equivalent verbs, there was not only within-language but also between-language priming (only Cantonese-to-Mandarin, Experiment 2). These results indicate that structure prediction between languages in comprehension is partly lexically-based, so that cross-linguistic structural priming only occurs with cognate verbs.

ARTICLE SENTENCE ANALYSIS: USE OF CLAUSES AND PHRASES IN SCIENTIFIC SENTENCES

Sentence analysis in scientific articles is a literature study that can improve students' ability to think critically. Especially in articles that use English. Syntax analysis is the first step in reading writing before the reader can understand the meaning implied in an English sentence as a whole. This research is literature review research that aims to analyse sentence structure and determine the types of sentences, clauses, and phrases. By selecting the title of the article from the accredited journal Sinta, a search is carried out on each sentence and then classifying sentences and word combinations according to the character and type of sentences, clauses, and phrases.

English for Homestay Tourism: Barriers and Needs of Entrepreneurs in Rural Community of Thailand

Nowadays English language has become a medium of communication and is used as a lingua franca by native and non-native speakers including in homestay tourism. Therefore, this qualitative research investigates the barriers and needs of English for homestay entrepreneurs in a rural community, in Phetchabun province, Thailand. The samples were 15 key informants selected by purposive sampling. They are homestay entrepreneurs in Baan Saliang Haeng 3, Khao Kho District, Phetchabun province that has obtained the Thai homestay standard evaluation. Participant observation and in-depth interviews were employed for data collection and the data were analyzed by thematic analysis. The findings reveal two main issues: i) the limitations and barriers of using English for communication with international visitors and ii) Needs for English skills development for homestay entrepreneurs. The key limitations of the homestay owners are their educational background. Most of them graduated from primary and secondary school as well as they do not use English in their daily life. As a result, they lack knowledge of English vocabulary and are not able to construct English sentences. In terms of the need for English improvement, most homestay entrepreneurs need English learning materials that are in bilingual version (Thai – English) with Thai language reading and meaning such as a booklet with the contents of greetings, room explanation, room rate, room facilities, amenities explanation, and tour itinerary of the community which they can learn by themselves.

Jordanian EFL Learners’ Production of Synonyms

This paper reports on the findings of a study that explored Jordanian EFL learners’ production of synonyms. The data were elicited through a translation task which consisted of 20 Arabic sentences to measure Jordanian EFL learners’ ability to produce the correct synonym in contextualized English sentences. The subjects were asked to translate whole sentences from Arabic into English. Each sentence contains a certain Arabic word that has a specific appropriate English equivalent out of a number of semantically interrelated words that belong to the same category. These words were selected from Sheeler and Markley (1982). The findings indicate that Jordanian EFL learners face serious difficulty in dealing with synonyms on the production level. This can be attributed to some reasons, namely the transfer of training, the complexity of the foreign language, the lack of some English lexical items, the confusion of words on the ground of formal similarity, and the EFL learners' limited knowledge of English in general and of collocations in particular. Furthermore, the subjects employed a number of strategies to compensate for their lack of knowledge, such as overgeneralization, semantic approximation, literal translation, and message abandonment when they encountered a problem in rendering a target word.

Jordanian EFL Learners’ Production of Synonyms

This paper reports on the findings of a study that explored Jordanian EFL learners’ production of synonyms. The data were elicited through a translation task which consisted of 20 Arabic sentences to measure Jordanian EFL learners’ ability to produce the correct synonym in contextualized English sentences. The subjects were asked to translate whole sentences from Arabic into English. Each sentence contains a certain Arabic word that has a specific appropriate English equivalent out of a number of semantically interrelated words that belong to the same category. These words were selected from Sheeler and Markley (1982). The findings indicate that Jordanian EFL learners face serious difficulty in dealing with synonyms on the production level. This can be attributed to some reasons, namely the transfer of training, the complexity of the foreign language, the lack of some English lexical items, the confusion of words on the ground of formal similarity, and the EFL learners' limited knowledge of English in general and of collocations in particular. Furthermore, the subjects employed a number of strategies to compensate for their lack of knowledge, such as overgeneralization, semantic approximation, literal translation, and message abandonment when they encountered a problem in rendering a target word.

The Problems Encountered by Non-English Department Students in Speaking English

Speaking is one of the difficult English skills for non-English department students. This is because students must understand how to produce good and correct sentences to pronounce. To produce a sentence, they must master a lot of vocabulary and master how to pronounce it. In addition, to be able to master speaking skills, students must also have self-confidence. This research aimed to know the problems encountered by Non-English Department students in speaking English and their causes and to find out the problem-solving encountered by non-English majoring students in speaking English. The researcher used descriptive qualitative research with a questionnaire and an interview to collect the data. The results of this study indicate that almost all students find problems (linguistic and nonlinguistic) in speaking English. Linguistic problems that are often found are a lack of grammar, poor pronunciation, and the last is lack of vocabulary. The non-linguistics are anxiety, shyness & lack of confidence. The factors causing the problem of speaking English in this study were low motivation, habits & mother tongue, lack of practice & opportunity, and fear of making mistakes. To solve the problem of speaking English is to improve vocabulary and pronunciation skills. Some ways to improve it are by listening and singing English songs, watching English movies to understand English sentences, and using Google Translate to look up the meaning of difficult words and how to pronounce them. In addition, to improve their speaking skills, sometimes students also practice speaking in English with their friends or independently.

Korean EFL Learner’s Suprasegmental Features

This study delves into some aspects of suprasegmental features such as syllable structure, stress, and rhythm and compares them between NS and NNS. It is investigated in spectrograms and sound waveforms that 1. On the aspect of syllable structure in English, the onset and the coda in English syllable structure are characterized to have a maximum of 3 and 4 consonant clusters, respectively. In contrast, Korean allows only 1 single consonant in onset and coda position. This cross-linguistic difference gives rise to the insertion of the neutral vowel /ɨ/ to break up the consonant clusters in English words, in which the inserted vowel forms an independent wave chunk. 2. Refer to stress in English, it is universally recognized as every single English word or sentence consist of its own stress. On the contrary, Korean lacks stress placed at the level of the word. It follows that Korean EFL learners tend to put an approximately equal prominence on every syllable in a word and to exhibit a tendency to put a strong prominence particularly on the first syllable of a word with more than 2 syllables, which is dubbed an ‘initial prominence phenomenon’in this paper. 3. In relation to English rhythm, English is certainly a stress-timed rhythm, but Korean is a syllable-timed rhythm. The core differences between the stress-timed rhythm and the syllable-timed are on the form of ‘foot’, which is established when stressed and unstressed syllables occur in relatively regular alternating patterns in sentences, led to a phenomenon of that the number of feet depends on the timing of articulation within a whole sentence. “This paper finds significance in exhibiting suprasegmental features in visualization between NS and NNS, given that these features play a more important role than segmental ones. It can also serve a milestone for future researchers in the EFL phonetic filed.”

SUBJECTS OF PHRASES IN ENGLISH LANGUAGE

An English sentence consists of two main parts – namely, the subject and the predicate1 · The subject is a noun phrase (NP) which can be realized by a noun, a pronoun, a word or a group of words. The predicate, on the other hand, is the verb phrase of the sentence. It consists of , beside the verb- the central element in sentence, all the auxiliaries, modifiers, etc. (Zandvoort, 1972: 196; Lapalombara, 1976: 32).

Implementing associative memories by Echo State Network for the applications of natural language processing

This paper presents Echo State Network (ESN) based associative memories and their applications to English words. Among the papers describing ESN applications in general, some papers deal with natural language processing (NLP). Those NLP papers utilize an ESN’s property of temporal signal learning to translate an English sentence into its corresponding predicate logic formula. In practical NLP applications, input sentences often include misspelled or undefined words. To cope with such problems, we constructed a training algorithm to realize an ESN-based associative memory. This algorithm can be used in two ways: auto-associative one when the input and output patterns are the same in each pair of the training data, and hetero-associative one otherwise. In this paper, we firstly show the basic performance of an ESN-based auto-associative memory by applying it to two-dimensional images. We made sure that the performance is improved by averaging the result of multiple runs. Secondly, we describe the performances of ESN-based auto- and hetero-associative memories when being applied to English words. The former is to recall correct English words from incomplete spelling ones, and the latter is to chain two different English words of an input and its corresponding output. The former performance in recalling 26 incomplete words can be improved by averaging the outputs of multiple runs, and the improved success rate of correct words is around 65%. The latter performance in chaining 26 words attains the success rate of 83.4%.

The Effect of Difference in Word Order on Semantic Processing in Hindi-English Bilinguals.

The typology of word order in Hindi (Subject-Object-Verb, SOV) differs from that of English (Subject-Verb-Object, SVO). Bilinguals whose two languages have conflicting word order provide a unique opportunity to understand how word order affects language processing. Earlier behavioural and event-related brain potential (ERP) studies with Spanish-Basque bilinguals showed longer reading times and more errors in the comprehension of OSV sentences than SOV sentences in Basque language, indicating that non-canonical word orders (OSV) were difficult to process than canonical word order (SOV). This study was designed to explore how the difference in word order in Hindi and English languages affects N400 parameters in proficient Hindi-English bilinguals, using semantic congruity paradigm. Twenty-five proficient Hindi-English bilingual subjects were asked to silently read the congruent and incongruent sentences presented in one word at a time in both the languages. ERPs were recorded from midline frontal, central and parietal sites. The mean amplitude of the N400 effect at the parietal sites in Hindi-English proficient bilinguals was larger for English than for Hindi but there was no significant difference in the N400 latencies. Hindi-English bilingual subjects processed SOV and SVO sentences with equal ease as evidenced by the N400 latencies. Higher amplitude of the N400 effect with English sentences indicate that placing 'Object' as the final word makes sentences more predictable than verb as the final word. Understanding the word order difference might help to unravel the neurophysiological mechanisms of language comprehension and may offer some insights in terms of functional advantage of a particular word order in bilinguals.

The ZuCo benchmark on cross-subject reading task classification with EEG and eye-tracking data.

We present a new machine learning benchmark for reading task classification with the goal of advancing EEG and eye-tracking research at the intersection between computational language processing and cognitive neuroscience. The benchmark task consists of a cross-subject classification to distinguish between two reading paradigms: normal reading and task-specific reading. The data for the benchmark is based on the Zurich Cognitive Language Processing Corpus (ZuCo 2.0), which provides simultaneous eye-tracking and EEG signals from natural reading of English sentences. The training dataset is publicly available, and we present a newly recorded hidden testset. We provide multiple solid baseline methods for this task and discuss future improvements. We release our code and provide an easy-to-use interface to evaluate new approaches with an accompanying public leaderboard: www.zuco-benchmark.com.

Uncovering Students’ Ability in Writing Simple Sentences Using Pictures

The development of technology affects the education sector in urban and rural areas. Teachers-students in rural areas find it difficult to apply it for some reasons. Therefore, teachers must be more creative and innovative in the learning-teaching process besides using technology, such as pictures. This research describes students' ability to write simple English sentences using pictures. The type of this research is descriptive quantitative. The respondents were tenth-grade students of SMA Negeri 29 Halmahera Selatan, which consisted of 13 males and seven females. The data were collected through an English simple sentence test consisting of 4 pictures. Each student wrote five sentences in a picture. This research showed that the mean score of students' ability to write simple English sentences using pictures is 2.95, referring to the good category. This research recommends that future research investigate the effectiveness of pictures as media used in rural and urban areas' learning-teaching process.

ROUND-TRIP TRANSLATION AS A WRITING TOOL FOR ENGLISH AS A SECOND LANGUAGE

The potential of the technique known as round-trip translation to detect errors in language use has been exploited in the design of programs for automatic error detection (Hermet & Désilets, 2009; Madnani et al., 2012), but to my knowledge, no study has explored the potential of translators as a tool that learners themselves can use to correct their writing in a second language. Consequently, there is no information as to how many of the transformations introduced by round-trip translation are useful for learners, how many simply rephrase the original text, or how many actually make it worse. Hermet and Désilets (2009) report a “repair rate” of 66.4% working with prepositions in French, while Madnani et al. (2012) report 36% successful changes, 33% paraphrasing and 31% changes for the worse in 200 sentences in English. The present study found a significant improvement in the number of corrections in texts written in English by Spanish students (97%) at the cost of generating an excessive number of false positives (34%). The most reliable transformations are those affecting spelling or word morphology, which correct errors in 88.33% and 78.57% of cases, respectively. These results show the progress made in machine translation and the reliability of the round-trip translation technique for correcting errors and inform which transformations are most useful.