Learner autonomy in language learning : teachers' beliefs

This case study research investigated the extent to which Vietnamese teachers understood the concept of learner autonomy and how their beliefs about this concept were applied in their teaching practices. Data were collected through two phases of the study and revealed that teachers generally lacked understanding about learner autonomy; there was an alignment between this lack of understanding and teachers' actual teaching practices regarding learner autonomy. The findings of this study will provide teachers and policy-makers new insights into learner autonomy against the backdrop of educational reforms in Vietnam.

Book Review: "Language, literacy, and pedagogy in postindustrial societies : the case of black academic underachievement"

Mocombe and Tomlin’s Language, Literacy, and Pedagogy in Postindustrial Societies: The Case of Black Academic Underachievement is part of the Routledge Research in Education series. The purpose of the work is to set out a theoretical framework for understanding the black/white academic achievement gap in the age of globalisation and post-industrialism. The authors use each chapter to develop an explanation for the persistent black/white academic achievement gap, by theorising that the gap is an epiphenomenon of global capitalist, post-industrial structures, reinforced by education as an apparatus of the system...

The Language : Rationale and Fundamentals

The Business Process Management domain has evolved at a dramatic pace over the past two decades and the notion of the business process has become a ubiquitous part of the modern business enterprise. Most organizations now view their operations in terms of business processes and manage these business processes in the same way as other corporate assets. In recent years, an increasingly broad range of generic technology has become available for automating business processes. This is part of a growing trend in the software engineering field throughout the past 40 years, where aspects of functionality that are potentially reusable on a widespread basis have coalesced into generic software components. Figure 2.1 illustrates this trend and shows how software systems have evolved from the monolithic applications of the 1960s developed in their entirety often by a single development team to today’s offerings that are based on the integration of a range of generic technologies with only a small component of the application actually being developed from scratch. In the 1990s, generic functionality for the automation of business processes first became commercially available in the form of workflow technology and subsequently evolved in the broader field of business process management systems (BPMS). This technology alleviated the necessity to develop process support within applications from scratch and provided a variety of off-the-shelf options on which these requirements could be based. The demand for this technology was significant and it is estimated that by 2000 there were well over 200 distinct workflow offerings in the market, each with a distinct conceptual foundation. Anticipating the difficulties that would be experienced by organizations seeking to utilize and integrate distinct workflow offerings, the Workflow Management Coalition (WfMC), an industry group formed to advance technology in this area, proposed a standard reference model for workflow technology with an express desire to seek a common platform for achieving workflow interoperation.

Generating natural language texts from business process models

Process Modeling is a widely used concept for understanding, documenting and also redesigning the operations of organizations. The validation and usage of process models is however affected by the fact that only business analysts fully understand them in detail. This is in particular a problem because they are typically not domain experts. In this paper, we investigate in how far the concept of verbalization can be adapted from object-role modeling to process models. To this end, we define an approach which automatically transforms BPMN process models into natural language texts and combines different techniques from linguistics and graph decomposition in a flexible and accurate manner. The evaluation of the technique is based on a prototypical implementation and involves a test set of 53 BPMN process models showing that natural language texts can be generated in a reliable fashion.

Broken gates and leaky graves : spectral language and Australia's ghost stories

Ghost stories are unusual amongst supernatural literatures in their modelling of a recognisable, mimetic reality interrupted or infiltrated by immaterial forces. In its discussion of Australian ghost stories, this thesis advances a new approach to ghost narratives which seeks to model and articulate the mechanics of ghosts and hauntings as something reliant on and engaged with the material and the mundane.

Understanding the information literacy experiences of EFL (English as a Foreign Language) students

This thesis investigated the information literacy experiences of EFL (English as a Foreign Language) students in a higher education institution in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Phenomenography was used to investigate how EFL students' 'used information to learn' (ie. information literacy). The study revealed that EFL students' experienced information literacy across four categories and had varying experiences of information and learning. The research also showed that EFL students' faced a number of challenges and barriers due to language that impacted on their experiences of reading, understanding, accessing and translating information.

Facilitating query decomposition in query language modeling by association rule mining using multiple sliding windows

This paper presents a novel framework to further advance the recent trend of using query decomposition and high-order term relationships in query language modeling, which takes into account terms implicitly associated with different subsets of query terms. Existing approaches, most remarkably the language model based on the Information Flow method are however unable to capture multiple levels of associations and also suffer from a high computational overhead. In this paper, we propose to compute association rules from pseudo feedback documents that are segmented into variable length chunks via multiple sliding windows of different sizes. Extensive experiments have been conducted on various TREC collections and our approach significantly outperforms a baseline Query Likelihood language model, the Relevance Model and the Information Flow model.

Design of a garment for data collection of toddler language and physical activity

Design process phases of development, evaluation and implementation were used to create a garment to simultaneously collect reliable data of speech production and intensity of movement of toddlers (18-36 months). A series of prototypes were developed and evaluated that housed accelerometer-based motion sensors and a digital transmitter with microphone. The approved test garment was a top constructed from loop-faced fabric with interior pockets to house devices. Extended side panels allowed for sizing. In total, 56 toddlers (28 male; 28 female; 16-36 months of age) participated in the study providing pilot and baseline data. The test garment was effective in collecting data as evaluated for accuracy and reliability using ANOVA for accelerometer data, transcription of video for type of movement, and number and length of utterances for speech production. The data collection garment has been implemented in various studies across disciplines.

Educational paradox : the hidden obstacles to the integration of mobile phones in the language classroom

This paper reports on the findings of an international telecollaboration study using Facebook, in which teachers studying in M. Ed programs in Australia and Greece, discussed the use of mobile phones in language classrooms. Results suggest that invisible barriers exist in the use of mobile phones in the classroom, including bans on use in schools, lack of familiarity with educational uses for mobile phones, and negative perceptions about mobile phones specifically in terms of classroom management.

Cell adhesion molecule uvomorulin expression in human breast cancer cell lines : relationship to morphology and invasive capacities

Loss of cell-cell adhesion in carcinoma cells may be an important step in the acquisition of an invasive, metastatic phenotype. We have examined the expression of the epithelial-specific cell adhesion molecule uvomorulin (E-cadherin, cell-CAM 120/80, L-CAM) in human breast cancer cell lines. We find that fibroblastoid, highly invasive, vimentin-expressing breast cancer cell lines do not express uvomorulin. Of the more epithelial-appearing, less invasive, keratin-expressing breast cancer cell lines, some express uvomorulin, and some do not. We examined the morphologies of the cell lines in the reconstituted basement membrane matrix Matrigel and measured the ability of the cells to traverse a Matrigel-coated filter as in vitro models for detachment of carcinoma cells from neighboring cells and invasion through basement membrane into surrounding tissue. Colonies of uvomorulin-positive cells have a characteristic fused appearance in Matrigel, whereas uvomorulin-negative cells appear detached. Cells which are uvomorulin negative and vimentin positive have a stellate morphology in Matrigel. We show that uvomorulin is responsible for the fused colony morphology in Matrigel since treatment of uvomorulin-positive MCF-7 cells with an antibody to uvomorulin caused the cells to detach from one another but did not induce invasiveness in these cells, as measured by their ability to cross a Matrigel-coated polycarbonate filter in a modified Boyden chamber assay. Two uvomorulin-negative, vimentin-negative cell lines are also not highly invasive as measured by this assay. We suggest that loss of uvomorulin-mediated cell-cell adhesion may be one of many changes involved in the progression of a carcinoma cell to an invasive phenotype.

Insight into morphology and structure of different particle sized kaolinites with same origin

The particle size, morphology, crystallinity order and structural defects of four kaolinite samples are characterized by the techniques including particle size analysis, scanning electron microscopy (SEM), X-ray diffraction (XRD), Raman spectroscopy, Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR) and magic angle spinning nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MAS NMR). The particle size of four kaolinite samples gradually increases. Four samples all belong to the ordered kaolinite and show a decrease in structural order with the increase of kaolinite particle size. The changes of structural defect are proved by the increase of the band splitting in Raman spectroscopy, the decrease of the intensity of absorption bands in infrared spectroscopy, and the decrease of equivalent silicon atom and the increase of nonequivalent aluminum atom in MAS NMR spectroscopy. The differences in morphology and structural defect are attributed to the broken bonds of Al–O–Si, Al–O–Al and Si–O–Si and the Al substitution for Si in tetrahedral sheets.

An attack-localizing watermarking scheme for natural language documents

We present a text watermarking scheme that embeds a bitstream watermark Wi in a text document P preserving the meaning, context, and flow of the document. The document is viewed as a set of paragraphs, each paragraph being a set of sentences. The sequence of paragraphs and sentences used to embed watermark bits is permuted using a secret key. Then, English language sentence transformations are used to modify sentence lengths, thus embedding watermarking bits in the Least Significant Bits (LSB) of the sentences’ cardinalities. The embedding and extracting algorithms are public, while the secrecy and security of the watermark depends on a secret key K. The probability of False Positives is extremely small, hence avoiding incidental occurrences of our watermark in random text documents. Majority voting provides security against text addition, deletion, and swapping attacks, further reducing the probability of False Positives. The scheme is secure against the general attacks on text watermarks such as reproduction (photocopying, FAX), reformatting, synonym substitution, text addition, text deletion, text swapping, paragraph shuffling and collusion attacks.

Large networks of vertical multi-layer graphenes with morphology-tunable magnetoresistance

We report on the comparative study of magnetotransport properties of large-area vertical few-layer graphene networks with different morphologies, measured in a strong (up to 10 T) magnetic field over a wide temperature range. The petal-like and tree-like graphene networks grown by a plasma enhanced CVD process on a thin (500 nm) silicon oxide layer supported by a silicon wafer demonstrate a significant difference in the resistance-magnetic field dependencies at temperatures ranging from 2 to 200 K. This behaviour is explained in terms of the effect of electron scattering at ultra-long reactive edges and ultra-dense boundaries of the graphene nanowalls. Our results pave a way towards three-dimensional vertical graphene-based magnetoelectronic nanodevices with morphology-tuneable anisotropic magnetic properties. © The Royal Society of Chemistry 2013.

Control of morphology and electrical properties of self-organized graphenes in a plasma

The possibility of effective control of morphology and electrical properties of self-organized graphene structures on plasma-exposed Si surfaces is demonstrated. The structures are vertically standing nanosheets and can be grown without any catalyst and any external heating upon direct contact with high-density inductively coupled plasmas at surface temperatures not exceeding 673–723 K. Study of nucleation and growth dynamics revealed the possibility to switch-over between the two most common (turnstile- and maze-like) morphologies on the same substrates by a simple change of the plasma parameters. This change leads to the continuous or discontinuous native oxide layer that supports self-organized patterns of small carbon nanoparticles on which the structures nucleate. It is shown that by tailoring the nanoparticle arrangement one can create various three-dimensional architectures and networks of graphene nanosheet structures. We also demonstrate effective control of the degree of graphitization of the graphene nanosheet structures from the initial through the final growth stages. This makes it possible to tune the electrical resistivity properties of the produced three-dimensional patterns/networks from strongly dielectric to semiconducting. Our results contribute to enabling direct integration of graphene structures into presently dominant Si-based nanofabrication platform for next-generation nanoelectronic, sensor, biomedical, and optoelectronic components and nanodevices.