the study aimed at investigating whether the retention of vocabulary acquired incidentally is dependent upon the amount of task-induced involvement. immediate and delayed retention of twenty unfamiliar words was examined in three learning tasks( listening comprehension + group discussion, listening comprehension + dictionary checking + summary writing in l1, and listening comprehension + dictio...

Podcasting is an innovative, asynchronous communication tool. A pilot study was conducted to assess the utility of podcasting as an educational tool for undergraduate medical students. A paper-and-pencil questionnaire was developed and distributed to the 40 first-year students enrolled in the francophone stream of the medical curriculum at the University of Ottawa, Canada. A majority of partici...

Educators have started incorporating iPods for academic purposes and a growing interest exists in using podcasting as an educational tool. However, it remains uncertain whether podcasting will hit the critical mass and become an indispensable teaching tool for the classroom. In this regard, it is critical to evaluate the adoption experience of the faculty and identify the benefits and challenge...

In late 2004, a new method of publishing multimedia broadcasts on the Internet became popular called ‘Podcasting’. Podcasting incorporates existing feed description formats, namely RSS 2.0 (Really Simple Syndication), to deliver various enclosed files which allows users to subscribe to feeds, receiving updates periodically. Originally intended for self-publishing and syndication of audio files,...

Today’s speech recognition systems are able to recognize arbitrary sentences over a large but finite vocabulary. However, many important speech recognition tasks feature an open, constantly changing vocabulary. (E.g. broadcast news transcription, translation of political debates, etc. Ideally, a system designed for such open vocabulary tasks would be able to recognize arbitrary, even previously...

a long-standing debate among the vocabulary researchers is the depth of processing to learn vocabulary. this paper is a quantitative research which considers a revision in the “involvement load hypothesis” proposed by laufer and hulstijn in 2001. it investigates the role of proficiency and evaluation in this hypothesis in order to better reveal its potential contribution to vocabulary learning....

In this study we examine in some detail the effectiveness of enhanced podcasting compared with traditional face-to-face class meeting. Enhanced podcasting goes beyond simply recording the audio portion of a lecture. It may include the video footage from the class meeting or, as in our case, the presented material (including each written pen stroke) exactly as seen by students sitting in the cla...

The main point of our study was to examine the vocabulary knowledge of pupils in grades 3-6, and in particular the relative reading vocabulary disadvantage of hearing-impaired pupils. The achievements of 394 pupils with normal hearing and 106 pupils with a hearing impairment were examined on two vocabulary assessment tasks: a lexical decision task and a use decision task. The target words in bo...

This study investigates the conditions under which graphical information can support reading comprehension in a second language. This paper presents results of an experimental study in which reading comprehension of foreign students in two different environments was compared: vocabulary learning only vs. vocabulary and grammar plus graphic tasks. The results indicate that tasks decreasing gramm...

Histogram pyramid representations computed from a vocabulary tree of visual words have proven valuable for a range of image indexing and recognition tasks; however, they have only used a single, fixed partition of feature space. We present a new efficient algorithm to incrementally compute set-of-trees (forest) vocabulary representations, and show they improve recognition and indexing performan...