Search results for "PIM"

Why Digital Games Can Be Advantageous in Vocabulary Learning

2021

Vocabulary learning is an integral part of language learning; however, it is difficult. Although there are many techniques proposed for vocabulary learning and teaching, researchers still strive to find effective methods. Recently, digital games have shown potentials in enhancing vocabulary acquisition. A majority of studies in digital game-based vocabulary learning (DGBVL) literature investigate the effectiveness of DGBVL tasks. In other words, there are enough answers to what questions in DGBVL literature whereas why questions are rarely answered. Finding such answers help us learn more about the structure of the DGBVL tasks and their effects on vocabulary learning. Hence, to achieve this…

Migrant women, work, and investment in language learning : Two success stories

2019

Abstract In the media, migrant mothers are often portrayed as uneducated, having trouble learning a new language, and preferring to stay at home rather than entering paid employment. This article offers a contrasting point of view as a result of examining how two migrant women narrativize their experiences of language learning and working-life-related integration during a three-year period. Specific attention is paid to how the women make sense of their language use over time, and how this may have contributed to their integration into working life and the wellbeing of their families. Interview data was analyzed using the short story analytical approach, focusing on both the content and the…

Recycling a genre for news automation: The production of Valtteri the Election Bot

2020

Abstract The amount of available digital data is increasing at a tremendous rate. These data, however, are of limited use unless converted into a user-friendly form. We took on this task and built a natural language generation (NLG) driven system that generates journalistic news stories about elections without human intervention. In this paper, after presenting an overview of state-of-the-art technologies in NLG, we explain systematically how we identified and then recontextualized the determinant aspects of the genre of an online news story in the algorithm of our NLG software. In the discussion, we introduce the key results of a user test we carried out and some improvements that these re…

Editorial : Networks Applied in Science Education Research

2020

Science education research is, in many ways, involved with exploring relational aspects of diverse elements that affect students’ learning outcomes; at one end, the elements may be concepts to be learned, and at the other end, the relations between students in different types of learning settings and environments and, ultimately, how such elements may interact [...]

Combining expertise from linguistics and tourism: a tale of two cities

2020

This case study presents the results of an interdisciplinary Virtual Exchange (VE) that was arranged between Finnish and Polish students in 2019. During their six-week collaboration, the students of language studies at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland, worked in teams together with their Polish peers specialising in information and communications technology and management in tourism at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poland. The international teams combined their linguistic and tourism-promotion expertise, and, using collaborative digital tools, grappled with the tasks of analysing the official municipal city websites and promoting the lesser-known aspects of their sister cities (…

Studying the visual and material dimensions of education and learning

2018

Visual Methods in Researching Language Practices and Language Learning: Looking at, Seeing, and Designing Language

2016

The changing ways of using language and various understandings of what language is have consequences for the way we research language practices and language learning. When engaging in social contact, people use diverse and complex forms, modes, and varieties of language to communicate, and moreover, these resources often include icons, images, and other semiotic ways of meaning making. Visuality thus has a natural position in people’s language practices. In this chapter, we discuss how visual methods have been adopted and used as a methodological tool in researching language practices and language learning. With this focus, attention is geared to the materiality of language, on the one hand…

Material scaffolding : Supporting the comprehension of migrant cleaners at work

2016

Linguistic diversity is growing in labour markets throughout Europe, including Finland, where cleaning is the most common job for immigrants. This paper explores material scaffolding provided for second language users in tasks involved in cleaning work. The notion of ‘scaffolding’ refers to temporary and adaptive support, and here the emphasis is especially on ‘material scaffolding’, that is, material artefacts and body movements employed in mentoring. The theoretical framework of the study is van Lier’s (2004) ecological perspective on language learning, and a discourse-ethnographic perspective of nexus analysis (Scollon and Scollon 2004) is adopted to analyse the ethnographic data collect…

Relationship between students' opinions, background factors and learning outcomes: Finnish 9th graders learning English

2017

CLIL: A European Approach to Bilingual Education

2016

Content and language integrated learning (CLIL) is a term used especially in Europe for forms of bilingual education where an additional language, in most cases English, is used as the language of instruction in non‐language school subjects. This chapter outlines the development of CLIL, embedded both in European level policies and in growing awareness of the new orientations to language learning introduced, for example, in language immersion research. Because of its potential to serve as a context for meaningful language use and situated language learning, CLIL has been regarded by EU institutions as an important instrument to foster European citizens’ bi‐ and multilingualism, to be offere…