The present study explores students’ experience in teaching English as a Second Language (ESL). Its approaches range from traditional to  interactive lectures which include e-learning tools. The purpose of different lecturing approaches is to promote active learning as part of learner-centred education, among tertiary students. This exploratory study examined responses from over 70 ESL students about their preferences in the lecturing presented to them. Results indicated that the students selected the game-based online platform, “Kahoot!”, as the best lecturing approach for understanding the course..

793 hits

Communicative  content  in  human  communication  involves  expressivity  of  socio-affective  states.  Research  in  Linguistics,  Social Signal  Processing  and  Affective Computing  in  par­  ticular, highlights the importance  of affect, emotion  and attitudes as sources of information for  communicative  content.   Attitudes,  considered  as socio-affective states of speakers,  are  conveyed  through a multitude of signals during communication.  Understanding  the expres­ sion of  attitudes of speakers is essential  for establishing  successful  communication.  Taking the  empirical  approach  to studying  attitude expressions,  the main objective  of this  research is  to contribute  to the development  of an  automatic  attitude classification system  through  a  fusion of  multimodal  signals expressed  by speakers  in  video biogs.  The present  study  de­  scribes a new communicative genre of self-expres.....

1225 hits

Speaking ability is one of the integral language components in English language acquisition. This ability is a challenging one to master for ESL learners as it involves several linguistic and non-linguistic features in presenting ideas and it is frequently associated with anxiety. Public speaking anxiety is a common issue faced by students learning a second language. Feelings such as stage frights and nervousness could contribute to their anxiety in communicating using the target language. Other than that, the classroom environment, among other factors such as instructor and peer pressure, could also pose as threats for students particularly in public speaking settings. The present study aims to investigate whether public speaking anxiety can be alleviated through the use of an online platform, video blogs. Creation of personal video blogs could potentially help learners by providing a safe and non-threatening learning environment in practising their public speaking skills. T.....

714 hits

This paper investigates the use of asynchronous online role-play as a learning technique to improve ESL learners willingness to communicate. This study proposes two research objectives; to investigate the significant difference in ESL learners willingness to communicate before and after performing asynchronous role-play and to identify factors that impact the ESL learners willingness to communicate. A mixed-methods approach is used to understand the impact of the intervention. A set of questionnaires, reflective journal entries and a semi-structured interview were administered to tertiary level ESL students. Results from this study revealed that willingness to communicate among the participants in the treatment group significantly increased with the aid of asynchronous online role-play. Other findings identified factors such as self-confidence, teamwork, linguistic and non-linguistic factors as well as technical skills that show the feasibility of the asynchronous online role-play. The.....

156 hits