Authentic Materials – Enhancing Language Acquisition and Cultural Awareness

Enhancing Authentic Web Pages for Language Learners

Second language acquisition research since the 90s has emphasized the importance of supporting awareness of language categories and forms, and input enhancement techniques have been proposed to make target language features more salient for the learner. We present an NLP architecture and webbased implementation providing automatic visual input enhancement for web pages. Learners freely choose t...

Enhancing Authentic Texts for Language Learners

Using NLP for Enhancing Second Language Acquisition

This study presents SMILLE, a system that draws on the Noticing Hypothesis and on input enhancements, addressing the lack of salience of grammatical information in online documents chosen by a given user. By means of input enhancements, the system can draw the user’s attention to grammar, which could possibly lead to a higher intake per input ratio for metalinguistic information. The system rec...

Metalinguistic awareness and reading acquisition in the Spanish language.

This research was designed to establish the importance of phonological awareness and print awareness in learning to read Spanish. A sample of 136 preliterate Spanish children (70 boys and 66 girls) whose ages ranged from 5.1 to 6.6 years (average age 5.6 years) participated in the study. The results, using path analysis, from this longitudinal study support the existence of a relationship betwe...

Language development and acquisition in children

Language acquisition is a natural developmental process and is unique to Homo sapiens in which a child acquiring his or her mother tongue as a first language.  The simplest theory of language development is that children learn language by imitating adult language. A second possibility is that children acquire language through conditioning. Noam Chomsky put forward innateness hypothesis. Piaget ...