The monograph focuses on the interrelations between language and intercultural communication, with particular emphasis on the importance of foreign language skills in shaping positive personal, ...professional and educational experiences of students during longer stays abroad, mainly within the Erasmus+ programme. The authors present a critical perspective on the understanding of the role of English as a lingua franca in intercultural relations and highlight the key role of the local language (in this case, Polish) in the processes of conversational control and social integration. The monograph begins with a literature review that focuses on the types of motivations underlying the decision to go or stay abroad and invest in learning the local language. In the next chapter, the authors focus on methodological aspects of narrative research in the context of intercultural communication. The theoretical part is followed by the presentation of the findings of a study based on a narrative interview, which over the course of two years (2018–2019) involved 53 respondents – representatives of 24 countries, who share the experience of an extended stay in Poland for educational or professional purposes. Contrary to popular belief, the research revealed that English is not sufficient to function abroad successfully. The results indicate that people who decide to stay abroad for a longer period should invest in learning the local language, which sooner or later becomes a medium of deep intercultural communication in terms of positioning themselves, building relationships and increasing their cultural and linguistic resources.
Human memory is imperfect; thus, periodic review is required for the long-term preservation of knowledge and skills. However, students at every educational level are challenged by an ever-growing ...amount of material to review and an ongoing imperative to master new material. We developed a method for efficient, systematic, personalized review that combines statistical techniques for inferring individual differences with a psychological theory of memory. The method was integrated into a semester-long middle-school foreign-language course via retrieval-practice software. Using a cumulative exam administered after the semester's end, we compared time-matched review strategies and found that personalized review yielded a 16.5% boost in course retention over current educational practice (massed study) and a 10.0% improvement over a one-size-fits-all strategy for spaced study.
People have false memories that distort their recollection of past events. Language is an important source of such memories, from providing false inferences to outright misinformation. Here we ...investigate the impact of using a native or foreign language on bilinguals' susceptibility to false memories. Although language has been argued to impact false memories in multiple ways, our study was inspired by recent work in the decision-making literature, which leads to the novel hypothesis that foreign language encourages people to engage in careful memory monitoring that could reduce false memories. This hypothesis contrasts with a processing load account, which predicts that a foreign language would increase false memories because it is naturally more difficult to process information in a foreign language. We tested these hypotheses using two false memory tasks. Using the DRM task, Experiment 1 found that individuals were more accurate in identifying false memories when using their foreign language compared with their native tongue, consistent with the memory monitoring hypothesis. Using the misinformation task, Experiment 2 found that processing misleading information in one's foreign language eliminated false memories, again supporting the hypothesis that a foreign language increases the use of memory monitoring. These findings support a monitoring hypothesis that has been overlooked in prior studies on bilingualism and false memory, with implications for billions of people who regularly use a foreign language.
Compound words are ubiquitous in English. Stressing compounds is difficult for EFL learners and native speakers, especially when the meaning is not a sum of the constituent parts. This study explores ...Arab EFL learners’ stress strategies and outlines their difficulties. It examines whether any of these factors (a) word class, (b) orthography, (c) understanding of phonetics and phonology, (d) age and (e) grade point average (GPA) influence their behaviour and levels of success. It involves 130 second and third-year Jordanian English majors in reading 50 opaque non-frequent compound words, 25 with right-stress and 25 with left-stress. The majority opted for right-stress, producing about half of the stimuli correctly. They right-stressed more often in compound verbs, nouns and adjectives of all spelling forms. Their performance was slightly influenced by the study of phoneticsandphonology, training in stress and GPA. However, there was no noticeable relationship between their stress performance and age. Notably, the subjects needed more training in compound word stress production.
The aim of the present paper is to shed more light on using L1 (Polish) orthographic spelling to represent the pronunciation of English words in English-Polish dictionaries (e.g. journey /dżerni/, ...ship /szyp/) and discuss multiple drawbacks of this practice. While there are numerous advantages of using the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) in foreign language teaching, some Polish lexicographers insist on, what they call, a “simplified” phonetic transcription. In my paper I conduct an overview of three English-Polish dictionaries which use orthographic transcription instead of the IPA and exemplify inevitable confusion and serious problems they present the learner with. The analysis reveals that orthographic transcription intensifies interference between L1 and L2 and contributes to the fossilization of the most persistent mispronunciations stemming from phonetic transfer. Inconsistent and inaccurate transcription prevents learners from spotting patterns and rules (such as e.g. non-rhoticity, vowel reduction, silent letters, etc.). It is argued that relying on ordinary spelling rather than the IPA is a short-sighted alternative which presents more problems than solutions.
The paper explores the accuracy of feedback provided to non-native learners of English by a pronunciation module included in Microsoft Reading Progress. We compared pronunciation assessment offered ...by Reading Progress against two university pronunciation teachers. Recordings from students of English who aim for native-like pronunciation were assessed independently by Reading Progress and the human raters. The output was standardized as negative binary feedback assigned to orthographic words, which matches the Microsoft format. Our results indicate that Reading Progress is not yet ready to be used as a CAPT tool. Inter-rater reliability analysis showed a moderate level of agreement for all raters and a good level of agreement upon eliminating feedback from Reading Progress. Meanwhile, the qualitative analysis revealed certain problems, notably false positives, i.e., words pronounced within the boundaries of academic pronunciation standards, but still marked as incorrect by the digital rater. We recommend that EFL teachers and researchers approach the current version of Reading Progress with caution, especially as regards automated feedback. However, its design may still be useful for manual feedback. Given Microsoft declarations that Reading Progress would be developed to include more accents, it has the potential to evolve into a fully-functional CAPT tool for EFL pedagogy and research.
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Z aplikacijo kointegracijske cenilke na osnovi skupin združenega povprecja (pmg, pooled mean group cross sectional cointegration estimators) na panelnoregresijske specifkacije J-krivulje na ravni ...industrije smo ugotovili, da bi bila depreciacija me-njalnih tecajev koristna za 8 od 19 skupin izdelkov v regiji sacu, med-tem ko bi preostalim 11 industrijam škodila. Kljucne besede: realni menjalni tecaji, trgovinske bilance, J-krivulja, raven industrije, Pooled Mean Group (pmg) cenilke, afriške države Klasifkacija jel: c32, c33, c51, f31, f41 Managing Global Transitions 21 (1): 23-40 Ucinek neposrednih tujih naložb na porabo energije: empiricni dokazi Sima Rani Dey in Monirul Islam Clanek raziskuje povezavo med neposrednimi tujimi naložbami (ntn) in porabo energije v okviru liberalizacije trgovine ter gospodarske rasti med letoma 1971 in 2014 v Bangladešu, pri cemer uporabi ardl model. Upoštevati bi morali tudi ugotovitve raziskave Ucinki nezado-stnega znanja tujih jezikov v podjetjih na evropsko gospodarstvo (Effects on the European Economy of Shortages of Foreign Language Skills in Enterprise - elan).
The objective of this article is to share the results obtained, following involved research carried out during our doctoral investigation. The aim and ambition of this research was to propose in ...Algerian colleges, whose teaching-learning of French as a foreign language responds exclusively to a textual typology, a new approach in the teaching of French as a foreign language in general, and of writing in particular. It is a question of project in gone self into a new dialectic of reading-writing which favors a generic approach to literary works in the FLE class. With the intention of essentially developing the scriptural competence of Algerian middle school students, we have opted for the introduction of literature by genres in FLE class; and on occasion the reading of complete works. To do this, the novel genre object of our proposalis the detective novel.
By considering the specificities of the Algerian sociolinguistic context, we will approach within the framework of this article the linguistic plurality in the school environment. In other words, we ...will question the impact of linguistic diversity at the social level on the linguistic representations and linguistic identities of the protagonists of the didactic relationship. Through this reflection, which aims to study language manifestations in terms of representations and their relationship to languages, we want to arrive at didactic suggestion based on methodological paradigms inherent in the didactics of plurilingualism in general and in socio-didactics in a particular way.
