Structured Input

This new text in the McGraw-Hill Second Language Professional series brings together theory, research, and practice on structured input, an instructional technique that first emerged in the early 1990s in association with processing instruction. The author skillfully makes theoretical concepts and research accessible to the uninitiated reader while offering an abundance of examples of structured input activities in various languages. Researchers and instructors looking for more examples and clarification on structured input activities will welcome this new title.

This volume bridges the gap between theory and practice by bringing together well-known and new authors to discuss a topic of mutual interest to second language researchers and teachers alike: input. Reader-friendly chapters offer a range of existing and new perspectives on input in morphology, syntax, phonetics and phonology.

The view of exemplar-based second language learning emphasizes the importance of frequency in learning grammar. According to this view, type frequency rather than token frequency contributes to learning generalized knowledge beyond item-based constructions. This book investigates how frequency in experiencing exemplars affects the learning of the English primary verb be by junior high school students in Japan. The study consists of a quasi-experiment and stimulated-recall analysis of the data. The quasi-experiment compares three kinds of output practice: practice with increased type frequency, practice with increased token frequency, and practice without increased frequency. The experiment also explores how the frequency effects relate to the extent of explicit knowledge about the target structures. In the stimulated-recall analysis, learners engaging in the type frequency practice and those engaging in the token frequency practice are compared in terms of thought processes employed while practicing. The book discusses how frequency promotes classroom second language learning by taking the role of awareness of form-meaning connections into consideration.

This user-friendly, engaging textbook makes the material accessible to graduate students and new researchers who wish to study the rapidly exploding area of computations with structured matrices and polynomials. The book goes beyond research frontiers and, apart from very recent research articles, includes previously unpublished results.

Structured singular light is an ubiquitous phenomenon. It is not only created when light refracts at a water surface but can also be found in the blue daytime sky. Such light fields include a spatially varying amplitude, phase, or polarization, enabling the occurrence of optical singularities. As structurally stable units of the light field, these singularities are particularly interesting since they determine its topology. In this excellent book, the author presents a pioneering study of structured singular light, thereby contributing many original approaches. Especially in the field of polarization and its rich number of different types of singularities the book defines and drives a completely new field. The work demonstrates how to control complex polarization singularity networks and their propagation. Additionally, the author pioneers tightly focusing vectorial beams, also developing an urgently needed detection scheme for three-dimensional nanoscale polarization structures. She also studies classical spatial entanglement using structured light, introducing entanglement beating and paraxial spin-orbit-coupling. The book is hallmarked by its comprehensive and thorough way of describing a plethora of different approaches to structure light by amplitude, phase and polarization, as well as the important role of optical singularities.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 15th European PVM/MPI Users' Group Meeting held in Dublin, Ireland, in September 2008. The 29 revised full papers presented together with abstracts of 7 invited contributions, 1 tutorial paper and 8 poster papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 55 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on applications, collective operations, library internals, message passing for multi-core and mutlithreaded architectures, MPI datatypes, MPI I/O, synchronisation issues in point-to-point and one-sided communications, tools, and verification of message passing programs. The volume is rounded off with 4 contributions to the special ParSim session on current trends in numerical simulation for parallel engineering environments.

An overview of recent work in the field of structured prediction, the building of predictive machine learning models for interrelated and dependent outputs. The goal of structured prediction is to build machine learning models that predict relational information that itself has structure, such as being composed of multiple interrelated parts. These models, which reflect prior knowledge, task-specific relations, and constraints, are used in fields including computer vision, speech recognition, natural language processing, and computational biology. They can carry out such tasks as predicting a natural language sentence, or segmenting an image into meaningful components. These models are expressive and powerful, but exact computation is often intractable. A broad research effort in recent years has aimed at designing structured prediction models and approximate inference and learning procedures that are computationally efficient. This volume offers an overview of this recent research in order to make the work accessible to a broader research community. The chapters, by leading researchers in the field, cover a range of topics, including research trends, the linear programming relaxation approach, innovations in probabilistic modeling, recent theoretical progress, and resource-aware learning. Contributors Jonas Behr, Yutian Chen, Fernando De La Torre, Justin Domke, Peter V. Gehler, Andrew E. Gelfand, Sébastien Giguère, Amir Globerson, Fred A. Hamprecht, Minh Hoai, Tommi Jaakkola, Jeremy Jancsary, Joseph Keshet, Marius Kloft, Vladimir Kolmogorov, Christoph H. Lampert, François Laviolette, Xinghua Lou, Mario Marchand, André F. T. Martins, Ofer Meshi, Sebastian Nowozin, George Papandreou, Daniel Průša, Gunnar Rätsch, Amélie Rolland, Bogdan Savchynskyy, Stefan Schmidt, Thomas Schoenemann, Gabriele Schweikert, Ben Taskar, Sinisa Todorovic, Max Welling, David Weiss, Thomáš Werner, Alan Yuille, Stanislav Živný

Despite the key role played by second language acquisition (SLA) courses in linguistics, teacher education and language teaching degrees, participants often struggle to bridge the gap between SLA theories and their many applications in the classroom. In order to overcome the 'transfer' problem from theory to practice, Andrea Nava and Luciana Pedrazzini present SLA principles through the actions and words of teachers and learners. Second Language Acquisition in Action identifies eight important SLA principles and involves readers in an 'experiential' approach which enables them to explore these principles 'in action'. Each chapter is structured around three stages: experience and reflection; conceptualisation; and restructuring and planning. Discussion questions and tasks represent the core of the book. These help readers in the process of 'experiencing' SLA research and provide them with opportunities to try their hands at different areas of language teachers' professional expertise. Aimed at those on applied linguistics MA courses, TESOL/EFL trainees and in-service teachers, Second Language Acquisition in Action features: · Key Questions at the start of each chapter · Data-based tasks to foster reflection and to help bridge the gap between theory and practice · Audiovisual extracts of lessons on an accompanying website · Further Reading suggestions at the end of each chapter