Web-based English Research Articles

Developing Web-based English Instructional Material Oriented to Promote Independent Learning at Indonesian University Context

The objective of this research is to develop web-based English instructional materials which enable to promote students’ independent learning at university context. To comprehend this objective, the researcher employs R & D (Research and Development) design by mixing quantitative and qualitative methods. This research is conducted at Faculty of Engineering Tadulako University. The subjects of the study are the lecturers who teach English for the general course and the students of faculty of Engineering. Subject matter experts were also involved to validate the product. The data were collected through semi-structured interview; study the related documents and the results of questionnaire distribution. The data in these phases were analyzed quantitatively and qualitatively. In reference to data analysis, five findings are documented as explored in this part of the article. In summary, the development of web-based English instructional materials oriented to promote independent learning is effective and responded positively both lecturers and students. With the various supported activities and along with the flexible learning atmosphere and methods of delivery, the web-based English instructional materials are effective to promote students’ independent learning.

‘Outdooring’ the Historical Corpus of English in Ghana

Over the last 30 years there has been an upsurge in research and theorising on postcolonial Englishes. Beginning with Kachru's (1985)Three Circlesmodel, more recently the focus has shifted to models focusing on identity construction and historical developments (Schneider, 2007), central and peripheral varieties and their spheres of influence (Mair, 2013), and those aiming to provide a more integrated approach to postcolonial and non-postcolonial Englishes (Buschfeld & Kautzsch, 2017). Dedicated corpora such as the International Corpus of English (ICE; Greenbaum, 1991) and the Corpus of Global Web-based English (GloWbe; Davies & Fuchs, 2015) have been designed to allow for a synchronic comparison of Englishes around the world and have since been widely used to study variation on the different levels of linguistic description within and across varieties. Recently, ICE corpora have also been used to test assumptions laid out by Schneider (2007), e.g. by comparing data from ICE corpora of varieties which have progressed to different phases (Mukherjee & Gries, 2009) or by taking an apparent-time approach to test developments within one variety (Fuchs & Gut, 2015).

Intelligent Web-based English E-learning tutor with Data Mining technique

With the transmission of instructive information mining field, it is in effect progressively associated with various research ranges, for example, versatile and smart electronic mentors, savvy instructive applications and other pleasing on the web instructive information mining frameworks. The utilizations of instructive information mining consider the framework scholarly perspectives, the scholastic foundation, and the learner's order. This paper proposes another versatile e-learning framework. The proposed framework incorporates an outstanding canny electronic English e-learning mentor with information mining procedures. Likewise, the information mining strategies are utilized as a part of request to bunch understudies’ learning styles as per Jackson's learning styles. A definitive objective of the proposed framework is to decide the best showing pattern for every learner. The proposed system can be made available through the web everywhere as well as Every Time (EWET). It also offers adaptive facilities such as learning videos, adaptive presentations, and quizzes for the students. Moreover, it helps both teachers and students to follow the best learning process and achieve the highest academic rates. The results show that the highest student's achievement pattern is the pattern (Speaking-Reading-Grammar-Writing) with score of at least 87.4%.

메타분석을 통한 웹기반 영어 교육이 학습자의 영어능력에 미치는 효과 분석

메타분석을 통한 웹기반 영어 교육이 학습자의 영어능력에 미치는 효과 분석

Experimental Study on Strategy-Oriented Web-Based English Instruction for EFL Students

This quasi-experimental study investigated whether a strategy-oriented media-based reading program could improve English as a Foreign Language (EFL) students’ reading comprehension. Eighty-five students who were registered for English Reading at a university were recruited through convenience sampling to take part in the study. In this study, a web-based Strategy-oriented Multimedia-Assisted Reading Training (SMART) program was designed and implemented. On the basis of a literature review, four instructional strategies were selected and implemented in this program. The SMART program was used by students in the experimental group but not by students in the control group. Students in both groups were taught by the same instructor with the same instructional materials. The experiment lasted for 10 weeks, and the effects of the SMART program on students’ reading comprehension were investigated. A questionnaire on students’ attitudes toward the use of the strategies was given only to the experimental group. The results show that mean score of the reading test was significantly higher for the experimental group than for the control group. Students’ feedback about using the SMART program was positive and encouraging.

Totally new and pretty awesome: Amplifier–adjective bigrams in GloWbE

Previous work on adjectival intensification (e.g. very good, so glad, really great) has mostly focussed on the adverbs in question, showing that different (native) varieties of English display distinctive preferences concerning intensifier choice. However, little is known so far about the role that intensifier-adjective units (bigrams) play. The present paper offers a first contribution to fill this research gap by focussing on a data-driven approach to (mostly) high-frequency bigrams and their collocational behaviour in the Corpus of Global Web-based English (GloWbE). Asymmetric and symmetric measures are employed to establish attraction and repulsion between adverb and adjective, while highlighting regional similarities and differences.

Canadian Dollar in the English Language Varieties: Corpus‑Based Study

The slang name for Canadian dollar loonie is a Canadianism used not only in spoken (Boberg, 2010: 121), but also in written texts such as Canadian news articles. While loonie is obviously taken for granted by Canadians, its occurrence in English texts published beyond Canada has hardly been in the focus of corpus-based studies. The goal of this study is to find out in what Canadian English written texts loonie occurs and whether it is encountered in the other varieties of English by researching the corpora adapted for web access at Brigham Young University (BYU), the Strathy Corpus of Canadian English (SCCE), the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) and the corpus of Global Web-Based English (GloWbE). The first two corpora were searched to reveal the genres of the written texts loonie occurs and GloWbE – to see loonie used in the other varieties of English. The obtained results revealed that loonie occurs in such written texts as newspaper and magazine articles of SCCE and COCA predominantly in the contexts connected with money issues. Search of GloWbE showed the use of loonie in American and British mass media texts, which reveals that this Canadian slang name goes beyond Canadian texts and thus, as Davies (2005: 45) has stated ‘[...] few of us are cocooned from [...] vocabulary of the major international varieties of English’. These findings therefore call for more detailed research of the collocations containing loonie in various text types of different varieties of English.

Integrating the Problem-Based Learning Approach Into a Web-Based English Reading Course

This study incorporated the problem-based learning (PBL) approach into a web-based English reading course. The purpose of the study was to examine the impact of PBL on the participants’ English reading comprehension (RC) and to explore the participants’ perceptions of PBL. The present study conducted a comparison of two teaching methods. Two classes of university students were randomly assigned to PBL and non-PBL groups. The PBL group was directed by the problem and surveyed the Internet to identify solutions. The non-PBL group was instructed using the teacher-lecture method. The two groups completed RC pre- and posttests, an instructional questionnaire, and self-reports. The statistic results showed that the PBL group achieved significantly higher mean scores than the non-PBL group in English RC. Additionally, the questionnaire results demonstrated that PBL significantly enhanced the participants’ active learning and synthesized their cognitive processing. Instructional recommendations for PBL web-based English curricula are presented.

The roles of revision-oriented peer evaluation as pragmatic intervention in web-based ELF communication

Peer evaluation (PE) in web-based English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) communication demonstrates certain uniqueness in moderating, transforming, or reinforcing linguistic and intercultural competence development. Within the framework of Spencer-Oatey’s (2000, 2008) rapport management framework, this article focuses on the use of revision-oriented peer evaluation (RPE) as a pragmatic intervention, drawing on data from the Cross-Pacific Exchange, an online exchange program between Chinese and American university students. Three types of RPE are identified based on its thematic content: knowledge-sharing, relationship-oriented, and disclaiming. The thematic content analysis hence reveals three major concerns in PE: the knowledge gap between ELF users, interpersonal care, and self-awareness. RPE, as a pragmatic intervention, mainly addresses these three concerns. The frequency and functional analysis of each type of RPE shows that Chinese and American students demonstrate a similar tendency, though their specific ways of intervening are not the same. Their top priorities are to scaffold common-ground construction and attend to interpersonal relationships; their least concern is to protect self/group face and identity, indicating the cooperative, mutually supportive feature of web-based ELF communication.

Corpus-based analysis of the collocational profiles of the terms denoting the mentally challenged

The present study aims to trace the evolution of public attitude towards the mentally challenged by means of the corpus-based analysis. The raw data comes from the two of the BYU corpora: Global Web-Based English (GloWbE) and Corpus of Historical American English (COHA). The former is comprised of 1.8 million web pages from 20 English-speaking countries (Davies/Fuchs 2015: 1) and provides an opportunity to research at a cross-cultural level, whereas the latter, containing 400 million words from more than 100,000 texts ranging from the 1810s to the 2000s (Davies 2012: 121), allows to carry on a diachronic research on the issue. To identify the difference in attitudes the collocational profiles of the terms denoting the mentally challenged were created. Having analysed them in terms of their semantic prosody one might conclude that there are certain semantic shifts that occurred due to the modern usage preferences and gradual change in public perception of everything strange, unusual and unique.

Behavioral Profile: Synonyms of ‘Disagree

There have been some developments in the area of lexical semantics through corpus linguistics in recent time. As a result, it is now possible to focus on semantic dimension of lexemes from a usage-based perspective. This paper presents a Behavioral Profile of synonymous words of the verb disagree. The data for this paper is taken from the Global Web-Based English (GloWbE) corpus.

Web-Based Yorùbá Numeral Translation System

<p class="Default">Yorùbá numerals have been seen as one of the most interesting but quite complicated numeral system. In this paper we present the development of a web-based English to Yorùbá numeral translation system. The system translates English numbers both in figure and text to its standard Yorùbá form. The computational processes underlying both numerals were used to formulate the model for the work. Unified Modeling language (UML) and Automata theory was used for the system design and specification. The designed system was implemented using Google Web App Engine with support for python. The result of the system evaluation using mean opinion score approach shows that the system gives a recall of 100% on all the output considered.</p>

Grammatical Change in the Verb Phrase in Contemporary Philippine English

This paper presents the findings of a diachronic corpus-based study of selected categories of the verb phrase – the progressive aspect, the passive voice, the present perfect aspect, the modals and quasi-modals – in contemporary Philippine English and its colonial parent variety, American English. Frequencies were determined for the verb phrase categories in the Philippine and American components of the early 2010s Corpus of Global Web-based English. These are compared with the findings of earlier studies by Collins and associates of Philippine English, and by Leech and associates of American English, in the 1960s and 1990s. The trajectories of the grammatical variables over the half-century from the early 1960s to the early 2010s are traced, and the implications of the findings for the contentious issue of the evolutionary status of PhilE are explored.

Web-Based English for Computer Science: Studentss Evaluation of Course Effectiveness

The recent expansion of web-based education as a promising practice marks the shift from the traditional teacher-centred to a learner-centred classroom. As English for specific purposes (ESP) is a learner-centred approach, web-based instruction ably serves its principles of autonomous learning, independent decision-making, time and space flexibility, and the changing role of teachers from instructors to facilitators. Thus, evaluating the success of web-based instruction in an ESP context is worthy of enquiry. Students’ course evaluation has become a vital source of data for teachers to make judgments on course delivery and determine the value of their instruction. This paper seeks to gauge the effectiveness of a web-delivered ESP course to 42 Master students of Computer Science at Biskra University. It also aims to determine the extent of the instructor’s accomplishment in bridging the objectives of the course to meet the needs of the learners. To do so, a summative evaluation checklist was utilized as a research instrument. The findings revealed that the engagement in different online practices besides the teacher’s feedback received students’ approval. However, students disclosed their dissatisfaction of the artificial interaction of the web-delivered instruction, which seems to fail to prepare them for academic and professional challenges.

THE CONCEPT OF FATE IN AMERICAN SCIENCE FICTION LITERATURE

The present article is dedicated to the problem of the concept of fate functioning in the American picture of the world. The aim of the article is to investigate the concept sphere of fate in American science-fiction literature. The main tasks are to outline the main specific approaches to the problem, to analyse synonymic rows of the concept of fate and to form the concept sphere of fate in terms of their characteristics. At the beginning, the outline of the last investigations of the fate was done, and then the historical background of the fate interpretation was introduced. In the next part, the preliminary statistical results of the Fate lexicographical analysis were given. The author tried to prove the material selection with the help of the data from the Corpus of global web-based English and the Corpus of contemporary American English. The practical part of the article is devoted to the analysis of the concept of fate in the American science fiction literature that was done on the basis of the fantastic stories of A.E. van Vogt and E. Mayne Hull. At the result of the analysis the synonymic raw of the fate was formed. At the final part of the article, we made the general conclusion that the concept of fate had such two models of objectification as universal and individual ones.

Design of a Web-Based English Teaching Assistant Platform Using SSH Framework

Design of a Web-Based English Teaching Assistant Platform Using SSH Framework

Web-based English for Computer Science: Students’ Evaluation of Course Effectiveness

The recent expansion of web-based education as a promising practice marks the shift from the traditional teacher-centred to a learner-centred classroom. As English for specific purposes (ESP) is a learner-centred approach, web-based instruction ably serves its principles of autonomous learning, independent decision-making, time and space flexibility, and the changing role of teachers from instructors to facilitators. Thus, evaluating the success of web-based instruction in an ESP context is worthy of enquiry. Students’ course evaluation has become a vital source of data for teachers to make judgments on course delivery and determine the value of their instruction. This paper seeks to gauge the effectiveness of a web-delivered ESP course to 42 Master students of Computer Science at Biskra University. It also aims to determine the extent of the instructor’s accomplishment in bridging the objectives of the course to meet the needs of the learners. To do so, a summative evaluation checklist was utilized as a research instrument. The findings revealed that the engagement in different online practices besides the teacher’s feedback received students’ approval. However, students disclosed their dissatisfaction of the artificial interaction of the web-delivered instruction, which seems to fail to prepare them for academic and professional challenges.

The functions of “just kidding” in American English

This study is a corpus-assisted investigation concerning the functions of the formulaic sequence just kidding and its variants (e.g., only kidding, just joking, JK) in spoken and written American English. We identified 1200 instances of this phrase from multiple corpora representing a range of modalities (Contemporary Corpus of American English, Global Web-Based English corpus, The Santa Barbara Corpus, CallFriend, and MICASE) and utilized a recursive qualitative coding process that identified four different functions of the phrase (inoculation, repair of failed humor, return to serious, and set-up-new-joke). After the initial identification, we analyzed the four functions of just kidding through the lens of rapport management (Spencer-Oatey, 2005), which assumes the ongoing maintenance of relationships between interlocutors, arguing that just kidding and its variants can serve as an important element of rapport management amongst interlocutors. Our results suggest that just kidding is pragmatically dynamic and not solely a marker of failed humor, as initially expected.

Effectiveness of Interactivity in a Web-based Simulation Game on Foreign Language Vocabulary Learning

Research conducted on the potential and effectiveness of simulations and video games for learning purposes in educational settings has proliferated in the past few decades. Yet the research specifically examined the effectiveness of simulation games for second/foreign language learning remains scarce. This experimental study investigated the effect of interactivity in a web-based simulation game on Asian EFL learners’ vocabulary learning in an immediate post treatment test and retention in a two-week delayed posttest. The study also examined the effect of interactivity on induced cognitive load. The factor “interactivity” is manipulated at two levels, i.e. game (interactive) vs. game replay (non-interactive). Participants were comprised of one hundred undergraduate students (N=100) enrolled in a rural university of technology in southern Taiwan. Students were first matched based on their game experiences, demographic information and English ability and then randomly assigned to either the gameplay or game replay condition. Results indicated that interactivity induced from multi-players is conducive to germane cognitive load and significantly enhanced vocabulary recall. Additionally, language proficiency was confirmed to be a factor that mediated the amount of mental effort EFL gamers invested in a web-based English simulation game.

Word-formation in Hong Kong English: diachronic and synchronic perspectives

The publication of the first dictionary of Hong Kong English (HKE) marks a major milestone in the legitimisation of HKE as an autonomous variety of English. This article examines the emergence and current prevalence of the vocabulary of HKE using five recently compiled corpora of English in Hong Kong. The diachronic perspective is provided by a 91-million-word corpus of Legislative Council proceedings (1858–2012) and a collection of 1379 letters published in the city’s leading English-language newspapers (1842–2010). The synchronic perspective is derived from a three-million-word corpus of lifestyle-magazine articles (2005–2012), a database containing 2820 letters published in the South China Morning Post in 2012 and the well-known Corpus of Global Web-based English. These corpora are used to assess the representativeness of the HKE lexicon compiled by the authors of the dictionary, to identify the principal processes of word-formation and to determine phases in the evolution of the HKE vocabulary.