Learning English by walking down the street

With internationalisation and globalisation, English has proliferated in urban spaces around the world. This creates new opportunities for EFL learning and teaching. An English literacy walk is one activity that can be used productively to capitalise on this potential. The activity has roots in: (i) long-established approaches to emergent literacy education for young children; and (ii) pedagogic projects inspired by recent research on linguistic landscapes. Drawing on these traditions, teachers can target reading outcomes involving code, semantic, pragmatic and critical knowledge and skills. We use the four resources model of literate practices to systematically map some of the potential of literacy walks in multilingual, multimodal linguistic landscapes. We suggest tasks and teacher questions that might be used for purposes of explicit teaching of reading during and after literacy walks. Although grounded in Taipei, our ideas might be of interest to EFL teachers in other globalised cities around the world.

Heritage language learning for Chinese Australians : the role of habitus

The relationship between Heritage Language and ethnic identity has gained significant research ground in social psychological and poststructural scholarship, with empirical evidence largely emerging from the North American settings. There is little pertinent sociological work conducted outside North America. To fill this gap, this sociological study sets its scene in an Australian context. Drawing on Bourdieu’s notion of habitus, the study examines the contribution of Chinese Australians’ Chineseness to their Chinese Heritage Language proficiency. Two hundred and thirty young Chinese Australians completed the online survey. Results from multiple regression indicate that habitus of Chineseness is one of the significant predictors for the Chinese Heritage Language proficiency of these young people. The study makes a theoretical contribution to investigate ethnic identity – Heritage Language link through the notion of habitus and makes a methodological contribution to quantify this habitus.

The spatialized practices of teaching writing in Australian elementary schools : diverse students shaping discoursal selves

This paper discusses the teaching of writing within the competing and often contradictory spaces of high-stakes testing and the practices and priorities around writing pedagogy in diverse school communities. It uses socio-spatial theory to examine the real-and-imagined spaces (Soja, 1996) that influence and are influenced by teachers’ pedagogical priorities for writing in two linguistically diverse elementary school case studies. Methods of critical discourse analysis are used to examine rich data sets to make visible the discourses and power relations at play in the case schools. Findings show that when teachers’ practices focus on the teaching of structure and skills alongside identity building and voice, students with diverse linguistic backgrounds can produce dramatic, authoritative and resonant texts. The paper argues that “thirdspaces” can be forged that both attend to accountability requirements, yet also give the necessary attention to more complex aspects of writing necessary for students from diverse and multilingual backgrounds to invest in writing as a creative and critical form of communication for participation in society and the knowledge economy.

Behavioural Inhibition System response to conflicting advertisement cues: Road safety messages vs. motor vehicle promotional advertisements

This study assessed the revised Behavioural Inhibition System (BIS), as conceptualised by Gray and McNaughton’s (2000) revised RST, by exposing participants to a loss-framed road safety message (emphasising the negative consequences of speeding behaviour) and a high performance motor vehicle promotional advertisement. Licensed young drivers (N = 40, aged 17–25 years) were randomly allocated to view either the message or both the message and advertisement. Participants then completed a computerised lexical decision task prior to completing three personality measures: Corr-Cooper RST-PQ, CARROT and Q-Task. It was predicted that those with a stronger BIS would demonstrate greater processing of these mixed message cues compared to weaker BIS individuals, and that this BIS effect would only be observed in the mixed cues condition (due to simultaneous activation of the incentive and punishment systems). Preliminary findings will be discussed in the context of the influence of personality traits on health message processing.

Processing biases towards gain-framed messages may lead reward sensitive individuals to adopt safer driving behaviours

Using Gray and McNaughton’s revised RST, this study investigated the extent to which the Behavioural Approach System (BAS) and the Fight-Flight-Freeze System (FFFS) influence the processing of gain-framed and loss-framed road safety messages and subsequent message acceptance. It was predicted that stronger BAS sensitivity and FFFS sensitivity would be associated with greater processing and acceptance of the gain-framed messages and loss-framed messages, respectively. Young drivers (N = 80, aged 17–25 years) viewed one of four road safety messages and completed a lexical decision task to assess message processing. Both self-report (e.g., Corr-Cooper RST-PQ) and behavioural measures (i.e., CARROT and Q-Task) were used to assess BAS and FFFS traits. Message acceptance was measured via self-report ratings of message effectiveness, behavioural intentions, attitudes and subsequent driving behaviour. The results are discussed in the context of the effect that differences in reward and punishment sensitivities may have on message processing and message acceptance.

Current trends and issues in geographical education

In this introductory chapter to Schmeinck, D. and Lidstone, J. (2014) “Current trends and issues in geographical education” in Schmeinck, D. and Lidstone, J. (2014) Eds) Standards and Research in Geographical Education: Current Trends and International Issues. Berlin. Mensch und Buch Verlag. Pp. 5 - 16. , the authors review and analyse eleven papers originally presented to the Congress of the International Geographical Union held in Cologne in 2012. Taking the collection of papers as a single corpus representing the “state of the art” of geography education, they applied lexical and bibliometric analyses in an innovative attempt to identify the nature of geographical education as represented by this anthology of peer reviewed chapters presented at the start of the second decade of the Twenty-first century?

Automatic de-identification of electronic health records : an Australian perspective

We present an approach to automatically de-identify health records. In our approach, personal health information is identified using a Conditional Random Fields machine learning classifier, a large set of linguistic and lexical features, and pattern matching techniques. Identified personal information is then removed from the reports. The de-identification of personal health information is fundamental for the sharing and secondary use of electronic health records, for example for data mining and disease monitoring. The effectiveness of our approach is first evaluated on the 2007 i2b2 Shared Task dataset, a widely adopted dataset for evaluating de-identification techniques. Subsequently, we investigate the robustness of the approach to limited training data; we study its effectiveness on different type and quality of data by evaluating the approach on scanned pathology reports from an Australian institution. This data contains optical character recognition errors, as well as linguistic conventions that differ from those contained in the i2b2 dataset, for example different date formats. The findings suggest that our approach compares to the best approach from the 2007 i2b2 Shared Task; in addition, the approach is found to be robust to variations of training size, data type and quality in presence of sufficient training data.

De-Identification of health records using Anonym: Effectiveness and robustness across datasets

Objective Evaluate the effectiveness and robustness of Anonym, a tool for de-identifying free-text health records based on conditional random fields classifiers informed by linguistic and lexical features, as well as features extracted by pattern matching techniques. De-identification of personal health information in electronic health records is essential for the sharing and secondary usage of clinical data. De-identification tools that adapt to different sources of clinical data are attractive as they would require minimal intervention to guarantee high effectiveness. Methods and Materials The effectiveness and robustness of Anonym are evaluated across multiple datasets, including the widely adopted Integrating Biology and the Bedside (i2b2) dataset, used for evaluation in a de-identification challenge. The datasets used here vary in type of health records, source of data, and their quality, with one of the datasets containing optical character recognition errors. Results Anonym identifies and removes up to 96.6% of personal health identifiers (recall) with a precision of up to 98.2% on the i2b2 dataset, outperforming the best system proposed in the i2b2 challenge. The effectiveness of Anonym across datasets is found to depend on the amount of information available for training. Conclusion Findings show that Anonym compares to the best approach from the 2006 i2b2 shared task. It is easy to retrain Anonym with new datasets; if retrained, the system is robust to variations of training size, data type and quality in presence of sufficient training data.

On display : Ravensthorpe Wildflower Show and the assembly of place

Each September since 1983 in the rural Shire of Ravensthorpe, Western Australia, volunteers collect samples of up to 700 wildfl ower species which are then displayed in the Ravensthorpe Senior Citizens Centre from 9.00 am to 4.00 pm daily over a two-week period. This chapter offers an ethnographic interpretation of this enduring annual event focusing on the 25th show held in 2007. The study contributes to understanding the complex and nuanced role of local wildflower shows in shaping and supporting rural senses of place and of community. Importantly, this particular type of festival, and more specifically this local instance, foregrounds a less-remarked aspect of festivals, namely the (re)production and celebration of place-specific knowledge through validations of, and interconnections between, scientific flower classification and emotive experience. This feature, encapsulated in Laurel Lamperd’s poem above, invites consideration of the ways in which local place knowledge and the simultaneous (re)production of ‘place’ are constituted by a complex layering of rational, objective ways of knowing and those which emphasize emotions, aesthetics and memories. This rural wildflower show not only mobilises both the rational and the emotional in ‘making sense of the world’ for local residents and for tourists, but also offers insights into the production of place as constituted in and through relations between humans and non-human life forms (Cloke & Jones, 2001; Conradson, 2005; see also Chapter 6).

University of Glasgow at ImageCLEFPhoto 2009 : optimising similarity and diversity in image retrieval

In this paper we describe the approaches adopted to generate the runs submitted to ImageCLEFPhoto 2009 with an aim to promote document diversity in the rankings. Four of our runs are text based approaches that employ textual statistics extracted from the captions of images, i.e. MMR [1] as a state of the art method for result diversification, two approaches that combine relevance information and clustering techniques, and an instantiation of Quantum Probability Ranking Principle. The fifth run exploits visual features of the provided images to re-rank the initial results by means of Factor Analysis. The results reveal that our methods based on only text captions consistently improve the performance of the respective baselines, while the approach that combines visual features with textual statistics shows lower levels of improvements.

Semantic interference in object naming : an fMRI study of the postcue naming paradigm

It is well established that the time to name target objects can be influenced by the presence of categorically related versus unrelated distractor items. A variety of paradigms have been developed to determine the level at which this semantic interference effect occurs in the speech production system. In this study, we investigated one of these tasks, the postcue naming paradigm, for the first time with fMRI. Previous behavioural studies using this paradigm have produced conflicting interpretations of the processing level at which the semantic interference effect takes place, ranging from pre- to post-lexical. Here we used fMRI with a sparse, event-related design to adjudicate between these competing explanations. We replicated the behavioural postcue naming effect for categorically related target/distractor pairs, and observed a corresponding increase in neuronal activation in the right lingual and fusiform gyri-regions previously associated with visual object processing and colour-form integration. We interpret these findings as being consistent with an account that places the semantic interference effect in the postcue paradigm at a processing level involving integration of object attributes in short-term memory.

Semantic context and visual feature effects in object naming : an fMRI study using arterial spin labeling

Previous behavioral studies reported a robust effect of increased naming latencies when objects to be named were blocked within semantic category, compared to items blocked between category. This semantic context effect has been attributed to various mechanisms including inhibition or excitation of lexico-semantic representations and incremental learning of associations between semantic features and names, and is hypothesized to increase demands on verbal self-monitoring during speech production. Objects within categories also share many visual structural features, introducing a potential confound when interpreting the level at which the context effect might occur. Consistent with previous findings, we report a significant increase in response latencies when naming categorically related objects within blocks, an effect associated with increased perfusion fMRI signal bilaterally in the hippocampus and in the left middle to posterior superior temporal cortex. No perfusion changes were observed in the middle section of the left middle temporal cortex, a region associated with retrieval of lexical-semantic information in previous object naming studies. Although a manipulation of visual feature similarity did not influence naming latencies, we observed perfusion increases in the perirhinal cortex for naming objects with similar visual features that interacted with the semantic context in which objects were named. These results provide support for the view that the semantic context effect in object naming occurs due to an incremental learning mechanism, and involves increased demands on verbal self-monitoring.

Overview of the ShARe/CLEF eHealth Evaluation Lab 2014

This paper reports on the 2nd ShARe/CLEFeHealth evaluation lab which continues our evaluation resource building activities for the medical domain. In this lab we focus on patients' information needs as opposed to the more common campaign focus of the specialised information needs of physicians and other healthcare workers. The usage scenario of the lab is to ease patients and next-of-kins' ease in understanding eHealth information, in particular clinical reports. The 1st ShARe/CLEFeHealth evaluation lab was held in 2013. This lab consisted of three tasks. Task 1 focused on named entity recognition and normalization of disorders; Task 2 on normalization of acronyms/abbreviations; and Task 3 on information retrieval to address questions patients may have when reading clinical reports. This year's lab introduces a new challenge in Task 1 on visual-interactive search and exploration of eHealth data. Its aim is to help patients (or their next-of-kin) in readability issues related to their hospital discharge documents and related information search on the Internet. Task 2 then continues the information extraction work of the 2013 lab, specifically focusing on disorder attribute identification and normalization from clinical text. Finally, this year's Task 3 further extends the 2013 information retrieval task, by cleaning the 2013 document collection and introducing a new query generation method and multilingual queries. De-identified clinical reports used by the three tasks were from US intensive care and originated from the MIMIC II database. Other text documents for Tasks 1 and 3 were from the Internet and originated from the Khresmoi project. Task 2 annotations originated from the ShARe annotations. For Tasks 1 and 3, new annotations, queries, and relevance assessments were created. 50, 79, and 91 people registered their interest in Tasks 1, 2, and 3, respectively. 24 unique teams participated with 1, 10, and 14 teams in Tasks 1, 2 and 3, respectively. The teams were from Africa, Asia, Canada, Europe, and North America. The Task 1 submission, reviewed by 5 expert peers, related to the task evaluation category of Effective use of interaction and targeted the needs of both expert and novice users. The best system had an Accuracy of 0.868 in Task 2a, an F1-score of 0.576 in Task 2b, and Precision at 10 (P@10) of 0.756 in Task 3. The results demonstrate the substantial community interest and capabilities of these systems in making clinical reports easier to understand for patients. The organisers have made data and tools available for future research and development.

Using textual analysis with Concept Inventories to identify root causes of misconceptions

Engineers must have deep and accurate conceptual understanding of their field and Concept inventories (CIs) are one method of assessing conceptual understanding and providing formative feedback. Current CI tests use Multiple Choice Questions (MCQ) to identify misconceptions and have undergone reliability and validity testing to assess conceptual understanding. However, they do not readily provide the diagnostic information about students’ reasoning and therefore do not effectively point to specific actions that can be taken to improve student learning. We piloted the textual component of our diagnostic CI on electrical engineering students using items from the signals and systems CI. We then analysed the textual responses using automated lexical analysis software to test the effectiveness of these types of software and interviewed the students regarding their experience using the textual component. Results from the automated text analysis revealed that students held both incorrect and correct ideas for certain conceptual areas and provided indications of student misconceptions. User feedback also revealed that the inclusion of the textual component is helpful to students in assessing and reflecting on their own understanding.

Text mining with semantic annotation : using enriched text representation for entity-oriented retrieval, semantic relation identification and text clustering

This project is a step forward in the study of text mining where enhanced text representation with semantic information plays a significant role. It develops effective methods of entity-oriented retrieval, semantic relation identification and text clustering utilizing semantically annotated data. These methods are based on enriched text representation generated by introducing semantic information extracted from Wikipedia into the input text data. The proposed methods are evaluated against several start-of-art benchmarking methods on real-life data-sets. In particular, this thesis improves the performance of entity-oriented retrieval, identifies different lexical forms for an entity relation and handles clustering documents with multiple feature spaces.