This paper introduces a case course with videoconferencing as a way of Synchronous Computer Mediated Communication (SCMC) for foreign language education in Japan. Research questions were to see the effects of videoconferencing on the learners' speaking ability and general English language proficiency, and also to see how the learners' international posture changed over time. Eight pairs of Japanese university English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners experienced two semesters of 9-10 videoconferencing sessions per semester with an English teacher living in the Philippines. The task for the pairs was to discuss a social issue together with the teacher once a week. Their goal was to exchange mutual ideas on the designated topic. To lower the anxiety of speaking English as well as to practice discussion with fellow Japanese students, there was a 90-minute preparation period prior to each videoconferencing session. Pre-tests and post-tests results showed significant improvement in fluency, particularly in the amount of speech, and complexity of their speaking abilities. The learners also demonstrated progress in English proficiency. Their international posture stayed at a high level, but did not change much. However, their increased interest in working or participating in volunteer activities overseas was observed. The results indicated that the instruction based on videoconferencing helped improve learners' language and their global mind as a part of international posture.
The purpose of this study is to find the effects of using Videoconferencing (VC) as a tool for foreign language instructions in a semester long research study. The research questions focus on the effects of VC (1) on speaking skills, and (2) on general proficiency scores. English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners in a university in Japan were divided into an Experimental Group (EG) with weekly VC outside the classroom, and a Control Group (CG) provided with 'shadowing practice' and written assignments instead of VC. Both groups spent eight weeks under the treatments with pre and post measurements. The results showed improvement in holistic ratings and temporal measurement in transcribed speech data, but not statistically significant in interaction between time and treatments. Speaking performance of the EG showed statistically more significant progress in fluency and lexical variation, and in general proficiency. The results suggest that using VC with tasks in a blended manner with classroom instruction develops balanced L2 competence and performance.
One of the major drawbacks to the conventional methods is that they are topic-dependent. They require a great number of human-reader scored essays that are written to the same essay topic as the target essay. This means that for every new essay topic, one has to collect a great number of essays that are written to the new essay topic and has to score them, which is costly and timeconsuming.This paper proposes a topic-independent method for automatically scoring essay content. Unlike conventional topic-dependent methods, it predicts the human score of a given essay without training essays written to the same topic as the target essay. To achieve this, this paper introduces a new measure called MIDF that measures how important and relevant a word is in a given essay. The proposed method predicts the score relying on the distribution of MIDF. Surprisingly, experiments show that the proposed method achieves an accuracy of 0.848 and performs as well as or even better than conventional topic-dependent methods.To solve the drawback, this paper proposes a topicindependent method for automatically scoring essay content. Here, topic-independent means that once obtained a set of human-reader scored essays written to a topic, one can apply the proposed method to new essays written to any essay topic. Surprisingly, it rivals the conventional topic-dependent methods as experiments will show later. To achieve this, this paper introduces a new measure called MIDF that measures how important and relevant a word is in a given essay. The proposed method predicts the score relying on the distribution of MIDF.
This study investigated the change of listeners' responses of Japanese learners of English over a semester of presentation training sessions. We were also concerned with the relationship between speaking ability and perceived use of listeners' responses. In this paper, the listeners' responses we focused on were: acknowledging signals, repetition of the teacher's utterances, and asking questions to the teacher. Therefore, the research questions were: (1) how did the learners' perceived use of listener's responses change over time?, and (2) what is the relationship between speaking ability and listeners' responses? The participants were 21 Japanese university students whose majors were in Economics. During the English teacher in charge of a group of three Japanese learners listened to three presentations during a 50-minute session. Speaking ability was assessed through an interview test following the format of STEP Eiken test for Japanese learners of English. To obtain the data of the listeners' responses, a questionnaire was provided after each session, asking how much they could actually put into practice from the three types of responses. The results indicated that as for RQ (1), three learners' responses changed to some extent over the sessions. Concerning RQ (2), of the teacher's utterance. From these results it can be said that videoconferencing interaction, particularly after presentation, provided opportunities for the learners to increase output and interaction, which boosts their L2 performance development.
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