Language Teaching Methodologies, Intercultural Awareness and Autonomous Learning

This paper will examine familiar reasons for including the teaching of intercultural competence within Language Teaching before adding some less familiar ones. It will focus in particular on the question of how far intercultural competence can be learned when students are formally studying languages and how far such competence needs to be acquired autono-mously. It will though also ask to what extent being initiated to the very varied facets of in-tercultural competence during formal language study plays an important role in allowing ef-fective autonomous acquisition to take place. The paper will conclude that a significant part of the intercultural development that students need to undertake if they are to be able to communicate effectively in a foreign language must happen autonomously, but that it is, nonetheless, vital that language courses at least sow the seeds of intercultural learning in ways that will facilitate autonomous learning. As such, language courses, if they are genuinely to meet student needs, should incorporate elements of intercultural training. The paper also concludes by outlining the type of empirical research that would need to be carried out for these claims to be fully substantiated.

Reducing social and environmental impacts of urban freight transport: a review of some major cities

This paper reviews the options available to policy makers in their efforts to reduce the negative impacts of urban freight transport. After providing a summary of the categories of negative impacts that can be targeted together with the specific policy initiatives available, it reviews the actions taken by policy makers across in cities within four countries (UK, Japan, the Netherlands and France). In the case of the UK and Japan attention is focused on a single city as an exemplar of some of the developments. In the case of the Netherlands and France the discussion is wider.

Teaching by leading and managing learning environments

The aim of this chapter is to promote an understanding of how different environments or settings within which students are asked or required to learn - such as large groups, small groups and laboratory and practice settings – have an impact on how they approach their learning and hence on the design and delivery of teaching. It provides an overview of underpinning principles and concepts before exploring their application in practice. The focus is on face-to-face teaching and learning.

Values in middle childhood: Social and genetic contributions

Theories of value development often identify adolescence as the period for value formation, and cultural and familial factors as the sources for value priorities. However, recent research suggests that value priorities can be observed as early as in middle childhood, and several studies, including one on preadolescents (Knafo & Spinath, 2011), have suggested a genetic contribution to individual differences in values. In the current study, 174 pairs of monozygotic and dizygotic 7-year old Israeli twins completed the Picture-Based Value Survey for Children (PBVS–C; Döring et al., 2010). We replicated basic patterns of relations between value priorities and variables of socialisation – gender, religiosity, and socioeconomic status– that have been found in studies with adults. Most important, values of Self-transcendence, Self-enhancement, and Conservation, were found to be significantly affected by genetic factors (29%, 47% and 31% respectively), as well as non-shared environment (71%, 53% and 69% respectively). Openness to change values, in contrast, were found to be unaffected by genetic factors at this age and were influenced by shared (19%) and non-shared (81%) environment. These findings support the recent view that values are formed at earlier ages than had been assumed previously, and they further our understanding of the genetic and environmental factors involved in value formation at young ages.