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Foreign Language Anxiety and Foreign Language Performance: A Meta-Analysis
This meta-analysis investigated the relationship between foreign language (FL) anxiety and FL performance. Fifty-five independent samples with more than 10,000 participants were surveyed. It was found that the overall correlation between FL anxiety and FL performance was —.34 (p < .01). FL listening anxiety had the strongest correlation with FL listening performance. Both FL reading anxiety and test anxiety had a weaker correlation with FL performance as compared to other types of anxiety. The anxiety—performance correlation remained stable across groups with different FL proficiency levels, suggesting that the role of FL anxiety should not be ignored regardless of the FL learners' proficiency level. As compared to language family, lexical similarity was found to have a more decisive modulating effect on the anxiety—performance correlation. However, language family and lexical similarity may interact to affect the anxiety—performance correlation. Finally, a metaregression analysis showed that age could affect the correlation between FL anxiety and performance.
Journal Article
Social networking for language education
\"Social media are applications that have a networking dimension at the heart of their use. They attract language learners, teachers and providers for different reasons, although they are a controversial issue in language education as we lack evidence whether and how they promote language learning. This book studies the impact of networking with the social media on language learning, through a collection of chapters offering theoretical perspectives and empirical studies of learner experiences in a wide range of networking settings, illustrating through a variety of teaching as well as research methodologies. Through focusing on communities and socialization, together the editors and contributors help to identify priority issues (such as identity and community-building) that need attention if today's social media culture is to work to the benefit of language learners. \"-- Provided by publisher.
BOOK
Language Distance Moderates the Effect of a Mixed-Language Environment on New-Word Learning for 4-Year-Old Children
As bilingual families increase, the phenomenon of language mixing among children in mixed-language environments has gradually attracted academic attention. This study aims to explore the impact of language mixing on vocabulary acquisition in bilingual children and whether language distance moderates this impact. We recruited two groups of bilingual children, Chinese–English bilinguals and Chinese–Japanese bilinguals, to learn two first-language new words in a monolingual environment and a mixed-language environment, respectively. The results showed that the participants could successfully recognize the novel words in the code-switching sentences. However, when we compared the performance of the two groups of bilingual children, we found that the gaze time proportion of the Chinese–English bilingual children under the code-switching condition was significantly higher than that of the Chinese–Japanese bilingual children, while there was no significant difference under the monolingual condition. This suggests that language mixing has an inhibitory effect on vocabulary acquisition in bilingual children and that this inhibitory effect is influenced by language distance, that is, the greater the language distance, the stronger the inhibitory effect. This study reveals the negative impact of language mixing on vocabulary acquisition in bilingual children and also implies that there may be some other influencing factors, so more research is needed on different types of bilingual children.
Journal Article
Measuring Language Distance of Isolated European Languages
Phylogenetics is a sub-field of historical linguistics whose aim is to classify a group of languages by considering their distances within a rooted tree that stands for their historical evolution. A few European languages do not belong to the Indo-European family or are otherwise isolated in the European rooted tree. Although it is not possible to establish phylogenetic links using basic strategies, it is possible to calculate the distances between these isolated languages and the rest using simple corpus-based techniques and natural language processing methods. The objective of this article is to select some isolated languages and measure the distance between them and from the other European languages, so as to shed light on the linguistic distances and proximities of these controversial languages without considering phylogenetic issues. The experiments were carried out with 40 European languages including six languages that are isolated in their corresponding families: Albanian, Armenian, Basque, Georgian, Greek, and Hungarian.
Journal Article
Mobile learning : languages, literacies and cultures
\"This book is a wide-ranging exploration of the use of mobile devices for teaching and learning language and literacies. It investigates the particular qualities of mobile devices which open up new educational possibilities, and examines the agendas behind the use of these tools in the developed and developing world alike. A history of the development of the hardware and software leads into a detailed study of how mobile devices can be used to teach language, which language areas and skills are already being taught around the world, and how the teaching of literacy, including digital literacies, can be supported. Eighteen case studies from across the globe are complemented by 13 vignettes by experienced mobile educators, thus building up a rich picture of contemporary mobile learning as well as sketching an outline of likely future developments\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Measuring language distance for historical texts in Basque
Measuring distance between languages, dialects and language varieties, both synchronically and diachronically, is a topic of growing interest in NLP. Based on our Syntactically Annotated Historical COrpus in BAsque (SAHCOBA) and previous work in perplexity-based language distance proposed by Gamallo, Pichel and Alegria (2017, 2020), we have compared historical corpora with current texts in the standard variety and calculated the language distances between them. As the standard Basque is based on the central dialects, the starting hypothesis is that the oldest texts and the dialects on the extremes will be the most distant. The results obtained have largely confirmed the thesis of traditional dialectology: peripheral dialects show a strong idiosyncrasy and are more distant from the rest.
Journal Article
The Use of Mobile Instant Messaging in English Language Teaching: The Case of South Korea
While learning management systems and video conferencing platforms have become a pivotal means for implementing emergency remote learning during the COVID-19 pandemic, the integration of mobile technologies into online teaching has been largely recommended in order to create an interactive educational environment. Focusing on the case of an English Language Program in South Korea, this study investigates the actual use of mobile instant messaging (MIM) applications as a learning aid in online language classrooms and how this was implemented in creating interactive language learning environments during the current outbreak. Based on a questionnaire survey collected from 979 students, it then compares students’ level of perceived satisfaction with their language learning and communication in online language classrooms between the group of students that used MIM during instruction and the group that did not. The discussion presented in this paper provides language educators, school administrators and policymakers at all levels with practical suggestions and ideas to consider, given that our daily communication has become highly dependent on and is increasingly mediated by mobile digital communication technologies and new media.
Journal Article
The Power of Major Trade Languages in Trade and Foreign Direct Investment
While the effects of cultural disparity and common institutional foundations on international trade and foreign direct investment (FDI) have been much analyzed, little analysis of languages' transaction costs has been done in either the international relations or international business literatures. This paper integrates literature from international political economy, international business and economics, and linguistics, to examine the transaction costs of languages under three different measures of language closeness, same language, direct communication, and language distance. Language is both a tool in international economic transactions and a vehicle to transmit cultural values, but our results point out that major trade languages are employed differently in international trade and in FDI. Communication costs, for both FDI and international trade, show a hierarchy, with English the most inexpensive among major trade languages. We introduce the concept of language intensity to explain why communication costs are much more important in FDI than in international trade. Major trade languages may obtain considerable power from their economic use; we examine the asymmetric nature of this power. We empirically test these ideas in gravity equation models.
Journal Article