Efectos de la presencia social de las lenguas escolares en el desarrollo lingüístico del alumnado extranjero. Un estudio empírico en Cataluña = The Social Presence of School Languages and Their Effects on the Development of Immigrant Students’ Linguistic Proficiency. An Empirical Study in Catalonia

El estudio de las variables relacionadas con la adquisición de las lenguas escolares en contextos bilingües y multilingües ha resurgido a raíz de la incorporación de alumnado extranjero al sistema educativo español. En este sentido, y gracias a su peculiar situación sociolingüística, Cataluña se ha convertido en un observatorio perfecto para estudiar el proceso de adquisición de lenguas del alumnado extranjero. En este artículo presentamos una parte de los datos obtenidos en la evaluación del conocimiento de catalán y del castellano de 668 alumnos extranjeros de sexto de Primaria escolarizados en 57 centros de Cataluña. Con ello pretendemos estudiar los efectos de la presencia y del uso social de las lenguas escolares en el conocimiento lingüístico de este alumnado. La hipótesis principal es que el desarrollo de buenos niveles de conocimiento escrito de las lenguas escolares por parte de los alumnos extranjeros depende, en buena medida, de las oportunidades que haya en el entorno social para que ellos puedan utilizar estas lenguas en los intercambios comunicativos informales con sus compañeros o con otros adultos. Las conclusiones del trabajo señalan las relaciones existentes entre el desarrollo de habilidades lingüísticas conversacionales y el de habilidades lingüísticas cognitivo-académicas (Cummins, 1979b), en el sentido de que tanto el conocimiento escrito de catalán como el de castellano que tiene el alumnado extranjero están condicionados por el nivel de desarrollo conversacional previo en ambas lenguas. Además, apuntan a que la transferencia de habilidades lingüísticas cognitivo-académicas no se produce directamente entre el catalán y el castellano, sino que depende fundamentalmente de la presencia social que tengan estas lenguas y de sus usos informales. Así, en la medida en que un buen número de estudiantes extranjeros no desarrolla suficiente competencia lingüística conversacional ni en catalán ni en castellano, el proceso de adquisición de las lenguas escolares se alarga más allá de los seis años

A citation analysis of Catalan literary studies (1974-2003): towards a bibliometrics of humanities studies in minority languages

A citation analysis was carried out on the most important research journals in the field of Catalan literature between 1974 and 2003. The indicators and qualitative parameters obtained show the value of performing citation analysis in cultural and linguistic areas that are poorly covered by the A&HCI. Catalan literature shows a similar pattern to that of humanities in general, but it could still be in a stage of consolidation because too little work has as yet been published.

Microvariation in the languages of the Iberian Peninsula

This issue of the Catalan Journal of Linguistics was conceived with the idea to promote comparative studies of the languages spoken in the Iberian Peninsula. The importance of comparison in linguistics dates back to neogrammarians in the xix century due to their interest of discovering the common roots of most of the languages spoken in Europe. In order to get to that objective, comparison of phonological patterns were crucial to retrieve the common Indo-European origins

Modeling information in software languages

Ohjelmiston kehitystyökalut käyttävät infromaatiota kehittäjän tuottamasta lähdekoodista. Informaatiota hyödynnetään ohjelmistoprojektin eri vaiheissa ja eri tarkoituksissa. Moderneissa ohjelmistoprojekteissa käytetyn informaation määrä voi kasvaa erittäin suureksi. Ohjelmistotyökaluilla on omat informaatiomallinsa ja käyttömekanisminsa. Informaation määrä sekä erilliset työkaluinformaatiomallit tekevät erittäin hankalaksi rakentaa joustavaa työkaluympäristöä, erityisesti ongelma-aluekohtaiseen ohjelmiston kehitysprosessiin. Tässä työssä on analysoitu perusinformaatiometamalleja Unified Modeling language kielestä, Python ohjelmointikielestä ja C++ ohjelmointikielestä. Metainformaation taso on rajoitettu rakenteelliselle tasolle. Ajettavat rakenteet on jätetty pois. ModelBase metamalli on yhdistetty olemassa olevista analysoiduista metamalleista. Tätä metamallia voidaan käyttää tulevaisuudessa ohjelmistotyökalujen kehitykseen.

BioSWR - Semantic Web services Registry for Bioinformatics

Article About the Authors Metrics Comments Related Content Abstract Introduction Functionality Implementation Discussion Acknowledgments Author Contributions References Reader Comments (0) Figures Abstract Despite of the variety of available Web services registries specially aimed at Life Sciences, their scope is usually restricted to a limited set of well-defined types of services. While dedicated registries are generally tied to a particular format, general-purpose ones are more adherent to standards and usually rely on Web Service Definition Language (WSDL). Although WSDL is quite flexible to support common Web services types, its lack of semantic expressiveness led to various initiatives to describe Web services via ontology languages. Nevertheless, WSDL 2.0 descriptions gained a standard representation based on Web Ontology Language (OWL). BioSWR is a novel Web services registry that provides standard Resource Description Framework (RDF) based Web services descriptions along with the traditional WSDL based ones. The registry provides Web-based interface for Web services registration, querying and annotation, and is also accessible programmatically via Representational State Transfer (REST) API or using a SPARQL Protocol and RDF Query Language. BioSWR server is located at http://inb.bsc.es/BioSWR/and its code is available at https://sourceforge.net/projects/bioswr/​under the LGPL license.

Search Interfaces on the Web: Querying and Characterizing

Current-day web search engines (e.g., Google) do not crawl and index a significant portion of theWeb and, hence, web users relying on search engines only are unable to discover and access a large amount of information from the non-indexable part of the Web. Specifically, dynamic pages generated based on parameters provided by a user via web search forms (or search interfaces) are not indexed by search engines and cannot be found in searchers’ results. Such search interfaces provide web users with an online access to myriads of databases on the Web. In order to obtain some information from a web database of interest, a user issues his/her query by specifying query terms in a search form and receives the query results, a set of dynamic pages that embed required information from a database. At the same time, issuing a query via an arbitrary search interface is an extremely complex task for any kind of automatic agents including web crawlers, which, at least up to the present day, do not even attempt to pass through web forms on a large scale. In this thesis, our primary and key object of study is a huge portion of the Web (hereafter referred as the deep Web) hidden behind web search interfaces. We concentrate on three classes of problems around the deep Web: characterization of deep Web, finding and classifying deep web resources, and querying web databases. Characterizing deep Web: Though the term deep Web was coined in 2000, which is sufficiently long ago for any web-related concept/technology, we still do not know many important characteristics of the deep Web. Another matter of concern is that surveys of the deep Web existing so far are predominantly based on study of deep web sites in English. One can then expect that findings from these surveys may be biased, especially owing to a steady increase in non-English web content. In this way, surveying of national segments of the deep Web is of interest not only to national communities but to the whole web community as well. In this thesis, we propose two new methods for estimating the main parameters of deep Web. We use the suggested methods to estimate the scale of one specific national segment of the Web and report our findings. We also build and make publicly available a dataset describing more than 200 web databases from the national segment of the Web. Finding deep web resources: The deep Web has been growing at a very fast pace. It has been estimated that there are hundred thousands of deep web sites. Due to the huge volume of information in the deep Web, there has been a significant interest to approaches that allow users and computer applications to leverage this information. Most approaches assumed that search interfaces to web databases of interest are already discovered and known to query systems. However, such assumptions do not hold true mostly because of the large scale of the deep Web – indeed, for any given domain of interest there are too many web databases with relevant content. Thus, the ability to locate search interfaces to web databases becomes a key requirement for any application accessing the deep Web. In this thesis, we describe the architecture of the I-Crawler, a system for finding and classifying search interfaces. Specifically, the I-Crawler is intentionally designed to be used in deepWeb characterization studies and for constructing directories of deep web resources. Unlike almost all other approaches to the deep Web existing so far, the I-Crawler is able to recognize and analyze JavaScript-rich and non-HTML searchable forms. Querying web databases: Retrieving information by filling out web search forms is a typical task for a web user. This is all the more so as interfaces of conventional search engines are also web forms. At present, a user needs to manually provide input values to search interfaces and then extract required data from the pages with results. The manual filling out forms is not feasible and cumbersome in cases of complex queries but such kind of queries are essential for many web searches especially in the area of e-commerce. In this way, the automation of querying and retrieving data behind search interfaces is desirable and essential for such tasks as building domain-independent deep web crawlers and automated web agents, searching for domain-specific information (vertical search engines), and for extraction and integration of information from various deep web resources. We present a data model for representing search interfaces and discuss techniques for extracting field labels, client-side scripts and structured data from HTML pages. We also describe a representation of result pages and discuss how to extract and store results of form queries. Besides, we present a user-friendly and expressive form query language that allows one to retrieve information behind search interfaces and extract useful data from the result pages based on specified conditions. We implement a prototype system for querying web databases and describe its architecture and components design.

English as a medium of instruction in teaching other languages: attitudes and practices

Internationalisation of HE and emergence of English as a global academic lingua franca used by people who share neither a common native tongue nor cultural and educational background have not only offered more opportunities but also raised challenges. According to recent European surveys, the percentage of pupils attaining the level of independent user in English varies from 14% to 82%, which evidences the potential and the complexity for English as a medium of instruction at tertiary level. This study aims to present the model of foreign language instruction at Vytautas Magnus University where one third of 30 languages are taught through English. It investigates the attitudes and practices of teachers in delivering their English-medium language courses by discussing the questions whether teaching other languages through English is psychologically, culturally and educationally preferable for teachers and students, whether it can limit the content taught and require a special methodology, how the teaching process changes with multiple languages used in the classroom and what level of English is necessary for teachers and students to ensure high quality of English-medium language teaching. The study is based on qualitative methodology with 12 language teachers participating as respondents. The results reveal areas in need of improvement.

Courts and Courtly Cultures in Early Modern Italy and Europe: Models and Languages

This volume deals with the forms of propaganda and self-representation, through words and images, during the rise of the 'civiltà delle corti' and through processes typical of the time, such as confrontation, adaptation, competition and rivalry. This period, which marked the passage of Italian and European culture from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance, is fundamental in the development of Modern Europe, and it lasted up to the XVIII century and beyond. At the heart of many matters debated here lies the relationship between culture and politics. The formation of a 'Lombard identity', central to the Sinergia project which was the frame of the whole research and its conferences, is closely linked to this broad general context. It places the so called 'questione milanese' - above the traditional hierarchies 'Toscana oriented' - at the centre of many questions regarding Northern Italy as a whole, starting from the dissolution of the Medieval communes, through to the rise of the signorie, from the end of the XIII century and the beginning of the XIV century up to the early XVI century.