A statistical analysis of the structure of language found in the essay writing of a sample of technical college students and public school boys

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Maintenance of communication in primary classrooms : some evidence for the role of elicitation and code-switching in English medium schools in Kenya, with implications for teaching

This is a study of specific aspects of classroom interaction primary school level in Kenya. The study entailed the identification of the sources of particular communication problems during the change-over period from Kiswahili to English medium teaching in two primary schools. There was subsequently an examination of the language resources which were employed by teachers to maintain pupil participation in communication in the light of the occurrence of possibility of occurrence of specific communication problems. The language resources which were found to be significant in this regard concerned firstly the use of different elicitation types by teachers to stimulate pupils into giving responses and secondly teachers' recourse to code-switching from English to Kiswahili and vice-versa. It was also found in this study that although the use of English as the medium of instruction in the classrooms which were observed resulted in certain communication problems, some of these problems need not have arisen if teachers had been more careful in their use of language. The consideration of this finding, after taking into account the role of different elicitation types and code-switching as interpretable from data samples had certain implications which are specified in the study for teaching in Kenyan primary schools. The corpus for the study consisted of audio-recordings of English, Science and Number-Work lessons which were later transcribed. Relevant data samples were subsequently extracted from transcripts for analysis. Many of the samples have examples of cases of communication breakdowns, but they also illustrate how teachers maintained interaction with pupils who had yet to acquire an operational mastery of English. This study thus differs from most studies on classroom interaction because of its basic concern with the examination of the resources available to teachers for overcoming the problem areas of classroom communication.

Organisational change and safety culture: the impact of communication

This research examines and explains the links between safety culture and communication. Safety culture is a concept that in recent years has gained prominence but there has been little applied research conducted to investigate the meaning of the concept in 'real life' settings. This research focused on a Train Operating Company undergoing change in a move towards privatisation. These changes were evident in the management of safety, the organisation of the industry and internally in their management. The Train Operating Company's management took steps to improve their safety culture and communications through the development of a cascade communication structure. The research framework employed a qualitative methodology in order to investigate the effect of the new system on safety culture. Findings of the research were that communications in the organisation failed to be effective for a number of reasons, including both cultural and logistical problems. The cultural problems related to a lack of trust in the organisation by the management and the workforce, the perception of communications as management propaganda, and asyntonic communications between those involved, whilst logistical problems related to the inherent difficulties of communicating over a geographically distributed network. An organisational learning framework was used to explain the results. It is postulated that one of the principal reasons why change, either to the safety culture or to communications, did not occur was because of the organisation's inability to learn. The research has also shown the crucial importance of trust between the members of the organisation, as this was one of the fundamental reasons why the safety culture did not change, and why safety management systems were not fully implemented. This is consistent with the notion of mutual trust in the HSC (1993) definition of safety culture. This research has highlighted its relevance to safety culture and its importance for organisational change.

A design environment for deadlock-free concurrent software

Using current software engineering technology, the robustness required for safety critical software is not assurable. However, different approaches are possible which can help to assure software robustness to some extent. For achieving high reliability software, methods should be adopted which avoid introducing faults (fault avoidance); then testing should be carried out to identify any faults which persist (error removal). Finally, techniques should be used which allow any undetected faults to be tolerated (fault tolerance). The verification of correctness in system design specification and performance analysis of the model, are the basic issues in concurrent systems. In this context, modeling distributed concurrent software is one of the most important activities in the software life cycle, and communication analysis is a primary consideration to achieve reliability and safety. By and large fault avoidance requires human analysis which is error prone; by reducing human involvement in the tedious aspect of modelling and analysis of the software it is hoped that fewer faults will persist into its implementation in the real-time environment. The Occam language supports concurrent programming and is a language where interprocess interaction takes place by communications. This may lead to deadlock due to communication failure. Proper systematic methods must be adopted in the design of concurrent software for distributed computing systems if the communication structure is to be free of pathologies, such as deadlock. The objective of this thesis is to provide a design environment which ensures that processes are free from deadlock. A software tool was designed and used to facilitate the production of fault-tolerant software for distributed concurrent systems. Where Occam is used as a design language then state space methods, such as Petri-nets, can be used in analysis and simulation to determine the dynamic behaviour of the software, and to identify structures which may be prone to deadlock so that they may be eliminated from the design before the program is ever run. This design software tool consists of two parts. One takes an input program and translates it into a mathematical model (Petri-net), which is used for modeling and analysis of the concurrent software. The second part is the Petri-net simulator that takes the translated program as its input and starts simulation to generate the reachability tree. The tree identifies `deadlock potential' which the user can explore further. Finally, the software tool has been applied to a number of Occam programs. Two examples were taken to show how the tool works in the early design phase for fault prevention before the program is ever run.

The development of color categories in two languages: a longitudinal study

This study unites investigations into the linguistic relativity of color categories with research on children's category acquisition. Naming, comprehension, and memory for colors were tracked in 2 populations over a 3-year period. Children from a seminomadic equatorial African culture, whose language contains 5 color terms, were compared with a group of English children. Despite differences in visual environment, language, and education, they showed similar patterns of term acquisition. Both groups acquired color vocabulary slowly and with great individual variation. Those knowing no color terms made recognition errors based on perceptual distance, and the influence of naming on memory increased with age. An initial perceptually driven color continuum appears to be progressively organized into sets appropriate to each culture and language. PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2009 APA, all rights reserved

Discriminative training of the hidden vector state model for semantic parsing

In this paper, we discuss how discriminative training can be applied to the hidden vector state (HVS) model in different task domains. The HVS model is a discrete hidden Markov model (HMM) in which each HMM state represents the state of a push-down automaton with a finite stack size. In previous applications, maximum-likelihood estimation (MLE) is used to derive the parameters of the HVS model. However, MLE makes a number of assumptions and unfortunately some of these assumptions do not hold. Discriminative training, without making such assumptions, can improve the performance of the HVS model by discriminating the correct hypothesis from the competing hypotheses. Experiments have been conducted in two domains: the travel domain for the semantic parsing task using the DARPA Communicator data and the Air Travel Information Services (ATIS) data and the bioinformatics domain for the information extraction task using the GENIA corpus. The results demonstrate modest improvements of the performance of the HVS model using discriminative training. In the travel domain, discriminative training of the HVS model gives a relative error reduction rate of 31 percent in F-measure when compared with MLE on the DARPA Communicator data and 9 percent on the ATIS data. In the bioinformatics domain, a relative error reduction rate of 4 percent in F-measure is achieved on the GENIA corpus.

What is English for? Language structure and the curriculum for English

This article uses Bernstein’s theory of pedagogic discourse to account for both the processes by which curriculum change occurs and the failure of efforts to introduce meaningful attention to language structure into national curricula.

Bringing a German voice to English-speaking readers: Spiegel International

Translation is a regular phenomenon for news production, even if this is not always explicitly indicated. It is quite common that journalists themselves perform translations in their text production processes. Online media have added new possibilties to these processes. This paper looks at the transfer between print and online media texts from the point of view of translation. On the basis of case studies of English translations made available online by Spiegel International, the text production practice and its reflection in the linguistic structure of the translations is illustrated. The declared aim of putting English translations on the Spiegel website is to bring its 'unique voice' to English-speaking readers. This paper argues that this 'unique voice' will not be seen by the readers in the actual linguistic make-up of the texts, but that it is as a result of the text selection process that English-speaking readers can get access to a different point of view.

The language of business interviewing:a study in cross-cultural communication

The study examines the concept of cultural determinism in relation to the business interview, analysing differences in language use between English, French and West German native speakers. The approach is multi- and inter-disciplinary combining linguistic and business research methodologies. An analytical model based on pragmatic and speech act theory is developed to analyse language use in telephone market research interviews. The model aims to evaluate behavioural differences between English, French and West German respondents in the interview situation. The empirical research is based on a telephone survey of industrial managers, conducted in the three countries in the national language of each country. The telephone interviews are transcribed and compared across languages to discover how managers from each country use different language functions to reply to questions and requests. These differences are assessed in terms of specific cultural parameters: politeness, self-assuredness and fullness of response. Empirical and descriptive studies of national character are compared with the survey results, providing the basis for an evaluation of the relationship between management culture and national culture on a contrastive and comparative cross-cultural basis. The project conclusions focus on the implications of the findings both for business interviewing and for language teaching.

The influence of political, economic and passenger market factors on international civil aviation

Civil aviation plays an essential role in maintaining international communications. Many extraneous factors influence the daily operations of the air transport industry. This thesis begins by investigating the major categories of so­ called "external interests" in civil aviation. These are shown to have played a significant part in ensuring the need for international agreement over the adoption of regulating principles. The combination and interaction of the various influences has produced a particular type of regulatory environment in which all commercial air services have to operate. The need for such regulation and the extreme difficulty experienced in trying to define universally acceptable methods of supervision is discussed. It is shown how opportunity for the development of on-scheduled air services was created by default on the part of the European Governments.The concept of so-called "scheduled" and "non-scheduled" sectors" is considered and it is suggested that growth of the inclusive tour industry resulted from inappropriate categorisation of the air services involved. The means by which development opportunities were created for inclusive tour operations is considered and the work then investigates the importance of British air transport policy in their exploitation. The politics of British civil aviation in the post-war years is the subject of detailed examination and the process by which Independent airlines were encouraged to develop inclusive tours, is identified. This theme is expanded to demonstrate the vital contribution of British air transport policy in the restructuring of the international industry. The subsequent involvement of the United States is shown to have been directed specifically towards the satisfaction of domestic issues. British objectives, however, are considered to have been more generally concerned with improving the tariff structure. The unique opportunities for British experimentation with international fares are seen to have major influence in forcing the pace of tariff rationalisation.

The role of the English language in the context of national development vision 2025 with specific reference to agriculture in Tanzania

After thirty years of vacillation, the Tanzanian government has made a firm decision to Swahilize its secondary education system. It has also embarked on an ambitious economic and social development programme (Vision 2025) to transform its peasant society into a modern agricultural community. However, there is a faction in Tanzania opposed to Kiswahili as the medium of education. Already many members of the middle and upper class their children to English medium primary schools to avoid the Kiswahili medium public schools and to prepare their children for the English medium secondary system presently in place. Within the education system, particularly at university level, there is a desire to maintain English as the medium of education. English is seen to provide access to the international scientific community, to cutting edge technology and to the global economy. My interest in this conflict of interests stems from several years' experience teaching English to students at Sokoine University of Agriculture. Students specialise in agriculture and are expected to work with the peasant population on graduation. The students experience difficulties studying in English and then find their Kiswahili skills insufficient to explain to farmers the new techniques and technologies that they have studied in English. They are hampered by a complex triglossic situation in which they use their mother tongue with family and friends, Kiswahili, the national language for early education and most public communication within Tanzania, and English for advanced studies. My aim in this thesis was - to study the language policy in Tanzania and see how it is understood and implemented; - to examine the attitudes towards the various languages and their various roles; - to investigate actual language behaviour in Tanzanian higher education. My conclusion is that the dysfunctionality of the present study has to be addressed. Diglossic public life in Tanzania has to be accommodated. The only solution appears to be a compromise, namely a bilingual education system which supports from all cases of society by using Kiswahili, together with an early introduction of English and its promotion as a privileged foreign language, so that Tanzania can continue to develop internally through Kiswahili and at the same time retain access to the globalising world through the medium of English.

Total quality management in English language teaching:a case study in Turkish higher education

The need to improve the management of language learning organizations in the light of the trend toward mass higher education and of the use of English as a world language was the starting point of this thesis. The thesis aims to assess the relevance, adequacy and the relative success of Total Quality Management (TQM) as a management philosophy. Taking this empirical evidence a TQM-oriented management project in a Turkish Higher Education context, the thesis observes the consequences of a change of organizational culture, with specific reference to teachers' attitudes towards management. Both qualitative and quantitative devices are employed to plot change and the value of these devices for identifying such is considered. The main focus of the thesis is the Soft S's (Shared Values, Style, Staff and Skills) of an organization rather than the Hard S's (System, Structure, Strategy). The thesis is not concerned with the teaching and learning processes, though the PDCA cycle (the Action Research Cycle) did play a part in the project for both teachers and the researcher involved in this study of organizational development. Both before the management project was launched, and at the end of the research period, the external measurement devices (Harrison's Culture Specification Device and Hofstede's VSM) were used to describe the culture of the Centre. During the management project, internal measurement devices were used to record the change including middle-management style change (the researcher in this case). The time period chosen for this study was between September 1991 and June 1994. During this period, each device was administered twice within a specific time period, ranging from a year to 32 months.

English in a global voluntary work context:a case study of spoken interaction and its implications for language pedagogy

This study analyses a sample of spoken interaction between a Japanese volunteer working for JICA (Japan International Co-operation Agency) and one of her co-workers in Jamaica. Details of the research context are provided, followed by a theoretical grounding of the project, which relates to publications in English as a Lingua Franca and related fields. In terms of methodology and epistemology, the research aligns with discourse analysis, specifically linguistic ethnography and interactional sociolinguistics. After presenting an an analysis of the spoken interaction based on these approaches, the resulting implications for language pedagogy are considered. This includes recommendations for specific aspects of language teaching and testing practice based on the research findings, which could be incorporated into a needs-driven localized pedagogy for future Japanese volunteers. These findings also carry significant implications for other contexts of language education, not only in terms of specific pedagogical practices but also regarding broader conceptions of language and communication.