Talking about oneself

This research focused on the description of lexical sophistication in LLT Journal: A Journal on Language and Language Teaching. To obtain the description of lexical sophistication in LLT Journal: A Journal on Language and Language Teaching, the researcher used a corpus software called Tool for the Automatic Analysis of Lexical Sophistication (TAALES). Sixty-six articles published in 2016, 2017 and 2018 were used as the data of this study. There were five descriptions of lexical sophistication in LLT Journal: A Journal on Language and Language Teaching, namely word frequency, word range, n-gram, academic list and word information. The word frequency (87%) showed the good amount of percentage in the articles. Word range (87%) showed the use of words in the articles were delivered properly. N-gram (35%) showed the sign of low lexical sophistication scores. Academic list (15%) showed low lexical sophistication scores. Word information (60%) showed high lexical sophistication scores. The percentage of each description of lexical sophistication showed that the academic list gained the lowest percentage among the other descriptions of lexical sophistication. It can be inferred that the academic list aspect in LLT Journal: A Journal on Language and Language Teaching needs to be upgraded.

This study investigated the feasibility of using artificial intelligence (AI)-generated reformulations as written feedback in second language (L2) writing contexts. A comparative analysis was conducted to assess the degree of lexical resemblance between reformulated texts by human individuals and those by AI. Following Cohen's definition of reformulation, seven first language (L1) English as a foreign language (EFL) university instructors and three types of AI chatbots − ChatGPT-3.5, Claude2 and Bing Chat Creative Mode − reformulated picture description narratives written by five L1 Japanese EFL university students. Utilizing corpus analysis tools, the study examined text lengths, lexical sophistication, lexical diversity and incorporation of new vocabulary and multiword units. The findings revealed that among all the reformulator types, human-generated reformulations most closely resembled the original drafts in text length and vocabulary usage. Furthermore, among the AI systems, Bing Chat Creative Mode was found to be the most comparable to human reformulators in these aspects. In contrast, ChatGPT-3.5 and Claude2, showcased more advanced vocabulary and greater lexical diversity. The study concludes with pedagogical implications.

BackgroundSmartphone addiction is a growing social problem with adverse health outcomes. There are few comparative studies in Asia that examine factors associated with smartphone addiction. The current study aimed to address this research gap by presenting a comparative analysis of factors associated with smartphone addiction in Japan and Thailand, two countries heterogeneous in both their level of economic development and culture.MethodsParticipant data were collected using two population-based surveys. Participants were high school students in grade 11, aged 16–17 years old, and were selected using quota sampling in Japan in 2014 and random sampling in Thailand in 2016. The outcome of interest was smartphone addiction, measured using a modified version of the Young Diagnostic Questionnaire for Internet Addiction. Multiple logistic regression analysis was performed to determine factors associated with smartphone addiction (gender; nationality; family connectedness; and average time spent on smartphone per day).ResultsThis study included a total of 7694 students, 6585 students from Japan and 1109 students from Thailand. The prevalence of smartphone addiction was 35.9% among Thai students and 12% among Japanese students. Thai students were more likely to have smartphone addiction than Japanese students (AOR 2.76; 95% CI: 2.37–3.30). Being female was associated with increased odds of smartphone addiction in both Japanese (AOR 1.53; 95% CI: 1.32–1.78) and Thai students (AOR 1.34; 95% CI: 1.01–1.78). The parental connectedness variables “my parents noticed when I was unhappy” (AOR 0.77; 95% CI: 0.62–0.96) and “my parents noticed when I did something good” (AOR 0.78, 95% CI: 0.61–0.99) were associated with lower odds of smartphone addiction among Japanese students.ConclusionSmartphone addiction was more prevalent among Thai adolescents than Japanese adolescents, and more prevalent among females than males in both countries. Interventions for reducing smartphone addiction should take into account both context and gender, and should leverage the protective effect of parental connectedness.

Lexical complexity, generally understood as a multidimensional construct consisting of lexical density, sophistication, and diversity, has been recognized as an important construct in first language acquisition and second language acquisition. A large variety of lexical complexity measures have been proposed by researchers to study its relationship to second language learners’ writing and/or speaking proficiency. While this line of research has generated fruitful results for languages such as English and other Indo-European languages, less is known about how it may be applicable to a typologically distance language such as Chinese. In this paper, we report the design of a computational tool for automating the measurement of lexical complexity with 25 indices. The Batch Mode of the software supports analyses of a large number of .txt files and outputs results to a .CSV file suitable for importation into statistical packages for further analyses. In an example application, we analyzed 87 texts from three distinct registers (academic prose, fiction, and press reportage) from the Lancaster Corpus of Mandarin Chinese (McEnery and Xiao, The Lancaster Corpus of Mandarin Chinese: A corpus for monolingual and contrastive language study, in Proc. Fourth Int. Conf. Language Resources and Evaluation, eds. M. Lino, M. Xavier, F. Ferreira, R. Costa and R. Silva, (European Language Resources Association, Paris, 2014), pp. 1175–1178) and explored how register variation may manifest in lexical complexity. The ANOVA analyses showed linear increase in multiple lexical sophistication and diversity measures across academic prose, fiction and press reportage. The results showed that press reportage has lower lexical density, but higher lexical sophistication and diversity than academic prose; fiction also has higher lexical diversity than academic prose. This paper concluded with discussions of potential pedagogical applications for Chinese language teaching and learning.

In the current study, we examined the effect of cognitive apprenticeship with contextualized language instruction on students with LD (SWLDs) and English learners’ (ELs) ability to compose scientific explanations using a multiple-probe, multiple-baseline single-case design. Six middle school students (three in each subgroup) participated in ten 30-min sessions in an after-school program. The intervention was implemented with high fidelity, and all participants believed they benefited from the writing instruction. After instruction, SWLDs and ELs had similar gains. They wrote better explanations, as demonstrated by substantial improvements in the quality of their causal and mechanistic reasoning ( τ = 1), grammatical and lexical sophistication ( τ = 1), and holistic writing ( τ = 0.95–0.96). Changes in writing performance were maintained for 4 or more weeks. We discuss implications of these findings for science classrooms and suggest areas for future writing research.

Purpose– Against a backdrop of legislative and policy changes, this paper assesses the extent to which the over-65 age-group is moving from the margins to the mainstream of UK employment. The purpose of this paper is to fill a gap in HR research and practice which, it is argued, has paid relatively little attention to the over-65s.Design/methodology/approach– The analysis draws on three waves of the Labour Force Survey (LFS) (2001, 2008, 2014), to explore the extent to which organisational, occupational and sectoral marginalisation of the over-65s has changed in the twenty-first century.Findings– The results show that the share of 65-69 year olds working as employees doubled between 2001 and 2014, primarily because long-term established employees worked longer. Overrepresentations of lower-level “Lopaq” occupations reduced, and over-65s became more integrated across occupations and sectors.Research limitations/implications– More research is needed to understand the factors driving the steady move from the margins to the mainstream (e.g. LFS does not measure pensions), and future research on the older workforce should automatically include workers in this age-group.Practical implications– The discussion considers the implications for managerial practice, in a context of increasingly age-diverse workforces.Originality/value– This paper addresses a gap in research into later life working and also demonstrates the ways in which the nature of employment among the over-65s is changing, thereby challenging some of the assumptions about those who work into later life and how they are – or should be managed.

Do Male Undergraduates Write More Argumentatively?

Statutory language in English is difficult for the average person to understand. Although the plain language movement has gained momentum, the US federal government has been slow to change guidelines for writing statutes, resulting in linguistically complex language. This complexity is potentially problematic if residents cannot understand the laws by which they are bound. The present study aims to evaluate the lexical complexity of federal statues compared with three registers of American English. Examining lexical sophistication, lexical diversity, and lexical density, this study determines that statutory language is far more lexically sophisticated and nominally dense and is far less lexically diverse and content word dense than television/movie subtitles, news articles, and even academic journal articles. These results indicate that statutory language is lexically distinctive and complex in specific ways, which provides additional insight into why legal language may be difficult to comprehend. Suggestions are made about how statutory language might be simplified.

A large body of strategy research has highlighted the many ways in which managerial cognition is a key driver in the strategic decision making of firms. Much of this research is driven by a central tenet of behavioral strategy; that is, managers face quantities of information that are beyond their cognitive capacities (Simon, 1947). Managers cope with this cognitive limitation by leveraging simplified representations of the information they expect will be important when making strategic decisions — such as who their competitors are (Porac, Thomas, & Baden-Fuller, 1989) or what product features matter (Benner & Tripsas, 2012). These representations become particularly consequential when a firm’s external environment changes, rendering initial representations obsolete (Tripsas & Gavetti, 2000). Despite the recognition of the critical role that cognition plays in managers’ strategic decision making, little research has systematically assessed the performance consequences of managerial cognition. For instance, what are the mechanisms that make one mental representation perform higher than another? How might firms’ heterogeneous representations interact in competitive environments? This gap in the research has prompted numerous calls from scholars to bring managerial cognition into a more central light in behavioral strategy research (Csaszar, 2018: 607; Gavetti, Levinthal, & Ocasio, 2007: 530; Posen, Keil, Kim, & Meissner, 2018: 209). This symposium recognizes that a key reason for this gap in further research is the methodological challenge of understanding and analyzing cognition. Given that cognitive processes occur largely within managers’ minds, how should management scholars study cognitive differences and their impact on performance? As such, this symposium proposes bringing together a group of scholars from diverse theoretical and methodological backgrounds to share their expertise on cognition and competition, and to facilitate future research on this important topic. The symposium aims to achieve three key goals. First, the symposium will explore recent research in the area of how cognition affects firm performance. For instance, how firms vary in their representations of their competitive environment, how managers’ capabilities shape the heterogeneity we observe in firms’ representations, and how firms can actively shape consumer perceptions of market categories. Second, given the methodological challenges of studying mechanisms that occur inside managers’ minds, this symposium also aims to share opinions on how to overcome the challenges of conducting and publishing empirical research on cognition. Third, we hope to encourage future research on the topics listed above by sharing theoretical insights on how strategy research on managerial cognition can be furthered.

Japanese college students’ akogare (meaning “longing”) for an idealized West has conventionally been researched and discussed under the assumption that the West is synonymous with Anglophone countries and that an encounter with the West is categorically an international experience. The present study provides new insights by exploring Japanese college students’ longing for an idealized France through a content analysis of blogs and reflective entries written by students during or after participating in a French study abroad program. The analysis reveals that Japanese students from prestigious universities display a high level of satisfaction irrespective of how well they are able to use French. This finding, which is intertwined with the nature of fun-oriented study abroad programs, is also related to the widespread use of English in Europe. The linguistic discovery reminds students of the overriding global status of English vis-à-vis French as a regional language. The study provides future research directions and pedagogical implication in light of (1) increasingly fierce competition for the securement of language course takers, which drives the institutional reproduction of language ideologies and the implementation of fun study abroad programs, and (2) the long-term effectiveness of such ideology-driven survival strategies amid the changing popularity of foreign languages in Japan and elsewhere.

The effect of instructor stance on ESL speakers' language production in a conversation group setting

One of the main assumptions of Complex Dynamic Systems Theory (CDST) is that internally complex language subsystems develop non-linearly while entering different kinds of supportive, competitive, conditional, or dual relationships which are characterised by trade-offs caused by learners’ restricted cognitive processing, especially in foreign language speech. The present paper belongs to a short series of articles which examines various aspects of the development of L2 English speech at secondary school on basis of the same longitudinal, exploratory, and corpus-based case study. The aim of this paper is to investigate the dynamics of the relationships between fluency and both syntactic and lexical complexity in the speech of a good, average, and poor language learner at the level of secondary school. Syntactic complexity was investigated in terms of general sentence complexity, subordination, coordination, and nominalisation, whereas lexical complexity was construed in terms of lexical density, sophistication, and variation. In general, the results indicated predominantly supportive relationships between fluency and different measures of syntactic complexity but competitive or dual relationships between fluency and lexical complexity. However, the relationships between the selected variables fluctuated over time and often differed in the case of a good, average, and poor language learner.

Explanatory variables for Japanese students' expository writing in English: An exploratory study

In previous work on mobile learning, students used cellphones and pocket computers (PDAs) primarily to view study materials and answer quizzes. But anecdotes imply that Japanese students type faster on cellphones than on desktop PCs, suggesting that students could use mobile devices to take notes and write reports. This paper is a first quantitative investigation into the ability of Japanese students to enter text on mobile devices. In 2-minute transcription tasks, 24 Japanese university students typed Japanese: English at 8:7 wpm on miniature QWERTY thumb keyboards, 10:9 on onscreen QWERTY keyboards, 17:5 on cellphones, 23:14 on desktop PCs, and 31:30 with pencil and paper. 5-minute composition speeds were slightly less in the student's native Japanese, and about half in English. Transcription errors were rare in Japanese, but more frequent in English, especially on mobile devices. Students preferred typing on desktops and cellphones. This data suggests that Japanese students could take notes and write reports on their mobile phones, but would require training before using PDAs and writing in English. Future work includes longitudinal studies learning various input methods, including handwriting recognition.

This study is devoted to understanding the adjustment issues Japanese and Korean international students face in Thai international higher education. An exploratory study of 15 visiting Korean college students and 15 visiting Japanese college students in Thai international programs was conducted using qualitative methods. A series of 30 face-to-face in-depth interviews regarding the participants' sociocultural adjustment to their host community was conducted in 2015-2016. Participants responded to open-ended questions regarding their adjustment experiences and perceptions of the host culture. The interview data was thematically coded into several categories. Participants' experiences were diverse and ranged from very subtle forms of discrimination and stereotyping to sexual harassment. The most frequently reported impediments to sociocultural adjustment included Thai language issues, excessive undesirable attention from the host community, academic adjustment, and difficulty establishing friendships with the host nationals. The most commonly reported coping strategies reported were the use of social support networks and social isolation from the host community. Implications for international relations departments and international programs within a Thai context are discussed.