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.

A study in Britain and France of the development of cross-cultural in-house sales training using distance learning.

The thesis is concerned with cross-cultural distance learning in two countries: Great Britain and France. Taking the example of in-house sales training, it argues that it is possible to develop courses for use in two or more countries of differing culture and language. Two courses were developed by the researcher. Both were essentially print-based distance-learning courses designed to help salespeople achieve a better understanding of their customers. One used a quantitative, the other qualitative approach. One considered the concept of the return on investment and the other, for which a video support was also developed, considered the analysis of a customer's needs. Part 1 of the thesis considers differences in the training context between France and Britain followed by a review of the learning process with reference to distance learning. Part 2 looks at the choice of training medium course design and evaluation and sets out the methodology adopted, including problems encountered in this type of fieldwork. Part 3 analyses the data and draws conclusions from the findings, before offering a series of guidelines for those concerned with the development of cross-cultural in-house training courses. The results of the field tests on the two courses were analysed in relation to the socio-cultural, educational and experiential background of the learners as well as their preferred learning styles. The thesis argues that it is possible to develop effective in-house sales training courses to be used in two cultures and identifies key considerations which need to be taken into account when carrying out this type of work.

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.

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.

Semi-supervised learning of statistical models for natural language understanding

Natural language understanding is to specify a computational model that maps sentences to their semantic mean representation. In this paper, we propose a novel framework to train the statistical models without using expensive fully annotated data. In particular, the input of our framework is a set of sentences labeled with abstract semantic annotations. These annotations encode the underlying embedded semantic structural relations without explicit word/semantic tag alignment. The proposed framework can automatically induce derivation rules that map sentences to their semantic meaning representations. The learning framework is applied on two statistical models, the conditional random fields (CRFs) and the hidden Markov support vector machines (HM-SVMs). Our experimental results on the DARPA communicator data show that both CRFs and HM-SVMs outperform the baseline approach, previously proposed hidden vector state (HVS) model which is also trained on abstract semantic annotations. In addition, the proposed framework shows superior performance than two other baseline approaches, a hybrid framework combining HVS and HM-SVMs and discriminative training of HVS, with a relative error reduction rate of about 25% and 15% being achieved in F-measure.

Group Work as a Strategy to Improve the Effectiveness of the Learning Process

Report published in the Proceedings of the National Conference on "Education in the Information Society", Plovdiv, May, 2013

An evaluation of English language instruction in universities/colleges in Taiwan

The purpose of this study is about to survey the effectiveness of English teaching in universities/colleges in Taiwan and provide suggestions to the educational authorities for upgrading or improving the English language teaching techniques or methods currently in use. On the one hand, the suggestions of English teachers in universities/colleges are the main concerns in this study. On the other hand, equal attention is given to the opinions and learning attitudes of the students, including the interaction between the teachers and the students.^ A social investigation methodology, consisting of questionnaire and data analysis, is devoted to this evaluation and analysis of teaching effectiveness. Among the significant findings reported in this study is the fact that both students and teachers consider evaluation of teaching effectiveness as a very important aspect of English Language programs at the university/college level. Another significant finding is that students are less concerned about the grades earned or awarded in English Language courses and more concerned about how much they learned in these classes.^ The analysis and suggestions based on the results for English teaching evaluation of universities/colleges in this dissertation can help teachers modify their teaching techniques and methods, the students to adjust their learning attitudes, and the authorities to schematize the English teaching plan that can facilitate the teaching goals to be realized. ^

A comparison of the effects of social constructivist and traditional approaches to teaching on students' attitude and achievement in high school chemistry

Current views of the nature of knowledge and of learning suggest that instructional approaches in science education pay closer attention to how students learn rather than on teaching. This study examined the use of approaches to teaching science based on two contrasting perspectives in learning, social constructivist and traditional, and the effects they have on students' attitudes and achievement. Four categories of attitudes were measured using the Upper Secondary Attitude Questionnaire: Attitude towards school, towards the importance of science, towards science as a career, and towards science as a subject in school. Achievement was measured by average class grades and also with a researcher/teacher constructed 30-item test that involved three sub-scales of items based on knowledge, and applications involving near-transfer and far-transfer of concepts. The sample consisted of 202 students in nine intact classrooms in chemistry at a large high school in Miami, Florida, and involved two teachers. Results were analyzed using a two-way analysis of covariance (ANCOVA) with a pretest in attitude as the covariate for attitudes and prior achievement as the covariate for achievement. A comparison of the adjusted mean scores was made between the two groups and between females and males. ^ With constructivist-based teaching, students showed more favorable attitude towards science as a subject, obtained significantly higher scores in class achievement, total achievement and achievement on the knowledge sub-scale of the knowledge and application test. Students in the traditional group showed more favorable attitude towards school. Females showed significantly more positive attitude towards the importance of science and obtained significantly higher scores in class achievement. No significant interaction effects were obtained for method of instruction by gender. ^ This study lends some support to the view that constructivist-based approaches to teaching science is a viable alternative to traditional modes of teaching. It is suggested that in science education, more consideration be given to those aspects of classroom teaching that foster closer coordination between social influences and individual learning. ^

The effects of a General Instructional Strategies course on the utilization of effective instructional strategies by teachers

The focus of this study was to explain the extent to which theoretically effective teaching strategies taught in a course on generic instructional strategies are being implemented by teachers in their actual teaching practice. ^ A multivariate causal-comparative (ex-post-facto) design was used to answer the research question. A teacher observation protocol, the General Instructional Strategies Analysis (GISA) was constructed and used to assess the utilization of instructional strategies in the classroom. The data of this study also included open-ended field notes taken during observations. ^ Multivariate Analyses of Variance (MANOVA) was used to compare the teaching strategies (set, effective explanation, hands-on activity, cooperative learning activity, higher order questioning, closure) of the group who had taken a general instructional strategies course (N=36) and the group who had not (N=36). Results showed a statistically significant difference between the two groups. The group who had taken the course implemented these strategies more effectively in almost all categories of effective teaching. Follow-up univariate tests of the dependent variables showed significant differences between the two groups in five of the six areas (hands-on activity being an exception). A second MANOVA compared the two groups on the effective use of attending behaviors (teacher movement/eye contact/body language/physical space, brief verbal acknowledgements/voice inflection/modulation/pitch, use of visuals, prompting/probing, praise/feedback/rewards, wait-time I and II). Results also showed a multivariate difference between the two groups. Follow-up univariate tests on the related dependent variables showed that five of the six were significantly different between the two groups. The group who had taken the course implemented the strategies more effectively. An analysis of the field notes provided further evidence regarding the pervasiveness of these differences between the teaching practices of the two groups. ^ It was concluded that taking a course in general instructional strategies increases the utilization of effective strategies in the classroom by teachers. ^

Effects of repeated readings on reading abilities of English language learners with specific learning disabilities

This study investigated the effects of repeated readings on the reading abilities of 4, third-, fourth-, and fifth-grade English language learners (ELLs) with specific learning disabilities (SLD). A multiple baseline probe design across subjects was used to explore the effects of repeated readings on four dependent variables: reading fluency (words read correctly per minute; wpm), number of errors per minute (epm), types of errors per minute, and answer to literal comprehension questions. Data were collected and analyzed during baseline, intervention, generalization probes, and maintenance probes. Throughout the baseline and intervention phases, participants read a passage aloud and received error correction feedback. During baseline, this was followed by fluency and literal comprehension question assessments. During intervention, this was followed by two oral repeated readings of the passage. Then the fluency and literal comprehension question assessments were administered. Generalization probes followed approximately 25% of all sessions and consisted of a single reading of a new passage at the same readability level. Maintenance sessions occurred 2-, 4-, and 6-weeks after the intervention ended. The results of this study indicated that repeated readings had a positive effect on the reading abilities of ELLs with SLD. Participants read more wpm, made fewer epm, and answered more literal comprehension questions correctly. Additionally, on average, generalization scores were higher in intervention than in baseline. Maintenance scores were varied when compared to the last day of intervention, however, with the exception of the number of hesitations committed per minute maintenance scores were higher than baseline means. This study demonstrated that repeated readings improved the reading abilities of ELLs with SLD and that gains were generalized to untaught passages. Maintenance probes 2-, 4-, and 6- weeks following intervention indicated that mean reading fluency, errors per minute, and correct answers to literal comprehensive questions remained above baseline levels. Future research should investigate the use of repeated readings in ELLs with SLD at various stages of reading acquisition. Further, future investigations may examine how repeated readings can be integrated into classroom instruction and assessments.

An examination of the effects of a summer book-reading program on the language and early literacy outcomes of toddlers from high risk environments

The current study examined the impact of an early summer literacy program and the mediating effects of the home literacy environment on the language and literacy outcomes of a group of children at-risk for long-term developmental and academic delays. Participating children (n=54) were exposed to an intensive book-reading intervention each summer (June through mid August) over a 3-year period. The current study implemented an ex post facto, quasi-experimental design. This nonequivalent group design involved a pretest and posttest over three time points for a non-randomized treatment group and a matched non-treatment comparison group. Results indicated that literacy scores did improve for the children over the 3-year period; however, language scores did not experience the same rate of change over time. Receptive language was significantly impacted by attendance, and race/ethnicity. Expressive language was impacted significantly by gestational age and attendance. Results also indicated that language outcomes for young children who are exposed to a literacy program were higher than those who did not participate; however, only receptive language yielded significance at the p<.05 level. These study results also found that activities in the home that support literacy and learning do indeed impact language and literacy outcomes for these children, specifically, the age at which a child is read to, the number of books in the home, a child’s enjoyment of reading, and whether a child looks at books on his or her own impact language scores. This study concluded that at-risk young children do benefit from center-based literacy intervention. This literacy experience, however, is also driven by the children's home environment, their attendance to the program, whether they were premature or not and the type of caregiver.

Universal Design for Learning and Differentiated Instruction: Resolving Competing Mandates of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act and No Child Left Behind

Recent federal mandates require accountability for providing students with disabilities access to the general education curriculum. In this paper, the authors recommend that principles of Universal Design for Learning and Differentiated Instruction can help school personnel tailor their teaching to meet the various strengths and needs of individual students.