Learning with Mobile Augmented Reality- and Automatic Speech Recognition-Based Materials for English Listening and Speaking Skills: Effectiveness and Perceptions of Non-English Major English as a Foreign Language Students

Due to the outbreak of COVID 19, an online bilingual curriculum was conducted via "Google Meet." The learning material was developed and implemented by using a smartphone application, STEMUP, based on augmented reality (AR) and automatic speech recognition (ASR) technologies. This study investigated the oral performance and perceptions of learning with STEMUP of ninety non-English major students from several colleges at a technical university in Taiwan. Data were collected from pre- and post-tests and a questionnaire survey. Results indicated that students significantly improved their oral performance and recorded their positive perceptions. Students' oral performance significantly depended on their English proficiency. Their perceptions were not significant related to their English proficiency, gender, or college. Instant feedback and evaluation provided by ASR technology and online "Google" text-to-speech service both embedded in STEMUP helped students notice, modify and improve their listening and speaking skills. They were satisfied with the bilingual curriculum, which helped them increase understanding about content knowledge by the teacher's explanation in Chinese, and improve English listening and speaking skills by learning with STEMUP. This study is a good start in creating an interactive and communicative learning environment where translanguaging is effectively integrated with innovative technologies.

Examining Field Experiences of Teacher Candidates During COVID-19: Systemic Inequities Unveiled for Underserved English Learners in K-12 Grades.

The impact of coronavirus disease 2019 challenged schools and credential programs to adjust pedagogy, but rapid changes impeded equitable practices to K-12 grade English Learners (ELs). The framework stems from critical multicultural education. Data represented 81 credential candidates across three universities. Study confirmed that ELs lacked access to online learning, active engagement with peers/teachers, and differentiated instruction due to rapid changes and uncertainties to their programs.

El Impacto de COVID-19 retó a las escuelas y programas certificados a ajustar su pedagogía, pero cambios rápidos impidieron prácticas egalitarias para estudiantes de inglés (ELs siglas en inglés) en K-12. El marco de referencia se originó en la educación multicultural crítica. La información representó 81 candidatos de credencial a través de tres universidades. El estudio confirmó que ELs no tenían acceso al aprendizaje en línea, al compromiso activo de compañeros/maestros, y a la educación diferenciada debido a los cambios rápidos y la incertidumbre de sus programas.

Collective Reflection to Resist Demoralization: Exploring Bilingual Teachers' Narrative Learning Experiences

This article explores the potential of narrative inquiry in collective spaces as a means to support educators in resisting demoralization in increasingly complex teaching contexts.

Notes from the editors

We are delighted to announce the release of the first issue of the eleventh volume of IJELS. Our January 2023 issue consists of a diverse selection of topics ranging from linguistic literacy to music literacy. The papers you are about to read cover current issues, including, Mitigation Effects on Pedagogy and Resilience, Turkish Language Curriculum and PISA 2018 Reading Skills Test, Pre-service Teachers' Metaphoric Perceptions on Reading and Reading Disability, Effect of Peer-Assisted Techniques on Students' Reading Skills and Attitudes towards Reading, Vocabulary Learning Strategies Used by Saudi University Students in Pair Work, Expert Opinions on Improving Writing Skills, Development of Persuasive Speaking Skills Rubrics, Children's Literature in the Digital Age, Effect of Theatre and Drama Practices on Social Anxiety, School Administrators' Competencies during COVID-19 Outbreak, Adolescents' Personal Values and Self-Efficacy Perceptions, Effect of School Closures on the Teaching and Learning of English during the COVID-19 Pandemic, Bilingualism on the News Headlines, Monolingual Turkish and Bilingual Turkish-Italian Children's Use of Tense-Aspect-Modality Markers, Evaluation on Turkish Teaching Accounts on Instagram, Being a Social Studies Teacher and Student in the COVID-19 Period, Effect of Retro Walking Training on Dynamic Balance in Sedentary Individuals with Hearing Impairment, Sportsmanlike Behaviors and Self-Confidence of School of Physical Education and Sports Students, School Administrators' Agile Leadership and Innovation Management Competencies, Music Education in relation to Social Intelligence and Communication Skills Levels, Evaluation of Students' Cognitive and Conceptual Learning Levels in Middle School Music Lessons, Evaluation of Music Teaching Undergraduate Programs, and Somaesthetics Approaches in Music and Performance Education.

Navigating Older Adults Service Provision during the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Qualitative Study of Bicultural and Bilingual Asian Human Service Workers

The pandemic has spotlighted multiple long-standing inequities among marginalized populations. Of particular concern is the population of older Asian adults with limited English proficiency, who rely heavily on bicultural and bilingual Asian human service workers for culturally and linguistically appropriate service provision. With ever-evolving public health measures implemented during the COVID-19 pandemic, new challenges arose for bicultural and bilingual Asian human service workers to provide timely and appropriate care. To better understand the challenges among bicultural and bilingual Asian human service workers, this qualitative study explores how these workers changed their service provision in assisting older adults with limited English proficiency. Using the purposive sampling strategy, ten bicultural and bilingual Asian human service workers participated in the study that employed a phenomenological approach. Findings suggest that the workers need additional support to create a more comprehensive system of care for their older Asian clients who carry dual cultures and systems during the time of public health emergencies. Implications for social work and human service practice are offered.

"A sense of where we are in the world": First-year bilingual, bicultural teachers from an alternative route to teaching program

The purpose of this study is to examine the experiences of first-year teachers, recently graduated from an Alternative Route to Teaching (ART) program and hired to teach within Spanish-English Dual-language Immersion strands at local schools. To do so, recordings and observations of classroom practice, teacher interviews, and supplementary data from previous coursework were analyzed to address three questions which arose from literature gaps and during fieldwork, namely, 1) How do graduates from an ART program engage and support their emerging bilingual/multilingual learners during the first year of instruction and across a variety of class modalities? 2) In what ways do graduates from an ART program utilize knowledge of (a) their students, parents, and communities, as well as of (b) their own experiences and trajectories as former paraeducators, school insiders, and across culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds? and 3) What are the ways in which graduates from an ART program experience and negotiate their first year as teachers in terms of support and identity? Three conclusions were generated as a result. First, the first-year teacher participants engaged their students through a variety of activities and relations which were marked in contrast to typical depictions of first-year practice, notably in how activities were grounded and authentic, and in how teacher-student interactions were adaptive and relational to student needs. Second, participants leveraged a substantial understanding of student and parent backgrounds to build curriculum and in-class supports which were relevant to students' learning needs. Finally, participants were not immune to many of the difficulties seen in the first year of teachers, despite extensive experience with schools as paraeducators, yet showed a practice quite flexible to student and instructional needs during the onset of COVID-19. In sum, participants engaged their first year of practice in ways which outpace much of the narrative literature surrounding first-year teachers, and did so in ways which were grounded in self-knowledge, as well as knowledge of students, school system, and community. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved)

Drawings + Talk: Capturing the Multimodal Authoring of Emergent Bilinguals through Culturally Responsive Teaching

Hao and Brown explore how a teacher-researcher team created a virtual learning space that embraced culturally relevant/responsive literacy practices and supported multimodal authoring practices for emergent bilingual children during COVID-19. The extenuating circumstances of the pandemic closed many heritage language schools, and there was a need to continue literacy learning for Chinese American children. These factors caused to rethink the best ways to maintain culturally responsive and relevant literacy instruction with young learners in a distance-learning format given the power of this approach to move children toward academic success, cultural competence, and an ability to navigate critical consciousness. Their central question was: How did emergent bilingual children make meaning of stories during a virtual book club driven by culturally responsive literacy practices and a multimodal approach to authoring? In this case, they invited eight children and their parents from Ling's Chinese class to join a virtual book club that met once a week to participate in multimodal authoring surrounding read-alouds of texts connected to Chinese culture and language.

A study of dual-language preschoolers with moderate to severe autism: perspectives and practices of professionals in Boston-area Massachusetts public school districts

The rate of autism continues to increase globally across cultures and languages. Inequities exist in early access to an autism diagnosis and necessary evidence-based education and related services for dual-language children in the U.S. This qualitative dissertation study investigated the perspectives and practices of 10 educators and therapists working in the Boston area of Massachusetts with dual-language preschoolers with moderate to severe autism. Data was collected via semi-structured interviews on Zoom. Practitioners described their commitment to their students and families. Using a social constructivist phenomenological approach, the data analysis of the practitioners' responses resulted in seven main findings. Assessment procedures for special education eligibility determination, monitoring progress, or 3-year-reevaluations did not address the required practice of assessment in the home language. Instructional practices described included early childhood and monolingual special education with little mention of cultural and language factors. Barriers to dual-language instruction were highlighted, leading to the use of primarily monolingual practices in special education and related services. Challenges identified included accessing competent interpreters, the limited availability of early childhood bilingual special education professional development, and rare support from English as a second language (ESL) teachers. Parents' language barriers impacted their understanding of the special education process for their children and led to a delayed start of evidence-based autism services. Priorities for language instruction did not address the social communication needs of dual-language students with autism across settings. Additional barriers were identified regarding student access to appropriate online education and therapy for dual-language preschoolers during the COVID-19 pandemic. A limitation of this study is the research context of the pandemic lockdown, making it challenging to access practitioners and collect data. Recommendations include the development of state standards for teacher preparation and professional development, policy change from monolingual to bilingual early childhood special education, and further research that includes dual-language preschoolers with autism. Using a bilingual special education approach with continuation of the native language and a focus on social communication development across home, school, and communities can support the most significant progress in learning and best quality of life outcomes for dual-language preschoolers with autism and their families. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved)

Exploring experiences of proculturation in international students during the COVID-19 pandemic

This study intends to find what are the experiences of international students semiotically adapting to unfamiliar signs in the United Kingdom before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with six international university students to learn about their experiences of adapting to a new country. Data were analysed using thematic analysis. Two themes were classified as dialogical self in interpersonal adaptation and linguistic elements of semiotic adaptation, each with two subthemes. Participants' experiences of merging self-constructs seem reflective of proculturation theory. The researchers termed ‘language bridges' to refer to social representations dependent on language-specific signs. Some of the participants' self-constructs relied on signs not provided by the environment during the COVID-19 pandemic. Overall, proculturation offers insight into the complex psychological and social processes of adapting to unfamiliar signs. © The Author(s) 2023.

Social stories for Spanish bilingual children with autism spectrum disorder post COVID-19 quarantine

Living through the global COVID-19 pandemic has caused major disruptions in everyday life. For many children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), this disruption has impacted academics, mental health, and ASD-related support services. Now, in this post COVID-19 quarantine time, routines are shifting back to pre-COVID-19 life, while individuals are still dealing with the effects of quarantine. Informed by a review of the literature, a compilation of social stories was created for Spanish bilingual children with ASD. The social stories can be used to aid educators and families of children with ASD in teaching self-regulation skills, strategies to manage worry and anxiety, and personal health and hygiene routines in this post COVID-19 quarantine time. Although a core symptom of ASD is social-communication deficits, the literature reveals that bilingualism does not interfere with language development among children with ASD. As such, the social stories are written in English and Spanish to provide accessibility to Spanish-speaking families, as well as promote consistency of information within the Spanish-speaking home and English-speaking school settings. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved)

To the Problem of Forming Communicative Strategies for Successful Adaptation of Foreign Students Learning Russian Within a Distance Educational Paradigm

Objectives: The article is devoted to the discussion and analysis of the problem of forming communicative strategies for successful adaptation of foreign students learning Russian within a distance educational paradigm. Speaking generally, the problem can be divided into several rather complicated subitems connected with bilingual education: the first aspect is connected with formation of a speaking competence as it is and the second aspect is connected with technical support of this process due to pandemic and post-pandemic restrictions. The problem of technical accessibility of education under the virus spread circumstances turned out to be an essential one because the foreign students came to Russia for study were put in the same conditions as Russian students and were transferred to e-learning no matter they were staying in the country or left for motherland. We should note that the pandemic was the starting point for the development of the latest educational technologies, the introduction of new technical skills, innovative teaching methods and creativity. Digitalization was the only possible way out of the current situation, when there was an urgent necessity to adjust the society life and an educational process by any means. Methodology: The methodology of our research includes several theoretical and empirical investigation methods such as the method of analysis, comparison, experiment and observation. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

Impacts of the COVID-19 disruption on the language and literacy development of monolingual and heritage bilingual children in the United States.

Children who speak one language at home and a different language at school may be at higher risk of falling behind in their academic achievement when schooling is disrupted. The present study examined the effects of COVID-19-related school disruptions on English language and literacy development among monolingual and bilingual children in the US. All children attended English-only schools that implemented varied forms of virtual and hybrid schooling during the pandemic. Pre-COVID-19 and during-COVID-19 examinations were conducted with 237 children (M(SD) age = 7.78 (1.54) at Time 1) from relatively high SES homes, including 95 monolinguals, 75 Spanish-English and 67 Chinese-English bilinguals. The findings revealed different impacts of COVID-19 school disruptions on the present bilingual and monolingual participants. Specifically, between Time 1 and Time 2, monolingual children made age-appropriate improvements in all literacy measurements. Relative to monolinguals, both bilingual groups showed greater gains in vocabulary but lower gains in reading comprehension. Moreover, across groups, children's independent reading practices during COVID-19 were positively associated with children's literacy growth during the pandemic-related schooling disruptions. Taken together, these findings inform theoretical perspectives on learning to read in linguistically diverse children experiencing COVID-19-related schooling disruptions. Supplementary Information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s11145-022-10388-x.

Intergenerational group work and mask making in the Asian American community in a time of COVID-19 and COVID-19-related racism

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Asian Americans faced multiple challenges due to COVID-19 and COVID-19 related racism. The Korean American Association of Greater Philadelphia (KAAGP), in Pennsylvania, decided to work together to fight against COVID-19 from the earliest stages of the pandemic in 2020. Intergenerational group work by more than 350 volunteers empowered the Korean community and promoted public health through the process of making and donating face masks to the broader community. These efforts were transitioned to other marginalized communities that shared a mutual understanding: "We are in this (pandemic) together.” It became clear that the Asian American community needs more culturally nuanced services to be delivered by bicultural and bilingual social workers who understand group work and its potential benefits and impacts on ethnically diverse communities.

Teaching Young Emergent Bilinguals Got a Bit More Challenging

The National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC) states that building bridges between home and school benefits students' development. With online teaching, this translates into informal conversations before class starts or at the end of class as a teacher waits for a virtual classroom to fill up or empty out. Much of teaching language learners relies on fostering relationships with students. The ability to build those relationships can be compromised by the challenges of remote learning. When schools were closed due to the COVID-19 pandemic, many teachers were struggling with questions about how to deliver lessons and engage second language learners online. This article highlights one teacher's experiences and offers some advice based on those experiences and the literature.

Health Misinformation in the Covid-19 Era - Detecting Misinformation on Bi-lingual Corpora using Lexical Features

Social media use spiked amid the COVID-19 pandemic, resulting in an increase in fake news proliferation, especially health misinformation. Many misinformation detection studies have primarily focused on English texts, and of these, very few have examined linguistic features (syntactic, lexical, and semantic). Lexical features such as number of upper-case letters have been shown to improve misinformation detection in English and non-English texts, however, use of lexical features is still in its infancy, and thus warrants further investigation. Therefore, a novel lexical-based health misinformation detection model is proposed using machine learning techniques, specifically focusing on two languages, namely, English, and standard Malay. A new dataset containing fake and real news were developed from a fact- checking portal and local media, targeting news related to COVID-19. Common natural language processing tasks including filtering, tokenization, stemming etc. and lexical feature extraction were administered prior to data modelling. Evaluation on a dataset containing 1060 fake and real news each show Random Forest to yield the best performance with 99.6% for F-measure and accuracy of 96%, followed closely by Support Vector Machine. A similar observation was noted for the Malay corpus. Improved health misinformation detection was observed when linguistic features were included as part of the model, hence implying that the features can be successfully used in detecting fake news. © 2022 IEEE.

"A sense of where we are in the world": First-year bilingual, bicultural teachers from an alternative route to teaching program

The purpose of this study is to examine the experiences of first-year teachers, recently graduated from an Alternative Route to Teaching (ART) program and hired to teach within Spanish-English Dual-language Immersion strands at local schools. To do so, recordings and observations of classroom practice, teacher interviews, and supplementary data from previous coursework were analyzed to address three questions which arose from literature gaps and during fieldwork, namely, 1) How do graduates from an ART program engage and support their emerging bilingual/multilingual learners during the first year of instruction and across a variety of class modalities? 2) In what ways do graduates from an ART program utilize knowledge of (a) their students, parents, and communities, as well as of (b) their own experiences and trajectories as former paraeducators, school insiders, and across culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds? and 3) What are the ways in which graduates from an ART program experience and negotiate their first year as teachers in terms of support and identity? Three conclusions were generated as a result. First, the first-year teacher participants engaged their students through a variety of activities and relations which were marked in contrast to typical depictions of first-year practice, notably in how activities were grounded and authentic, and in how teacher-student interactions were adaptive and relational to student needs. Second, participants leveraged a substantial understanding of student and parent backgrounds to build curriculum and in-class supports which were relevant to students' learning needs. Finally, participants were not immune to many of the difficulties seen in the first year of teachers, despite extensive experience with schools as paraeducators, yet showed a practice quite flexible to student and instructional needs during the onset of COVID-19. In sum, participants engaged their first year of practice in ways which outpace much of the narrative literature surrounding first-year teachers, and did so in ways which were grounded in self-knowledge, as well as knowledge of students, school system, and community. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved)

Social stories for Spanish bilingual children with autism spectrum disorder post COVID-19 quarantine

Living through the global COVID-19 pandemic has caused major disruptions in everyday life. For many children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), this disruption has impacted academics, mental health, and ASD-related support services. Now, in this post COVID-19 quarantine time, routines are shifting back to pre-COVID-19 life, while individuals are still dealing with the effects of quarantine. Informed by a review of the literature, a compilation of social stories was created for Spanish bilingual children with ASD. The social stories can be used to aid educators and families of children with ASD in teaching self-regulation skills, strategies to manage worry and anxiety, and personal health and hygiene routines in this post COVID-19 quarantine time. Although a core symptom of ASD is social-communication deficits, the literature reveals that bilingualism does not interfere with language development among children with ASD. As such, the social stories are written in English and Spanish to provide accessibility to Spanish-speaking families, as well as promote consistency of information within the Spanish-speaking home and English-speaking school settings. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved)

BU-TTS: An Open-Source, Bilingual Welsh-English, Text-to-Speech Corpus

This paper presents the design, collection and verification of a bilingual text-to-speech synthesis corpus for Welsh and English. The ever expanding voice collection currently contains almost 10 hours of recordings from a bilingual, phonetically balanced text corpus. The speakers consist of a professional voice actor and three amateur contributors, with male and female accents from north and south Wales. This corpus provides audio-text pairs for building and training high-quality bilingual Welsh-English neural based TTS systems. We describe the process by which we created a phonetically balanced prompt set and the challenges of attempting to collate such a dataset during the COVID-19 pandemic. Our initial findings in validating the corpus via the implementation of a state-of-the-art TTS models are presented. This corpus represents the first open-source Welsh language corpus large enough to capitalise on neural TTS architectures. © European Language Resources Association (ELRA)

Mentoring Medical Students: Voices from Zoom Rooms during the Pandemic

Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, careers in medicine were challenging, and the academic journey could be a lonely one. The pandemic presented both challenges and opportunities in mentoring such as utilizing technology to transform formal mentorship programs into those that are beneficial for women and minorities because these programs can offer critical engagement, opportunities to hear and express multiple perspectives, expand our capacity to understand and talk about complex social issues, and meaning-making frameworks. Medical schools can utilize innovative and creative mentoring programs to support medical students as they enter the medical profession. © Common Ground Research Networks, Joseph Muñoz et al., All Rights Reserved.

The strength of incidental bidirectional naming stimulus control across two languages: Differences among monolingual and dual language leaners

Across 2 experiments, I examined the effects of the establishment of English Incidental Bidirectional Naming (Inc-BiN) on the transformation of stimulus function from English to Spanish Inc-BiN for novel familiar stimuli. A total of 10 preschool-aged participants with disabilities were selected across both experiments, as none demonstrated incidental learning for listener and speaker responses. Participants were categorized as either a Monolingual (ML) or Dual Language Learner (DLL), based on the language they were exposed to outside the educational setting. Further, I conducted pre-experimental screenings to determine participants' initial strength of Inc-BiN stimulus control and paired them into dyads consisting of 1 student from each language community. In the pilot study, I used a pre-test post-test simultaneous treatment design across 2 dyads to test the effects of Brief and Prolonged Naming Exposures on the establishment of English Inc-BiN. Across all phases of the intervention, I provided visual match-to-sample Naming experiences followed by tests for the acquisition of untaught listener and speaker English responses for novel familiar stimuli. Upon completing any given phase to the intervention, I assessed for the transformation of stimulus function using the same set of Naming experiences and tests in Spanish. Results showed that English Inc-BiN was established for both DLLs, 1 of whom also acquired Spanish Inc-BiN while the other demonstrated Spanish Incidental-Unidirectional Naming (Inc-UniN) without intervention. However, this developmental capability was not established for any ML participants, as the intervention was interrupted due to the COVID-19 pandemic. In Experiment II, I utilized a multiple probe design across 3 dyads to conduct a systematic replication of the pilot study. Overall, English Inc-BiN was established across all participants. Brief Naming Exposures were effective in establishing the capability for 4 participants while the remaining 2 required additional Prolonged Naming Exposures. The intervention was also effective in establishing the transformation of stimulus function across listener and speaker responses of different languages, with the acquisition of Spanish Inc-BiN for 3 participants and Spanish Inc-UniN for 2 participants. Reported differences in the number of Naming exposures required to establish English Inc-BiN further indicate that Inc-BiN may be acquired at varying rates across members of different language communities. The implications of these findings are discussed in terms of establishing incidental language repertoires in order to improve DLLs rate of learning and long-term educational success. These results further pose question on the effectiveness of our nation's current bilingual education system, as there may be a need to shift focus from language of instruction to quality of instruction. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved)