Vocabulary Usage Research Articles

Ubiquitous Access to Digital Cultural Heritage

The digitization initiatives in the past decades have led to a tremendous increase in digitized objects in the cultural heritage domain. Although digitally available, these objects are often not easily accessible for interested users because of the distributed allocation of the content in different repositories and the variety in data structure and standards. When users search for cultural content, they first need to identify the specific repository and then need to know how to search within this platform (e.g., usage of specific vocabulary). The goal of the EEXCESS project is to design and implement an infrastructure that enables ubiquitous access to digital cultural heritage content. Cultural content should be made available in the channels that users habitually visit and be tailored to their current context without the need to manually search multiple portals or content repositories. To realize this goal, open-source software components and services have been developed that can either be used as an integrated infrastructure or as modular components suitable to be integrated in other products and services. The EEXCESS modules and components comprise (i) Web-based context detection, (ii) information retrieval-based, federated content aggregation, (iii) metadata definition and mapping, and (iv) a component responsible for privacy preservation. Various applications have been realized based on these components that bring cultural content to the user in content consumption and content creation scenarios. For example, content consumption is realized by a browser extension generating automatic search queries from the current page context and the focus paragraph and presenting related results aggregated from different data providers. A Google Docs add-on allows retrieval of relevant content aggregated from multiple data providers while collaboratively writing a document. These relevant resources then can be included in the current document either as citation, an image, or a link (with preview) without having to leave disrupt the current writing task for an explicit search in various content providers’ portals.

Quality of Linked Bibliographic Data: The Models, Vocabularies, and Links of Data Sets Published by Four National Libraries

ABSTRACTLittle effort has been devoted to the systematic examination of published Linked Data in the library community. This article examines the quality of linked bibliographic data published by the national libraries of Spain, France, the United Kingdom, and Germany. The examination is mainly based on a statistical study of the vocabulary usage and interlinking practices in the published data sets. The study finds that the national libraries successfully adapt established Linked Data principles, but issues at the data level can limit the fitness of use. In addition, the study reveals that these four libraries have chosen widely different solutions to all the aspects examined.

Processes of Vocabulary Semantic Transformation in Ukrainian Media Space

The article deals with entry and active use of branch vocabulary and its semantic rethinking in modern information space (press, internet, television, author blogs, etc.). The spectrum usage of special vocabulary in contemporary periodicals is wide enough. There are a lot of well-known terms that journalists, TV presenters and bloggers like to use: аеропорт, термінал, літак etc., and brunch terms, that contain military segment полігон, блокада, міна, etc. A separate group in the media language consists of occasionalisms, which create pointedly and expressive characteristics of events, phenomena, realities, such as літакопад, пасажирство, майданбайтер. There are a lot of terms from different disciplines in media language, which are used with various purposes – description of the events that take place in modern society, promotion of science, technology and inventions. There is reconsideration of vocabulary while atypical for terminological functioning, the term or phrase turns into the category of sustainable phrases and loses its original meaning. Such creations are often used with fully or partially changed meaning. Original phrase semantic is lost and new value often expressive appears due to the unusual context usage and unusual interaction between the components. There is a semantic shift, which makes its new meaning.

Statistical and Qualitative Analyses of Students� Answers to a Constructed Response Test of Science Inquiry Knowledge

Objective: We report on a comparative study of the language used by middle school students in their answers to a constructed response test of science inquiry knowledge. Background: Text analyses using statistical models have been conducted across a number of disciplines to identify topics in a journal, to extract topics in Twitter messages, and to investigate political preferences. In education, relatively few studies have analyzed the text of students’ written answers to investigate topics underlying the answers. Methodology: Two types of linguistic analysis were compared to investigate their utility in understanding students’ learning of scientific investigation practices. A statistical method, latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA), was used to extract topics from the texts of student responses. In the LDA model, topics are viewed as multinomial distributions over the vocabulary of documents. These topics were examined for content and used to characterize student responses on the constructed response items. The change from pre-test to post-test in proportions of use of each of the topics was related to students’ learning. Next, a qualitative method, systemic functional linguistic (SFL) analysis, was used to analyze the text of student responses on the same test of science inquiry knowledge. Student assessments were analyzed for two linguistic features that are important for convincing scientific communication: technical vocabulary usage and high lexical density. In this way, we investigated whether human judgement regarding the changes observed from texts based on the SFL framework agreed with the inference regarding the changes observed from the texts through LDA. Research questions: Two research questions were investigated in this study: (1) What do the LDA and SFL analyses tell us about students’ answers? (2) What are the similarities and differences of the two analyses? Data: The data for this study were taken from an NSF-funded host study on teaching science inquiry skills to middle school students who were a mix of both native English speakers and English-language learners. The primary objective was to enable participants to learn to take ownership of scientific language through the use of language-rich science investigation practices. The LDA analysis used a sample of 252 students’ pre-and post-assessments. The SFL analysis used a second sample of 90 students’ pre- and post-assessments. Results: In the LDA analysis, three topics were detected in student responses: “preponderance of everyday language (Topic 1),” “preponderance of general academic language (Topic 2),” and “preponderance of discipline-specific language (Topic 3).” Students’ use of topics changed from pre-test to post-test. Students on the post-test tended to have higher proportions of Topic 3 than students on the pre-test. In the SFL analysis, students tended to use more technical vocabulary and have higher lexical density in their written responses on the post-test than on the pre-test. Discussion: Results from the LDA and SFL analyses suggest that students responded using more discipline-specific language on the post-test than on the pre-test. In addition, the results of the two linguistic features from the SFL analysis, technical vocabulary usage and lexical density, were compared with the results from the LDA analysis. • Conclusion: Results of the LDA and SFL analyses were consistent with each other and clearly showed that students improved in their ability to use the discipline-specific and academic terminology of the language of scientific communication.

Text-based writing of low-skilled postsecondary students: relation to comprehension, self-efficacy and teacher judgments

Summarization and persuasive writing are important in postsecondary education and often require the use of source text. However, students entering college with low literacy skills often find this type of writing difficult. The present study compared predictors of performance on text-based summarization and persuasive writing in a sample of low-skilled adult students enrolled in college developmental education courses. The predictors were general reading and writing ability, self-efficacy, and teacher judgments. Both genre-specific and general dependent variables were used. A series of hierarchical regressions modeling participants’ writing skills found that writing ability and self-efficacy were predictive of the proportion of functional elements in the persuasive essays, reading ability predicted the proportion of main ideas from source text in the summaries, and teacher judgments were predictive of vocabulary usage. General reading and writing skills predicted written summarization and persuasive writing differently; the data showed relationships between general reading comprehension and text-based summarization on one hand, and between general writing skills and persuasive essay writing on the other.

Recognition about the Terms ‘Curing’ and ‘Healing’ to Establish Standard of ‘Agro-healing’ Terminology

This study was conducted to understand the public recognition about the concepts and literary definition ‘curing, healing’ as a reporter for basic research to be able to use the meaning of the terms and terminology related to ‘agro-healing’. The public was aware that ‘curing’ and ‘healing’ are different, ‘healing’ is natural compared to ‘curing’, ‘do’ is for ‘curing’, ‘become’ is for ‘healing’. This is interpreted as ‘curing’ is active, ‘healing’ is ‘passive’ and natural processes manually. And also, ‘healing’ is required for those who do not have a problem and was recognized as priority access to psychological and social purposes. ‘Healing’ has the means to cure the sick and disease, and the target of ‘sick, disease’ include abstract and mental. It equals to literary definition. Based on these results, in order to promote the ‘agro-healing’ in Korea, it will have to go to find the direction focused on the psychological and social purpose to highlight the differences between the results obtained with the medical approach. This study looked at with meaning and usage of english vocabulary. The area which is discussed as ‘agro-healing’ in Korea is expressed as green care’, ‘care farming’, ‘green care farming’, ‘social farming’, etc. in Europe. There are presented translation of the term differently for each scholar, Rural Development Administration has proposed as ‘agro-healing’ in final. How to use the english vocabulary may not be considered, but to develop the ‘agro-healing’ as science, brand name and industry internationally, which english brand name will be used should also be important. When we saw the meaning of many english vocabulary, including usage and discussion, the word ‘healing’ which means the healing in humans is considered the best goal-oriented and well known term that reflects the current social trends. when combined ‘agri’ which means the ‘land’ comes from the Latin word as a expression that encompasses rural resources with ‘healing’, ‘agro-healing’, it could be used as english name which has comprehensive meaning that is healing and rural resource utilization through agriculture. Keywords: agriculture, cure, heal, psychological goal, social purpose

Seamlessly learning Chinese: contextual meaning making and vocabulary growth in a seamless Chinese as a second language learning environment

Second language learners are typically hampered by the lack of a natural environment to use the target language for authentic communication purpose (as a means for ‘learning by applying’). Thus, we propose MyCLOUD, a mobile-assisted seamless language learning approach that aims to nurture a second language social network that bridges formal classroom learning and informal use of the language. The research context that we have applied MyCLOUD to is Chinese as a second language learning. In this paper, we focus on a corpus-based analysis of 1043 social media items to determine the patterns of the students’ vocabulary usage. By participating in activities over a year, the students gradually developed their propensity to proactively and spontaneously make meaning through interacting with their living spaces. This resulted in the retrieval of a greater diversity of the learnt vocabulary and the application of the language, particularly the use of significantly more “less frequent words” in the informal physical contexts, as compared to those from the formal or online contexts. While such findings affirm the notions of situated learning, authentic learning and contextualised language learning, we stretch the theoretical explication by connecting it with the students’ intentionality in learning, with the “joint mediation” of the contextual affordances (the sources of inspiration for meaning making), social media network (providing students the sense of “communication with a purpose”) and their handhelds (the tool for artefact creation and a reminder of their involvements in MyCLOUD) to sustain their activity level and therefore the cumulative development of their linguistic competencies.

ICT and the Teaching of Reading Comprehension in English as a Second Language in Secondary Schools: Problems and Prospects

This study is aimed at identifying both prospects and problems of using Information and Communication Technology (ICT) in teaching reading comprehension in English as Second Language. To achieve this aim, a total of 25 secondary school English teachers were interviewed through the use of questionnaire. The teachers were purposively and pragmatically selected from 5 private schools and 4 public schools in the Abakaliki metropolis of Ebonyi State of Nigeriato ensure that both private and public schools were represented in the sample. The results of descriptive statistical analyses revealed that the most important prospects of using ICT in teaching reading comprehension included: the obvious improvement in vocabulary building and usage through the use of online dictionary; as well as the excitement about reading comprehension lessons often expressed by the students, which facilitated students’ learning process and promotion of meaningful learning among others. However, there were problems that were very prevalent with the use of ICT in the classrooms. These were: difficulty in classroom control, distractions caused by irrelevant websites, poor maintenance, and lack of infrastructure. The findings of the study are expected to provide the teachers and policy makers with a better and more accurate picture of problems and prospects of integrating ICT in the teaching of reading comprehension in English as a Second Language classrooms. Keywords: Information and communication technology, Reading comprehension, Problems, Prospect, English as a second language

A STUDY OF ENGLISH VOCABULARY USED IN ONLINE LAO FOOD RECIPES

The purpose of this study is to analyze English vocabulary usage in online Lao recipes from a cooking website. The aim of this study is to analyze frequency of eight categories of parts of speech; noun, pronoun, adjective, verb, adverb, preposition, conjunction and determiner. This study is a survey research. The data collection is from 21 Lao recipes selected for analysis. The researcher maintained the use of data analysis by apparently using the frequency and percentage of various types of part of speech as a tool to use for teaching English language most effectively. According to the aims consisting of types of parts of speech divided into eight categories from an online Lao food recipe site entitled: “Lao recipe from a cooking website” was used for summa -rizing the usage frequency of parts of speech from 21 Lao recipes. In the final conclusion, that was taken from the result it was found that “Noun” is the highest frequency part of speech that was frequently used in recipe writing with a count of 1390 words that is a frequency percentage of 42.78%. That is twice the usage frequency of verb which is ranked second amongst the eight parts of speech. The analysis accounting of “Verb” found that there was a total verb word count of 594 words or 18.28%. In contrast, “Determiner” is the part of speech that was the least frequently used in selected recipes with the total work count of 46 words that is a frequency of 1.44%.

A Study on Chinese EFL Learners’ Vocabulary Usage in Writing

Vocabulary acquisition is one of the hottest research fields in English learning, which has aroused researchers’ great attention in recent years. However, their focus is on vocabulary size, vocabulary learning strategies and receptive lexical ability, seldom to productive lexical ability. Writing is an important productive ability for EFL learners, and a myriad of writing researches show that inappropriate vocabulary use leads to inferior writing quality. Therefore, research on learners’ vocabulary proficiency, especially their vocabulary in English writing is quite profound. 66 subjects from a comprehensive university participating in this study, finished one composition for analyzing their vocabulary usage, i.e. lexical richness which includes lexical sophistication and lexical variation. All the data and writing papers were analyzed with RANGE and SPSS 17.0. The findings of the present study demonstrated that the subjects relied more on the first 1000 word level to express their meanings in productive tasks and the lexical sophistication and lexical variation are not high. Subjects with different writing ability have differences in vocabulary usage, but the two groups only have significant difference in lexical variation and not in lexical sophistication. The present study enriches the research on vocabulary acquisition in SLA and provides helpful implications for vocabulary teaching and learning to improve learners’ vocabulary productive ability.

Literature in English Language Teaching

Language as a means of communicatiın has been learned and taught for centuries.For every human the learning process starts unconsciously with learning their mother tongue and later it goes on systematically and consciously at school.However,in order to carry on commercial or social relations among different communities people have to learn two or even more languages. Therefore teaching of foreign languages has been an object of inerest to societies for ages. Many researchers belive that literature is useful in English language teaching.Value of literature as a useful source in language teaching is strongly defended by these researchers. Literature has a number of benefits which include but are not limited to availability of unique material, stimulation of reader's development and contribution to reader's vocabulary and cultural enrichment. Along with the abovementioned benefits diversity, interest, and vagueness, and universality, could be named as other advantages. This study reveals that literature increases all language skills since it extends linguistic knowledge through giving evidence of extensive and subtle vocabulary usage. Furthermore, it gives students the opportunity to strengthen language skills as it often enables oral discussions and exchange of opinions.

Did C. S. Lewis write The Dark Tower?: An Examination of the Small-Sample Properties of the Thisted-Efron Tests of Authorship

The Dark Tower is a fragment of a science fiction novel, attributed to C.S. Lewis and published posthumously. Shortly after its publication controversy arose, questioning the work’s provenance and authenticity. This controversy still continues. We apply and extend procedures developed by Thisted and Efron (1987) to investigate whether word usage in The Dark Tower is similar to that in Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra, two worksof the same genre and period known to be by Lewis. We further examine the validity and limitations of these procedures in the case at hand. Our results show vocabulary usage in The Dark Tower differs from that predicted by the baseline Lewis works.

Culturomics as a data playground for tests of selection: Mathematical approaches to detecting selection in word use

In biological evolution traits may rise and fall in frequency due to genetic drift, where variant frequencies change by chance, or by selection where advantageous variants will rise in frequency. The neutral model of evolution, first developed by Kimura in the 1960s, has become the standard against which selection is detected. While the balance between these two important forces – drift and selection – has been well established in biology there are other domains where the contribution of these processes is still coming together. Although the idea of natural selection has been applied to the cultural domain since the time of Darwin, it has proven more challenging to positively identify cultural traits under selection both because of a lack of established tests for selection and a lack of large cultural data sets. However, in recent years with the accumulation of large cultural data sets many cultural features from pre-history pottery to modern baby names have been shown to evolve according to the neutral theory. But there is accumulating empirical evidence from cultural processes suggesting that the neutral theory alone cannot account for all features of the data. As such, there has been a renewed interest in determining whether there is selection amidst drift. Here we analyze a subset English word frequencies, and determine whether frequency change reveals processes of selection.Inspired by the Moran and Wright–Fisher models in population genetics, we developed a neutral model of word frequency variation to assess when linguistic data appears to depart from neutral evolution. As such, our model represents a possible “test for selection” in the linguistic domain. We explore how the distribution of word use has changed for sets of words in English for more than 100 years (1901–2008) as expressed in vocabulary usage in published books, made available by Google Ngram. When comparing empirical word frequency changes to our neutral model we find pervasive and systematic departures from neutrality.

ТРАНСФОРМАЦІЇ БУРЛЕСКНОГО СВІТОВІДЧУТТЯ У ГУМОРЕСКАХ ПАВЛА ГЛАЗОВОГО

The article deals with the transformation of burlesque attitude in Pavlo Glazovyi’s works. The purpose of this article is to analyze characteristic features of Pavlo Glasovyi’s burlesque style. Attention is paid in the study to all literary levels of texts. It is found that his burlesque style was associated with metamorphosis of «kotlyarevschyna» in the twentieth century.Textual study of humoresques from «Smiholohiya» showed that the author learned burlesque tradition on two levels. On the one hand, Pavlo Glasovyi assimilate burlesque at the level of language elements. The detailed analysis of spoken rough and obscene vocabulary, slang, doublespeak (surzhyk), phraseology with thickened connotation, coarsened nomination has been presented in the article. This paper estimate how the usage of rude and unprintable vocabulary allows author to create a colorful description of the satirical characters, to demonstrate the ideological conflict between them.On the other hand, Pavlo Glasovyi assimilate burlesque as a part of Ukrainian worldview. This aspect is presented in the form of text parodying prayers, funeral laments, desecration of images of the clergy and themes of death etc.

Characteristics of Second Graders' Mathematical Writing

This study compared the characteristics of second graders' mathematical writing between an intervention and comparison group. Two six‐week Project M2 units were implemented with students in the intervention group. The units position students to communicate in ways similar to mathematicians, including engaging in verbal discourse where they themselves make sense of the mathematics through discussion and debate, writing about their reasoning on an ongoing basis, and utilizing mathematical vocabulary while communicating in any medium. Students in the comparison group learned from the regular school curriculum. Students in both the intervention and comparison groups conveyed high and low levels of content knowledge as indicated in archived data from an open‐response end‐of‐the‐year assessment. A multivariate analysis of variance indicated several differences favoring the intervention group. Both the high‐ and low‐level intervention subgroups outperformed the comparison group in their ability to (a) provide reasoning, (b) attempt to use formal mathematical vocabulary, and (c) correctly use formal mathematical vocabulary in their writing. The low‐level intervention subgroup also outperformed the respective comparison subgroup in their use of (a) complete sentences and (b) linking words. There were no differences between groups in their attempt at writing and attempts at and usage of informal mathematical vocabulary.

Flushing in anger, blushing in shame

This paper comprises a study of the somatic vocabulary associated with particular emotions (especially anger, shame and love) as they appear in Old Norse texts. Through a detailed analysis of the occurrences of these emotion expressions in different textual genres and periods, we investigate the way in which certain physiological manifestations were linked to a specific emotion in a certain type of text and period, and how certain changes in the usage of vocabulary came into being. We conclude that changes in the conceptualization of emotions in Old Norse written texts were mediated by new metaphors and metonymies imported into medieval Icelandic culture in the form of translated texts, both religious and secular.

THE ROLE OF AGE OF ACQUISITION IN LATE SECOND LANGUAGE ORAL PROFICIENCY ATTAINMENT

The current project examined whether and to what degree age of acquisition (AOA), defined as the first intensive exposure to a second language (L2) environment, can be predictive of the end state of postpubertal L2 oral proficiency attainment. Data were collected from 88 experienced Japanese learners of English and two groups of 20 baseline speakers (inexperienced Japanese speakers and native English speakers). The global quality of their spontaneous speech production was first judged by 10 native English-speaking raters based on accentedness (linguistic nativelikeness) and comprehensibility (ease of understanding) and was then submitted to segmental, prosodic, temporal, lexical, and grammatical analyses. According to the results, AOA was negatively correlated with the accentedness and comprehensibility components of L2 speech production, owing to relatively strong age effects on segmental and prosodic attainment. Yet significant age effects were not observed in the case of fluency and lexicogrammar attainment. The results suggest that AOA plays a key role in determining the extent to which learners can attain advanced-level L2 oral abilities via improving the phonological domain of language (e.g., correct consonant and vowel pronunciation and adequate and varied prosody) and that the temporal and lexicogrammatical domains of language (e.g., optimal speech rate and proper vocabulary and grammar usage) may be enhanced with increased L2 experience, regardless of age.

By their words ye shall know them: Evidence of genetic selection against general intelligence and concurrent environmental enrichment in vocabulary usage since the mid 19th century.

It has been theorized that declines in general intelligence (g) due to genetic selection stemming from the inverse association between completed fertility and IQ and the Flynn effect co-occur, with the effects of the latter being concentrated on less heritable non-g sources of intelligence variance. Evidence for this comes from the observation that 19th century populations were more intellectually productive, and also exhibited faster simple reaction times than modern ones, suggesting greater information-processing ability and therefore higher g. This co-occurrence model is tested via examination of historical changes in the utilization frequencies of words from the highly g-loaded WORDSUM test across 5.9 million texts spanning the period 1850–2005. Consistent with predictions, words with higher difficulties (δ parameters from Item Response Theory) and stronger negative correlations between pass rates and completed fertility declined in use over time whereas less difficult and less strongly selected words, increased in use over time, consistent with a Flynn effect stemming in part from the vocabulary enriching effects of increases in population literacy. These findings persisted when explicitly controlled for word age, changing literacy rates and temporal autocorrelation. These trends constitute compelling evidence for the co-occurrence model.

La démocratie populaire et l'esthétisme irresponsable

The article underlines the existence of major differences between the understanding of democracy and that of the autonomy of literature in Western and East-European cultures (during the totalitarian regime). In the particular case of Romanian culture, democracy used to be a concept claimed by both the official politics of the communist party and the writers who refused any form of political instrumentation of literature. The analyses highlights the tension between aestheticism and activism, formalism and commitment, and the drama of having to chose, as a writer, between moral and social responsibility. The contrast between the literary discourse and the discourse of the propaganda is emphasized through the binary usage of the same vocabulary. Between the schizo-words able to convey the tension between aesthetic and political, we have stopped at: beauty, morals, democracy, tradition, formalism, evasionism, utopia, message.

Attitudes to Improving Speaking Skills by Guided Individual Activities

Students’ perceptions of difficulties in speaking on professional issues are in the focus of the present article. It is generally assumed that the skill of speaking a foreign language is very difficult to master, while speaking on professional topics involves such difficulties as the usage of specific vocabulary and ability to deal with listeners’ oncoming arguments. The aims of the current research are to investigate learners’ attitudes to the level of difficulty in speaking activi - ties on a subject matter at university and apply an innovative approach to improving their speaking skills. The methodology applied was focused on guided individual learning (GIL), with gradually increasing amount of spontaneity in public talks on the subject matter, starting with prepared short talks on an ESP issue leading to group discussions; moving on to Power Point presentations, involving spontaneous deviations from the subject and followed by question time; further, adding some complex subject matter, such as a discussion on a problematic professional subject suggested by learning materials; and, eventually, speaking impromptu on an issue, with a high level of control of one’s speaking skills. The research method of the learners’ attitudes employed the survey on learner attitudes to four different speaking activities in the classroom, which included short talks, Power Point Presentations, discussions and speaking impromptu. The questionnaire was administered to students of two different specializations by the end of the semester. The respondents were students who studied Psychology and Social Work at the Faculty of Social Policy, at Mykolas Romeris University in Vilnius, Lithuania. The respondents were asked to indicate the degree of difficulty they had with the various speaking activities on the Likert’s scale ranging from “very difficult” (1) to “very easy” (5). The results indicated that perceptions of difficulties to developing speaking skills depended, on the one hand, on students’ chosen specialization: students of Psychology were more positive about speaking activities than students of Social Work. The differences of opinions might be caused by the level of proficiency in General English which influences the performance in professional language. On the other hand, the responses depended on the type of assignments: students felt more confident with themselves if they invested more individual learning time for their assignments. By the end of the semester, students self-assessed their achievements in improving speaking skills by contributing written reflections to individual weblogs. The analysis of contributions suggests the usefulness of the approach to perfecting professional speaking skills.