Corrective feedback in oral interaction: A comparison of a CLIL and an EFL classroom

[EN] Since Long's Interaction Hypothesis (Long, 1983) multiple studies have suggested the need of oral interaction for successful second language learning. Within this perspective, a great deal of research has been carried out to investigate the role of corrective feedback in the process of acquiring a second language, but there are still varied open debates about this issue. This comparative study seeks to contribute to the existing literature on corrective feedback in oral interaction by exploring teachers' corrective techniques and students' response to these corrections. Two learning contexts were observed and compared: a traditional English as a foreign language (EFL) classroom and a Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) classroom .The main aim was to see whether our data conform to the Counterbalance Hypothesis proposed by Lyster and Mori (2006). Although results did not show significant differences between the two contexts, a qualitative analysis of the data shed some light on the differences between these two language teaching settings. The findings point to the need for further research on error correction in EFL and CLIL contexts in order to overcome the limitations of the present study.

The role of personal involvement and responsibility in dictatorial allocations: A classroom experiment

Paper was revised on 2009-11-11.-- Published as article in: Rationality and Society (2009), 21(2), 1-24.

An Open and Social Spaced Repetition System for Language Learning

In the last decades big improvements have been done in the field of computer aided learning, based on improvements done in computer science and computer systems. Although the field has been always a bit lagged, without using the latest solutions, it has constantly gone forward taking profit of the innovations as they show up. As long as the train of the computer science does not stop (and it won’t at least in the near future) the systems that take profit of those improvements will not either, because we humans will always need to study; Sometimes for pleasure and some other many times out of need. Not all the attempts in the field of computer aided learning have been in the same direction. Most of them address one or some few of the problems that show while studying and don’t take into account solutions proposed for some other problems. The reasons for this can be varied. Sometimes the solutions simply are not compatible. Some other times, because the project is an investigation it’s interesting to isolate the problem. And, in commercial products, licenses and patents often prevent the new projects to use previous work. The world moved forward and this is an attempt to use some of the options offered by technology, mixing some old ideas with new ones.

Open Personalization: Involving Third Parties in Improving the User Experience of Websites

Traditional software development captures the user needs during the requirement analysis. The Web makes this endeavour even harder due to the difficulty to determine who these users are. In an attempt to tackle the heterogeneity of the user base, Web Personalization techniques are proposed to guide the users’ experience. In addition, Open Innovation allows organisations to look beyond their internal resources to develop new products or improve existing processes. This thesis sits in between by introducing Open Personalization as a means to incorporate actors other than webmasters in the personalization of web applications. The aim is to provide the technological basis that builds up a trusty environment for webmasters and companion actors to collaborate, i.e. "an architecture of participation". Such architecture very much depends on these actors’ profile. This work tackles three profiles (i.e. software partners, hobby programmers and end users), and proposes three "architectures of participation" tuned for each profile. Each architecture rests on different technologies: a .NET annotation library based on Inversion of Control for software partners, a Modding Interface in JavaScript for hobby programmers, and finally, a domain specific language for end-users. Proof-of-concept implementations are available for the three cases while a quantitative evaluation is conducted for the domain specific language.

The basque ecological debt: global socioecological impacts of a small open economy

4 p.

Arreta faltaren nahastea eta hiperaktibitatea duten lehen hezkuntzako umeentzako neurriak ikasgelan: erantzun egokia ematearen beharra

[eus] Arreta Faltaren Nahastea eta Hiperaktibitatea (AFNHa) gaur egun ikasgela batean aurki dezakegun nahaste ohikoenetariko bat da. Nahastea pairatzen duten umeek haien errendimendu akademikoan negatiboki eragiten duten zailtasun desberdinei aurre egin behar diete. Irakasleen ezagutza edo parte-hartze eza dela eta, ume horiei arrakasta lortzeko ez zaie beti bere esku jartzen gainontzekoei eskaintzen zaizkien aukera berdinak. Hortaz, irakasleak laguntzea eta ume horiei ikasgela baten barruan ahalik eta erantzun egokien ematea ikerketa lan honen helburua da. Horretarako, bilaketa bibliografiko baten bitartez, nahastean sakondu da eta estrategia desberdinak, metodologia egokia eta IKTen (Informazioaren eta komunikazioaren teknologien) erabilera proposatu dira. Inor atzean utzi gabe, guztientzako kalitatezko eta inklusiboa den hezkuntza defendatzen duen eta itxaropenerako bidea irekitzen saiatzen den lana da.

Anisotropic expansion and SNIa: An open issue

We review the appropriateness of using SNIa observations to detect potential signatures of anisotropic expansion in the Universe. We focus on Union2 and SNLS3 SNIa datasets and use the hemispherical comparison method to detect possible anisotropic features. Unlike some previous works where nondiagonal elements of the covariance matrix were neglected, we use the full covariance matrix of the SNIa data, thus obtaining more realistic and not underestimated errors. As a matter of fact, the significance of previously claimed detections of a preferred direction in the Union2 dataset completely disappears once we include the effects of using the full covariance matrix. Moreover, we also find that such apreferred direction is aligned with the orthogonal direction of the SDSS observational plane and this suggests a clear indication that the SDSS subsample of the Union2 dataset introduces a significant bias, making the detected preferred direction unphysical. We thus find that current SNIa surveys are inappropriate to test anisotropic features due to their highly non-homogeneous angular distribution in the sky. In addition, after removal of the highest in homogeneous sub-samples, the number of SNIa is too low. Finally, we take advantage of the particular distribution of SNLS SNIa sub- sample in the SNLS3 data set, in which the observations were taken along four different directions. We fit each direction independently and find consistent results at the 1 sigma level. Although the likelihoods peak at relatively different values of Omega(m), the low number of data along each direction gives rise to large errors so that the likelihoods are sufficiently broad as to overlap within 1 sigma. (C) 2014 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http:// creativecommons. org/licenses/by/4.0/).