Enhancing teaching and learning speech acts: action research of Japanese as a foreign language /

This action research observes a second year Japanese class at a university where foreign language courses are elective for undergraduate students. In this study, using the six strategies to teach Japanese speech acts that Ishihara and Cohen (2006) suggested, I conducted three classes and analyzed my teaching practice with a critical friend. These strategies assist learners toward the development of their understanding of the following Japanese speech acts and also keep the learners to use them in a manner appropriate to the context: (I) invitation and refusal; (2) compliments; and (3) asking for a permission. The aim of this research is not only to improve my instruction in relation to second language (L2) pragmatic development, but also to raise further questions and to develop future research. The findings are analyzed and the data derived from my journals, artifacts, students' work, observation sheets, interviews with my critical friend, and pretests and posttests are coded and presented. The analysis shows that (I) after my critical friend encouraged my study and my students gave me some positive comments after each lesson, I gained confidence in teaching the suggested speech acts; (2) teaching involved explaining concepts and strategies, creating the visual material (a video) showing the strategies, and explaining the relationship between the strategy and grammatical forms and samples of misusing the forms; (3) students' background and learning styles influenced lessons; and (4) pretest and posttests showed that the students' Icvel of their L2 appropriate pragmatics dramatically improved after each instruction. However, after careful observation, it was noted that some factors prevented students from producing the correct output even though they understood the speech act differences.

A framework for understanding the factors that influence spectators' recall and recognition of embedded sponsorship stimuli

Now, more than ever, sponsors of athletic events demand to see evidence of a commercial return, such as enhanced brand awareness, for their investment of cash or non-cash resources (Lough et aI., 2000). The most common way to measure the impact of perimeter signage (Le., any billboard or sign that displays a company's brand name and/or logo and which surrounds the playing area) on spectators' awareness of event sponsors has been through the use of brand name recall and recognition tests (Shilbury & Berriman, 1996). Recall testing requires spectators to list all of the sponsors they can remember seeing at, for example, an athletic event, strictly from memory and without any help (Cuneen & Hannan, 1993). With recognition testing, spectators are required to identify sponsors from a prepared list which include "dummy" brand names (i.e., sponsors that are present in the list but which do not actually sponsor the event). In order to determine whether sponsors' brand awareness objectives are being met, it is important for sport and recreation marketers to understand what influences a spectator's ability to remember (Le., recall and/or recognize) the brand names of companies who advertise on perimeter signage. The purpose this study was to examine the factors that influence spectators' recall and recognition of embedded sponsorship stimuli (i.e., company brand names on perimeter signage surrounding the play area) at a Canadian University's men's basketball game and football game. These factors included the number of games spectators attended over the course of the season (i.e., repeated exposure to sponsorship stimuli), spectators' level of involvement with the event, and spectators' level of involvement with the advertisements (i.e., perimeter signage). This study also examined the differences between recall and recognition as a means of measuring spectators' awareness of sponsors, and attempted to determine if there are sport differences in spectators' recall and recognition of perimeter signage. Upon leaving the football stadium or gymnasium, spectators were approached, at random, by trained research assistants located at each exit and asked to complete a brief survey questionnaire. Respondents completed the survey on-site. A total of 358 completed surveys were collected from spectators who attended the football (N = 277) and basketball (N = 81) games. The data suggest that football and basketball respondents recognized more sponsors' brand names than they recalled. In addition, football respondents who were highly involved with the event (i.e., those individuals who viewed attending the events as fun, interesting and exciting) attended more games over the course of the season and had significantly higher brand name recognition of sponsors who advertised on perimeter signage than those individuals with low involvement with the athletic event. Football respondents who were highly involved with the sponsors' advertisements (i.e., those individuals who viewed sponsors' perimeter signage as appealing, valuable and important) had significantly higher brand name recall of event sponsors than those individuals with low involvement with these sponsors' advertisements. Repeated exposure to perimeter signage did not have a significant influence on football or basketball respondents' recall or recognition of sponsors. Finally, the data revealed that football respondents had significantly higher recall of sponsors' brand names than basketball respondents. Conversely, basketball respondents had significantly higher recognition of sponsors' brand names than did football respondents.

Mr. Giles' speech, delivered in the Senate of the United States, on Thursday, 24th November, 1808, on the resolution of Mr. Hillhouse, to repeal the embargo laws. --

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Mr. Hillhouses' speech, on the resolution to repeal the embargo, November 29, 1808. --

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Mr. Pickering's speech in the Senate of the United States, on the resolution offered by Mr. Hillhouse to repeal the several acts laying an embargo, November 30, 1808. --

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Mr. Randolph's speech on the British war. --

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Speech of Com. Jesse Duncan Elliott, U.S.N. delivered in Hagerstown, Md. on 14th November, 1843.-

Published by the Committee of Arrangement of Washington County, Maryland.

Advocating recognition and redistribution in poverty alleviation programs in Ghana : an examination of state and NGO programs and policies

Abstract This thesis argues that poverty alleviation strategies and programs carried out by the government and Non Governmental Organizations in Ghana provide affirmative solutions to poverty. This is because, these intervention strategies have been influenced by conventional discourses on poverty that fail to adequately address non-economic issues of poverty such as powerlessness, marginalization and tmder-representation. The study is carried out in a two-pronged manner; first, it analyses state policies and strategies, particularly the Ghana Poverty Reduction Strategy (GPRS), on poverty alleviation and compares these to NGO programs, implemented with funds and support from external donor organizations. Specifically, I focus on how NGOs and the governnlent of Ghana negotiate autonomy and financial dependency with their funding donor-partners and how these affect their policies and programs. Findings from this study reveal that while external influences dominate poverty alleviation policies and strategies, NGOs and the government of Ghana exercise varying degrees of agency in navigating these issues. In particular, NGOs have been able to adapt their programs to the changing needs of donor markets, and are also actively engaged in re-orienting poverty back to the political domain through advocacy campaigns. Overall, rural communities in Ghana depend on charitable NGOs for the provision of essential social services, while the Ghanaian government depends on international donor assistance for its development projects.

Extending the irrelevant sound effect beyond serial recall

The finding that serial recall perfonnance for visually presented items is impaired by concurrently presented speech or sounds is referred to as the irrelevant sound effect (lSE). The foremost explanation for the effect is based on interference with rehearsal and seriation processes. The present series of experiments demonstrates tha t neither rehearsal nor seriation processes is necessary to observe the ISE. Evidence comes from three experiments that a) allow participants to report to-be-remembered items in any order, b) eliminate rehearsal by engaging participants in a cover task and surprising them with a memory test, and c) show that surprise non-serial recognition is immune to rehearsal-based experimental manipulations that modulate the ISE in more typical serial recall tasks. Together,the results show that models that rely on rehearsal or seriation processes to account for the ISE need to be reconsidered. Results are discussed in tenns of interference with encoding of to-be-remembered material.

Behavioural and neural correlates of emotion recognition as a function of psychopathic personality traits

Psychopathy is associated with well-known characteristics such as a lack of empathy and impulsive behaviour, but it has also been associated with impaired recognition of emotional facial expressions. The use of event-related potentials (ERPs) to examine this phenomenon could shed light on the specific time course and neural activation associated with emotion recognition processes as they relate to psychopathic traits. In the current study we examined the PI , N170, and vertex positive potential (VPP) ERP components and behavioural performance with respect to scores on the Self-Report Psychopathy (SRP-III) questionnaire. Thirty undergraduates completed two tasks, the first of which required the recognition and categorization of affective face stimuli under varying presentation conditions. Happy, angry or fearful faces were presented under with attention directed to the mouth, nose or eye region and varied stimulus exposure duration (30, 75, or 150 ms). We found that behavioural performance to be unrelated to psychopathic personality traits in all conditions, but there was a trend for the Nl70 to peak later in response to fearful and happy facial expressions for individuals high in psychopathic traits. However, the amplitude of the VPP was significantly negatively associated with psychopathic traits, but only in response to stimuli presented under a nose-level fixation. Finally, psychopathic traits were found to be associated with longer N170 latencies in response to stimuli presented under the 30 ms exposure duration. In the second task, participants were required to inhibit processing of irrelevant affective and scrambled face distractors while categorizing unrelated word stimuli as living or nonliving. Psychopathic traits were hypothesized to be positively associated with behavioural performance, as it was proposed that individuals high in psychopathic traits would be less likely to automatically attend to task-irrelevant affective distractors, facilitating word categorization. Thus, decreased interference would be reflected in smaller N170 components, indicating less neural activity associated with processing of distractor faces. We found that overall performance decreased in the presence of angry and fearful distractor faces as psychopathic traits increased. In addition, the amplitude of the N170 decreased and the latency increased in response to affective distractor faces for individuals with higher levels of psychopathic traits. Although we failed to find the predicted behavioural deficit in emotion recognition in Task 1 and facilitation effect in Task 2, the findings of increased N170 and VPP latencies in response to emotional faces are consistent wi th the proposition that abnormal emotion recognition processes may in fact be inherent to psychopathy as a continuous personality trait.

Mr. Giles' speech, delivered in the Senate of the United States, on Thursday, 24th November, 1808, on the resolution of Mr. Hillhouse, to repeal the embargo laws

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