The purpose of the present paper is twofold; first, we present an empirical study evaluating the effectiveness of a novel CALL tool for foreign language vocabulary instruction based on spaced repetition of target vocabulary items. The study demonstrates that by spending an average of three minutes each day on automatically generated vocabulary activities, EFL students increased their long-term vocabulary retention rate three fold. Second, we demonstrate that the double-blind experiment design, which has become standard research practice in such extremely high-stakes fields as pharmacology and healthcare, has the potential of being successfully implemented in CALL research.
The purpose of the present paper is twofold; first, we present an empirical study evaluating the effectiveness of a novel CALL tool for foreign language vocabulary instruction based on spaced repetition of target vocabulary items. The study demonstrates that by spending an average of three minutes each day on automatically generated vocabulary activities, EFL students increased their long-term vocabulary retention rate three fold. Second, we demonstrate that the double-blind experiment design, which has become standard research practice in such extremely high-stakes fields as pharmacology and healthcare, has the potential of being successfully implemented in CALL research.
Based on an integrative methodology that combines quantitative and qualitative methods of linguistic research, the authors consider grammatical forms, syntactic types and pragmatic functions of the tag question in British spoken discourse. The research material included samples of dialogues with tag questions taken from British contemporary fiction and the Spoken BNC2014. Drawing on the theory of linguistic metarepresentation and using corpus analysis tools the authors presented the model under study in structural-syntactic and functional-pragmatic perspectives and obtained reliable data on discourse realization of tag question models, specified their standard and common usage polarity status, distinguished bi- and monopolarity variations. An analysis of the tag question types that are distinguished as the combinations of the predicative and auxiliary parts shows that the most frequent type of tag question is the one formed with an affirmative predicative part and a negative tag. The corpus-based approach allowed obtaining quantitative data on frequencies of tag questions in British spoken discourse, retrieving the repertoire of tag questions with their grammatical representation. It is shown that in the corpus under study the most frequent form of the tag question is the form isn't it?. The least frequent forms of tag questions are the ones formed with the have verb, as well as the modal verbs will, may, can, which supports the thesis that tag questions are losing ground in British spoken discourse. Discourse-pragmatic analysis of utterance contexts with tag questions highlighted its discourse value in the British tradition of conversation, as they perform the following communicative functions: informational; etiquette; interpersonal-relation-corrective (focus-positive or focus-negative).
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