The Connections of Music, Culture, and Language: A Qualitative Case Study of the Musical Experience of a Newcomer Program

In this qualitative case study, I investigated the philosophy and process of an elementary newcomer program and explored the perceived benefits for newcomer students of the musical experience, aiding in transition from full-time English as a second language (ESL) services in self-contained class to a general education setting. The studied school division serves a high population of students who are English Language Learners (ELLs), representing a multitude of languages and cultures. The division places students of immigrant families who have no social or educational experience speaking English in the newcomer program. In order to gain a deep understanding of the musical experience provided for newcomer students, I interviewed the music teacher, building administrator, and division coordinator of English language services. Three semi-structured interviews informed the data analysis, using intrinsic motivational theory as a theoretical framework, with the notion that the three participants upheld the conditions of accessing newcomer students’ inherent motivation. Results indicated that education professionals perceived that music, when taught through a culturally responsive philosophy, welcomes newcomer students into the school community; develops a positive student disposition for learning each other’s cultures and the new culture to which they are trying to assimilate; enhances meaning regarding language acquisition and development of identity; and engenders competence, putting the students at the center of learning. Therefore, music education should receive strong consideration when planning instruction for newcomer students and ELLs in general. Furthermore, music educators should receive pre-service and in-service training on how to effectively teach students of diverse cultures and languages with a culturally responsive teaching philosophy. Newcomer programs could also benefit from collaboration between music educators, ESL educators, and culturally representative musicians in the community. The implementation of these recommendations could potentially result in stronger cultural identities among immigrant students and more efficient English language acquisition for ELLs

Cost Assessment Modelling of Treatments for Highly Active Relapsing Multiple Sclerosis

Introduction Cost assessment modelling (CAM) of treatments in highly active relapsing multiple sclerosis was conducted. Methods The CAM was developed using the R programming language. The PICOSTEPS health technology assessment framework was applied in the CAM. Modelled patients were 280 adults with highly active relapsing multiple sclerosis eligible for disease-modifying treatment. Intervention was cladribine tablets, a new and reimbursed oral treatment for highly active relapsing multiple sclerosis in Finland. Comparators included fingolimod, the most used oral reimbursed treatment for the highly active disease, and natalizumab, the most used intravenous treatment, and a treatment mix (80% use fingolimod, 20% use natalizumab) in Finland. Outcomes presented expected annual and cumulative drug-associated costs in the overall population and per patient. Setting was modelled public specialist care in Finland. Time was set to 4 years, without discounting. Effects covered expected drug-associated costs (screening, acquisition, administration, monitoring, adverse events, travelling, productivity). Perspective was a limited societal perspective. Sensitivity analyses regarding all PICOSTEPS components were conducted. Results Cladribine tablets were projected to be cost saving in comparison to fingolimod, natalizumab and treatment mix. The respective modelled savings were euro4,598,742, euro16,249,701 and euro6,928,934 in the overall population, and euro16,424, euro58,035 and euro24,746 per patient, respectively, during the 4 years. The most important cost driver was drug costs, representing 96.3%, 96.0% and 83.4% of modelled costs associated with cladribine tablets, fingolimod and natalizumab, respectively. Cladribine tablets sustained their affordability in the sensitivity analyses. From the perspective of health care payer, cladribine tablets' savings were projected to be euro4,514,509, euro15,145,366 and euro6,640,680 in the overall population, and euro16,123, euro54,091 and euro23,717 per patient in comparison to fingolimod, natalizumab and treatment mix, respectively. Conclusion Based on the CAM, cladribine tablets were projected to robustly save modelled drug-associated costs in comparison to fingolimod, natalizumab and their mix in Finland.Peer reviewe

Immigrant Integration: Educator Resource Guide

Recommends ways for district administrators, school administrators, and teachers to promote immigrant integration in schools in critical areas, including school enrollment, classroom instruction, student assessment, and family and community outreach

Towards Building a Knowledge Base of Monetary Transactions from a News Collection

We address the problem of extracting structured representations of economic events from a large corpus of news articles, using a combination of natural language processing and machine learning techniques. The developed techniques allow for semi-automatic population of a financial knowledge base, which, in turn, may be used to support a range of data mining and exploration tasks. The key challenge we face in this domain is that the same event is often reported multiple times, with varying correctness of details. We address this challenge by first collecting all information pertinent to a given event from the entire corpus, then considering all possible representations of the event, and finally, using a supervised learning method, to rank these representations by the associated confidence scores. A main innovative element of our approach is that it jointly extracts and stores all attributes of the event as a single representation (quintuple). Using a purpose-built test set we demonstrate that our supervised learning approach can achieve 25% improvement in F1-score over baseline methods that consider the earliest, the latest or the most frequent reporting of the event.Comment: Proceedings of the 17th ACM/IEEE-CS Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL '17), 201

Pushed and Non-pushed Speaking Tasks in an EAP Context: What Are the Benefits for Linguistic Processing and Accuracy?

This article reports on a mixed methods study investigating the effectiveness of pushed and non-pushed speaking tasks in a UK university setting with upper-intermediate students. Specifically, the study addressed a) if a pushed speaking task produced more language related episodes (LREs) than a non-pushed speaking task b) the differences in the types of LREs produced by each task and c) whether a pushed speaking task resulted in more accurate usage of past narrative forms. Results showed that the pushed storytelling task produced significantly more LREs than the non-pushed task and it also identified that the most common LRE type for both pushed and non-pushed learners related to some form of output correction. The pushed group achieved greater accuracy gains from pretest and posttest scores but these gain scores were not found to be statistically significant. The study concludes that creating a push during spoken output activities can increase the occurrence of opportunities for linguistic processing, and subsequently interlanguage development, to occur

Doing Business in Japan

[Excerpt] The purpose of this publication is to provide foreign investors with a broad overview of the legal framework within which business is conducted in Japan. This publication deals primarily with: • The regulation of foreign investment in Japan, including the Japanese Government’s policy on foreign investment; • The legal structures available for investors in Japan; • The tax system imposed by the national and prefectural governments; and • The general system of business regulation applicable in Japan. This publication has been prepared by Baker & McKenzie GJBJ / Tokyo Aoyama Aoki Law Office as a general guide for those persons or corporations considering making an investment in Japan. Before specific investment is made, however, consideration should be given to specific laws and regulations that may affect the investment decision