Master of Arts / Department of Modern Languages / Douglas K. Benson / In this report, I present my personal teaching philosophy and the instructional practices that I believe best contribute to a successful second language classroom. Comprising the teaching philosophy chapter are sections concerning: the role of the instructor, the three parameters of post-method pedagogy, the maximization of learning opportunities and minimalization of perceptual mismatches, the need for negotiated interaction, the promotion of learner autonomy, the teaching of higher order thinking skills, the advantages of contextualized input, and the development of students' cultural consciousness. The instructional practices chapter describes my approach to grammar instruction, vocabulary instruction and the implementation of authentic texts. To conclude, I offer a model five-day lesson plan, complete with structured pedagogical activities, contextualized to the theme of food, which will integrate the ideas and concepts discussed in the philosophy and practices chapters.

Master of Arts / Department of Modern Languages / Janice McGregor / The current study investigates phrase-initial parts of speech as found in intermediate German textbooks and compares these findings to utterance-initial parts of speech as found in spontaneous speech in German-language interactions. This is important, because learning and using German word order appears to be a struggle for German learners whose first language is English. Research has shown that possible word order realizations in a language are partly restricted by the parts of speech system of that language (Hengeveld, Rijkhoff, & Siewierska, 2004; Vulanovic & Köhler, 2009). This is important because English and German have different parts of speech systems (Hengeveld et. al., 2004; Hengeveld & van Lier, 2010). Doherty (2005) analyzed English to German translations of an international science magazine and found that almost every second sentence begins differently. Instead, this study looks at talk in contexts of use and compares these findings with textbook language because, in recent years, communicative approaches to language teaching have been adopted by a large number of US German language programs. One would thus expect that textbooks used in these classrooms would contain at least some input with constructions that are typical to contexts of use. The results of the study indicate that construction-initial parts of speech in textbooks and in contexts of use are quite different. These differences imply that if it is a communicative approach that is being promoted, textbook authors and German educators would do well to expose students to actual talk from contexts of use so that they might learn to make meaning based on considerations of context.

Master of Arts / Department of Modern Languages / Mary T. Copple / This study investigates the effectiveness of visuals in the language classroom. Two types of visual aids commonly used in the language classroom, video and still pictures, are used to elicit narratives from L2 English speakers, and these narratives are subsequently compared. The data come from eleven international students from a university English Language Program, who voluntarily participated in two separate 15-minute interviews. In each interview session, they were shown either a series of pictures or a video, both depicting a story. Upon completion of the presentation of each visual, participants were asked a prompt question and their narration of the events portrayed in the visuals recorded. The narratives were transcribed and analyzed in order to test (1) if still pictures and video are equally effective in eliciting elaboration in the narratives, defined in this case, as the number of new referents introduced and the number of adjective and verb types produced; and (2) if exposure to still pictures and video elicit narrations of similar length. Both kinds of visuals stimulated learners to create narratives and elaborate on what had been shown in them. The video task elicited narratives roughly 10% longer than the picture task in regards to the raw number of words. When linguistic factors were compared, participants introduced new referents at comparable rates in both tasks while they employed 10% more verb types in the video task. Additionally, the series of still pictures prompted participants to employ a much higher number of adjective types. These observations suggest that a series of still pictures are an effective alternative for video for eliciting narratives. This study provides support for the use of still pictures as an equivalent to videos in situations where videos are less accessible in language classrooms (due to lack of technological access).

Master of Arts / Department of Modern Languages / Douglas K. Benson / Students have opportunity to reach learner autonomy and achieve real world applications utilizing communicative competence, a learner centered environment and comprehensible input, incorporated into a unit for student success. The acquisition of language and culture is facilitated in the classroom environment with low affective filters and comprehensible input combining different learning strategies. The activities in this cultural thematic art unit engage student’s interest and activate his or her background knowledge, making meaningful connections with the unit content and their personal lives. Literature, paintings, grammar and vocabulary enable students to build communicative competence in L2. Language learners collaborate and engage in the target language while simultaneously learning about literature, history and culture and learning how artists and writers represent empathy for others as they process words by various Spanish speakers. Additionally, authentic texts and the use of technology enhance students’ linguistic performance. The unit begins with my teaching philosophy followed by a sequence of activities that allow students to process language while they study the consequences of war on those who are affected by it, and a brief section on potential learning outcomes for those who participate in the activities.

Master of Science / Department of Computing and Information Sciences / William H. Hsu / Machine Translation (MT) is the practice of using computational methods to convert words from one natural language to another. Several approaches have been created since MT’s inception in the 1950s and, with the vast increase in computational resources since then, have continued to evolve and improve. In this thesis I summarize several branches of MT theory and introduce several newly developed software applications, several parsing techniques to improve Japanese-to-English text translation, and a new key algorithm to correct translation errors when converting from Japanese kanji to English. The overall translation improvement is measured using the BLEU metric (an objective, numerical standard in Machine Translation quality analysis). The baseline translation system was built by combining Giza++, the Thot Phrase-Based SMT toolkit, the SRILM toolkit, and the Pharaoh decoder. The input and output parsing applications were created as intermediary to improve the baseline MT system as to eliminate artificially high improvement metrics. This baseline was measured with and without the additional parsing provided by the thesis software applications, and also with and without the thesis kanji correction utility. The new algorithm corrected for many contextual definition mistakes that are common when converting from Japanese to English text. By training the new kanji correction utility on an existing dictionary, identifying source text in Japanese with a high number of possible translations, and checking the baseline translation against other translation possibilities; I was able to increase the translation performance of the baseline system from minimum normalized BKEU scores of .0273 to maximum normalized scores of .081. The preliminary phase of making improvements to Japanese-to-English translation focused on correcting segmentation mistakes that occur when attempting to parse Japanese text into meaningful tokens. The initial increase is not indicative of future potential and is artificially high as the baseline score was so low to begin with, but was needed to create a reasonable baseline score. The final results of the tests confirmed that a significant, measurable improvement had been achieved through improving the initial segmentation of the Japanese text through parsing the input corpora and through correcting kanji translations after the Pharaoh decoding process had completed.

Master of Arts / Department of Modern Languages / Douglas K. Benson / This thesis answers the questions: How should the terms interaction, individualization, and personalization be applied to Computer Aided Language Learning (CALL) software? What progress has been made in their implementation? How can CALL software developers better incorporate them in the future? For each of the three terms, I explain how it is applicable to the CALL software environment by defining it, describing the pedagogical research supporting it, and then giving general guidelines for incorporating it into a CALL software program. I measure the progress of the implementation of the three terms in CALL software through compiling and analyzing data from reviews of 44 software titles. The publication dates of the software titles are from 1981 to 2008. I propose through description and a proof-of-concept software program ways to improve the incorporation of the terms in question into CALL software. As a result of answering the three questions, this thesis shows that the current accepted definitions and ways of implementing interaction, individualization, and personalization need to be improved in order to comply with pedagogical research and make full use of current technology. The general guidelines given in the explanation of each term relative to CALL and the attributes under each term in the analysis of the compilation data provide examples of areas on which to focus development. Additionally, I specifically comment on pedagogically supported attributes within each term that have a weak representation in the software compilation and therefore need more development. In addition, this thesis is accompanied by “Mis vacaciones”, a proof-of-concept software program, which demonstrates ways to improve the incorporation of interaction, individualization, and personalization into CALL software. In “Mis vacaciones”, the learner takes a virtual trip to Nuevo Leon, Nicaragua. The multimedia sent to the learner by a previous traveler shows Nicaraguan city people and the La Gigatona festival. After visiting, the learner is asked to describe the Nicaraguans that they saw. If the learner needs help, Structured Input activities lead the learner to develop the third person singular imperfect form. Buttons in the software environment provide access to internet sources. The learner is able to draw and take photos to create a visual prop to aid in the description task.

Master of Arts / Department of Modern Languages / Young-Ok Yum / Writing well, especially in English, is an asset to anyone who aspires to succeed in the academic or other professional fields in this age of English as a lingua franca. Numerous scholars have investigated errors committed by English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) learners. However, to date there is no empirical study on the error patterns displayed in native Dari speakers’ EFL writing in English and in Dari. The present study investigates error occurrences in 20 native Dari speakers’ English and Dari writing. These participants were English majors attending Balkh University, in Mazar-i-Sharif, Afghanistan. Most of the participants self-identified their English proficiency levels as “advanced.” The data were collected through convenience sampling of the students enrolled in EFL writing courses who voluntarily participated in two writing tasks of different levels of difficulty; they completed these first in English and then a week later in Dari. In order to observe any patterns, all spelling and word choice errors were identified by three independent judges (one Dari instructor at BU, one native-American-English-speaking graduate student in the English Department, and the author who is bilingual and works as an English instructor). All three worked separately initially and then discussed any discrepancies together in person (English) or via Skype (Dari), until they reached consensus. The analysis, concerning the three research hypotheses, supported these findings: (1) as predicted, the native Dari speakers committed a variety of errors similar to learners from previous studies; (2) as predicted, the participants made fewer errors in English than in Dari; and (3) counter to the hypothesis, the results indicated that the participants, when writing in Dari, demonstrated more errors in the simpler tasks; yet, the participants committed more errors in the more complex (versus simpler) English writing task, consistent with this hypothesis.