This paper presents a linguistic analysis of a corpus of messages written in Catalan and Spanish, which come from several informal newsgroups on the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (Open University of Catalonia; henceforth, UOC) Virtual Campus. The surrounding environment is one of extensive bilingualism and contact between Spanish and Catalan. The study was carried out as part of the INTERLINGUA project conducted by the UOC's Internet Interdisciplinary Institute (IN3). Its main goal is to ascertain the linguistic characteristics of the e‐mail register in the newsgroups in order to assess their implications for the creation of an online machine translation environment. The results shed empirical light on the relevance of characteristics of the e‐mail register, the impact of language contact and interference, and their implications for the use of machine translation for CMC data in order to facilitate cross‐linguistic communication on the Internet.
Abstract-Nowadays, universities (on-site and online) have a large competition in order to attract more students. In this panorama, learning analytics can be a very useful tool since it allows instructors (and university managers) to get a more thorough view of their context, to better understand the environment, and to identify potential improvements. In order to perform analytics efficiently, it is necessary to have as much information as possible about the instructional context. The paper proposes a novel approach to gather information from different aspects within courses. In particular, the approach applies natural language processing (
Learners and teachers of a foreign language in online and blended learning environments are being offered more opportunities for speaking practice from technological developments. However, in order to maximise these learning opportunities, appropriate task-based materials are required which promote and direct student to student interaction in order to counter learners' possible reluctance to use new language structures in their target language (TL). This paper presents the provisional findings of a case study in which three groups of English as a foreign language (EFL) students worked synchronously (in Skype) in pairs with spot-the-difference pictures presented to them using three different formats: standard HTML format, the Tandem tool (a content management application which distributes the materials in real-time), and a variation of the Tandem tool interface which incorporates confirmation buttons aimed at providing a scaffold to the interactions. In order to contextualise the results from the three groups of learners, a group of native English speakers also carried out the tasks. Differences in the interactions were identified, particularly between the HTML format materials and the Tandem materials, mostly due to the fact that students were able to access both students' materials prior to the synchronous interaction, enabling them to prepare for the interactions in various ways, and in some cases, to script their conversations. Other differences were found in terms of the turn-taking, time spent on tasks, and the language used to complete the tasks.
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