Computer, Internet, and English Learning

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Computer, Internet, and English Learning

• Howard Hao-Jan Chen
• Dept of English, NTNU
• ???
• hjchen_at_ntnu.edu.tw

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Listening

• International Web sites
• Domestic web sites
• Streaming Technologies
• Real media
• Windows media
• QuickTime

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Randal Davis ESL Cyber Listening Lab
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CNN
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VOA Special English
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How to download VOA

• The VOA files can be downloaded and put on the
  Moodle
• Scripts available

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Synchronized Audio and Texts at Taiwan Normal
University
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Regular VOA
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Pod cast CNN
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NTNU Moodle Listening Courses
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Audio/Video Files Available

• Podcasts
• CNN
• VOA
• PBS
• ABC
• Other kinds of Audio and Video via Podcast
• How to use Juice? Or iTune

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Listening Comprehension Test

• Moodle offer options.
• Or you can use Hotpotato
• Upload and make link to the files

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Tracking Learner Performance
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Speaking Skills

• Speech recognition programs (ASR)
• From Europe
• From US
• From Microsoft
• Computer mediated communication
• Various formats---
• Text. Voice. Video

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An Conversation with TeLLmeMore pro
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A.L.I.C.E. (Artificial Linguistic Internet
Computer Entity) by Dr. Richard Wallace
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The log of conversation with ALICE
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Talking bots AIML and TTS
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http//140.122.73.1508080/candle/candle1.html

• CANDLE Project FAQ

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JoinNet Conferencing Server
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The total scores assigned by MyET program
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NTNU speech recognition System
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NTNU Dept of English ASR Technologies
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Listen and Repeat the Sentences
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Conversation (Role Play)
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Choose the Right Answer
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Write and Say(exercises on demand)
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Flash and Speech Recognition
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Personal Learning Records
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Checking Students PerformancesDemo of various
activities
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Reading

• Web Sites and Tools

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Reading Web Sites

• Online dictionaries
• Self-access reading center at NTNU
• Various News Web Site CNN, BBC, ABC, NBC, CBS,
  VOA, Taipeitimes, and many many others.

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Click and Show Dictionary

• Google toolbar
• Dr. Eye online
• Yahoo minipen
• Moodle and reading management
• And assign readings to students.

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Online Reading/Vocabulary learning Center

• Moodle can be used again.
• Moodle in reading course and extensive reading
  and what they can do?

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Text-to-Speech( speech synthesis)

• THE TTS server at national Taiwan Normal
  University and how do students feel about this?

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Writing Web Sites

• The Numerous online handouts for writing
• The various tools for second language writing
• Concordancer
• Bilingual Concordancers
• Collocation tools in Taiwan
• E-rater

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Writing Sites and Tools
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Hong-Kong University Online Handouts
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Purdue University Writing Lab
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Tools PC Concordancer and Web Concordancer (????)
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Collocation Retrieval Tools
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Outcomes
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NTNU Collocation Tool
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Outcomes for task
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Perform the tasks
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More Writing tools

• The BNC system
• The Gutenberg system
• The Wikipedia

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NTHU Bilingual Concordancer developed by Jason
Chang

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NTNU bilingual search engines
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Hong Kong news and Scripts
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Automatic Scoring and E-raters

• ETS Criterion
• MyAccess

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Automatic Feedback on Learners Writing- ETS
Criterion
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Poor grammar Feedback

• NTNU has developed good tool here and it can help
  students.
• Rule-based
• Statistic-based

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The Needs to Providing Feedback on Second
Language Writing

• Many ESL students want to improve their writing
  abilities.
• SLA Researchers would suggest that learners would
  need more practices and corrective feedback.
• However, who can provide them useful feedback on
  meaning and forms?

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The Existing Grammar Checkers

• Teachers are the best feedback providers.
• However, so many essays to correct.
• Microsoft grammar checker
• How useful is this tool? How does it deal with
  various ESL errors?
• General impressions from ESL/EFL learners it is
  NOT very useful.
• The two new commercial packages Vantage MyAccess
  and ETS Criterion

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Errors Marked by Criterion and Human Instructors
(Means)

• Error Type Criterion Human Instructors
• Verbs 0.47 0.84
• Nouns 0.00 0.94
• Articles 0.07 2.00
• Word Choice
• 0.11 2.32
• Sentence Structure
• 0.32 6.31

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Rather Disappointing Results

• The results revealed that Criterion experienced
  difficulties in detecting errors in all of the
  five categories.
• Another program MyAccess has similar problems,
  though the general impression from review reports
  was that they can detect more errors.

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Whats the Ngram (statistical) Checker?

• The computer helps to calculate all the possible
  combinations of word strings (2-word and 3-word)
  in a very large native corpus. Language models
  building.
• All these saved to a large database.
• Then when students write and submit an essay to
  the ngram checker, the system can quickly detect
  the word strings that do not exist in the native
  corpus.

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Ngram-based Checker advantages

• The key idea is simple but powerful
• No need to write rule
• More robust in detecting errors.
• Large and suitable corpus might make this very
  useful. (EST,30-million news)

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The Procedure of Developing an Ngram Checker
(corpora and tools)

• 1. Find suitable and large corpus (e.g BNC
  wikipedia, and Google)
• 2. Extract the ngrams (NLP tools SRI tool )
• 3. Build a large ngram database
• 4. Develop and test different highlighting
  methods
• 5. Highlight the possibly problematic ngrams in
  learners writing

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Grammar Checker Online

• The links
• http//140.122.83.2504000/main (BNC)
• http//140.122.83.250/search.php (Google)
• http//140.122.83.245/ngram-check/ (BNC)
• http//140.122.83.227/ngram-count/ (BNC)
• The rule-based checker
• http//140.122.83.1898080/wgrammar/default.asp

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The Web Interface of Ngram Checker
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A Simple Example
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Evaluate the Checker Performances Any Standard
Way of Evaluating Checkers?

• What kind of errors should be used to test the
  grammar checker?
• Fair assessment- same set of sentences.
• How many sentences?
• Many different categories and errors
• Lexical factors.
• NLP researchers F-measure and precision and
  recall

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Test with CLEC Corpus from China

• The size of the Chinese learners of English
  Corpus.
• 1 million error-tagged learner corpus.
• With about 60 error types.
• We decided to single out some sentences (10
  sentences) from the learner corpus and then throw
  them into our ngram checkers.

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The Strengths and Limitations of NTNU Ngram
Checkers

• Ngram is good at detecting errors in the local
  or adjacent domains. It can indeed find many
  errors in CLEC.
• Spellings
• Word forms
• Verb phrases
• Noun phrases
• Adj phrases
• Collocations

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The Weakness of Ngram Checkers

• It failed to catch the followings effectively
• Tense errors
• Conjuncts errors
• Fragments
• Pronoun errors
• Preposition errors
• The run on sentences
• The missing words

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How about comparing NTNU Checkers with Criterion
and Myaccess?

• We would like to compare with Criterion and
  MyAccess. But this was difficult to get the
  outcomes from these packages.
• The checkers were embedded in a large program.
• The topics are assigned by the system
• But we will do this later on when we have access
  to more data from these two tools.

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Pre-service English Teachers Feedback

• Microsoft Word is widely available for teachers
  and learners.
• How about comparing with Microsoft Word?
• 22 pre-service teachers prepared their own
  sentences (errors).
• Results NTNU checkers do work better than
  Microsoft Word (21/22). It can detect more
  errors, but the ngram systems still highlight
  some strings incorrectly.

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A Simple Example
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How to provide effective feedback?

• The function words and content words
• Function words limited
• We might be able to provide some rule-based
  generalizations
• Some word choice problems.
• Increase their life, receive their apology.
• Content word Search Just the word

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ESL Portals

• CANDLE- NTHU
• ESL Café
• Hong-Kong Polyu
• NTNU
• NCNU
• Others.

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NTHU CANDLE
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Powerful Tools Available
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More Portals for ESL/EFL

• ?? ?????????????
• http//llrc.eng.ntnu.edu.tw
• ?????? ???????
• http//english.csie.ncnu.edu.tw/index.php
• Hong Kong Polytechnic University
• http//vlc.polyu.edu.hk
• HKUST Self Access Centre
• http//lc.ust.hk/sac/advice/V1.htm

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2004 version of The Developments in the Future

• More audio and video on demand with
  subtitles/speed control/summary
• Interacting with a virtual partner or a real
  person via The Internet (speech recognition and
  CMC)
• Reading Intelligent agent summarizing the main
  ideas for us
• Writing better tools and corrective feedback on
  demand
• Testing automatic generation of questions, and
  computer adaptive tests
• Virtual Reality 3D

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Moodle the most popular CMS
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ICT4LT (information and communication
technologies for language teachers) Web Site
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Fun Internet Movie Database
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Movie Trailers and others
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Games and The 3D Virtual Worlds

• Talking about the LLT. Sims ????- about using the
  German version of Sims to learn German.
• A new trend is that many universities and
  colleges moved their classrooms and campus to the
  virtual world.
• The new world- Second life????.

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Second Life

• Show them some video files there.
• Quite a few
• Downloadable from Youtube
• Several books and web sites for tutorials
• http//www.associatedcontent.com/article/215721/to
  p_10_second_life_tutorial_videos.html

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Texas State in Second Life
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Texas State University
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Meeting People on Second Life
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Interactions with Other People
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Virtual Classrooms
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The Potentials of Second Life

• 1. Use the existing resources
• English village language lab
• 2. Build new learning environment for specific
  learning needs _ How challenging is this?
• 3. Build and design with a team.
• How many teachers and developers should be
  involved?

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The Potentials of Learning/Education Games

• Traditionally, we think games are useless and
  irrelevant for learning
• Playing games wasting precious time.
• Perhaps the new generation might not believe
  that.
• How we can make the Learning Process more
  Interesting and engaging

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Hardware

• Wireless tech WiMax
• EEEPC
• Smaller NB
• Mobile device

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More New Applications

• The use of Google video
• Youtube
• Skype
• More communicative tools-CMC
• Face to face video calls
• High quality TTS and ASR
• Faster reading speed
• Web-based Content-based English learning

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Recommendations

• Self-Access learning
• Better English ability
• Moodle as the major tool
• Infuse various contents and tools
• Are you ready?
• Collect and Use good tools and good sites

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Hands-on Sessions

• Moodle accounts
• How to download video and audio
• How to use podcast?
• speech recognition- log in
• collocation tools- search tips
• grammar checkers- allow learners to use
• second life at home- virtual classrooms