This paper seeks to explore the concept of the digital divide by critiquing the notion of the digital native and its relationship to the legal conception of technology transfer and sited knowledge. It is the contention of this paper that technology transfer is key in developmental issues currently facing the international community in general, and is the first and paramount step in bridging the...

This article presents a selective overview of studies that have investigated how advanced adult second language (L2) learners process morphologically complex words. The studies reported here have used different kinds of experimental tasks (including speeded grammaticality judgments, lexical decision, or priming) to examine three domains of morphological processing (regular and irregular inflect...

This article analyzes the digital native–digital immigrant dichotomy based on the results of a small-scale study conducted at the University of Toronto, Faculty of Dentistry, regarding students’ and faculty members’ perceptions toward the implementation of digital learning technologies in the curriculum. The first element chosen for measurement was user perception of the impact on learning of b...

This study explores the efficacy of an approach to native language identification that utilizes grammatical, rhetorical, semantic, syntactic, and cohesive function categories comprised of key n-grams. The study found that a model based on these categories of key n-grams was able to successfully predict the L1 of essays written in English by L2 learners from 11 different L1 backgrounds with an a...

Language transfer, the characteristic second language usage patterns caused by native language interference, is investigated by Second Language Acquisition (SLA) researchers seeking to find overused and underused linguistic features. In this paper we develop and present a methodology for deriving ranked lists of such features. Using very large learner data, we show our method’s ability to find ...

The past few decades have witnessed the rapid development of information and communication technology around the world, as well as continuing efforts to introduce technology into K12 schools. To gauge the success of integrating technology into classrooms, how end users, including teachers and students, accept and use technology while overcoming a new kind of digital gap needs to be investigated...

We examine different ensemble methods, including an oracle, to estimate the upper-limit of classification accuracy for Native Language Identification (NLI). The oracle outperforms state-of-the-art systems by over 10% and results indicate that for many misclassified texts the correct class label receives a significant portion of the ensemble votes, often being the runner-up. We also present a pi...

Native Language Identification (NLI) is a task aimed at determining the native language (L1) of learners of second language (L2) on the basis of their written texts. To date, research on NLI has focused on relatively small corpora. We apply NLI to the recently released EFCamDat corpus which is not only multiple times larger than previous L2 corpora but also provides longitudinal data at several...

This paper tests a theory of social uses of the Internet (L opez-Sintas, Filimon, & GarcíaAlvarez, 2012), inspired by the work of Bourdieu (1984, 1986, 1989), outside the Spanish national context in which it was initially formulated. Using the OECD's PISA 2012 data for Germany and Norway, it specifically seeks to uncover differences in patterns of Information and Communication Technologies usag...

In this paper, we describe the approach of the ItaliaNLP Lab team to native language identification and discuss the results we submitted as participants to the essay track of NLI Shared Task 2017. We introduce for the first time a 2-stacked sentencedocument architecture for native language identification that is able to exploit both local sentence information and a wide set of general–purpose f...