AN AGENT-BASED DECISION SUPPORT MODEL FOR THE DEVELOPMENT OF E-SERVICES IN THE TOURIST SECTOR

This paper regards cultural heritage as a strategic development tool for urban tourist policy. It highlights the use of e-services as a central instrument in a competitive tourist sector. The appropriate choice of e-services – and packages thereof – depends on the various strategic considerations of urban stakeholders (agents) and may differ for each individual city. The paper offers a systematic analysis framework for supporting these choices and deploys multi-criteria analysis as a systematic evaluation methodology, in particular the Regime method. The evaluation framework is exemplified through an application to three field cases in Europe, viz. the cities of Amsterdam, Genoa and Leipzig. Our analysis concludes that tailor-made packages of e-services that serve the needs of the stakeholders can be made with the help of our evaluation tools.

Reconsidering translation and language in an international business context: beyond an instrumental approach.

International;

Troping the Enemy: Metaphor, Culture, and the Big Data Black Boxes of National Security

This article considers how cultural understanding is being brought into the work of the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA), through an analysis of its Metaphor program. It examines the type of social science underwriting this program, unpacks implications of the agency’s conception of metaphor for understanding so-called cultures of interest, and compares IARPA’s to competing accounts of how metaphor works to create cultural meaning. The article highlights some risks posed by key deficits in the Intelligence Community\u27s (IC) approach to culture, which relies on the cognitive linguistic theories of George Lakoff and colleagues. It also explores the problem of the opacity of these risks for analysts, even as such predictive cultural analytics are becoming a part of intelligence forecasting. This article examines the problem of information secrecy in two ways, by unpacking the opacity of “black box,” algorithm-based social science of culture for end users with little appreciation of their potential biases, and by evaluating the IC\u27s nontransparent approach to foreign cultures, as it underwrites national security assessments

Deconstructing aspects of native speakerism: Reflections from in-service teacher education

In many Asian contexts, issues of who teaches and educates teachers in English Language Teaching remain challenging with status accorded to socalled ‘native speakers’. Issues still remain after two decades of research calling for deconstruction of the native speaker fallacy. Drawing on critiques of the concept, as well as teacher education research, this paper suggests ways to deconstruct the maze of native speakerism. Recent Malaysian in- service training research shows that positioning and modeling can override the origin of the teacher educator, namely a so-called native speaker background. Descriptions of techniques to help deconstruct native speakerism at the interactional level are derived from teacher educator reflection on data. Possibilities for countering native speakerism are suggested through descriptions of how teacher educators may model and use humour to address perceptions of hierarchy. With the growing use of English as an additional language, research into who teaches or educates teachers could also address the challenges of hidden professional racism sustained by factors such as so-called Standard English. Practical approaches from teacher educator reflections on their interaction with Malaysian teachers suggest ways to reconstruct aspects of native speakerism

Exploring intercultural interactions on a university campus through the lens of a local student: A multidimensional, multi-theoretical analysis

Modern-day universities are sites of unprecedented levels of cultural diversity, thus affording plentiful opportunities for intercultural interactions to occur. However, research from nations across the sector consistently suggests a pattern of limited intercultural contact among students on university campuses. Further, there is emerging evidence that this pattern is heightened among local students, with research suggesting that local students are less likely to engage in intercultural interactions than their international peers. The implications of this limited contact are concerning, suggesting that many local students are being denied the cognitive, affective and educational benefits that intercultural interactions can generate. However, the issue also raises a broader question: why, in a climate of unprecedented levels of cultural diversity and global mobility, are intercultural interactions on campus constrained in their frequency and depth? Using a variety of qualitative methods and theoretical lenses, this research provides insight into how local students conceptualise, perceive and experience intercultural interactions on an Australian university campus. Participants were first-year students (n=27) representing a range of academic disciplines. Students were recruited for the study at the beginning of the academic year and participated in two semi-structured interviews (at the beginning and the end of their first study period) in which students’ subjective accounts of their intercultural interaction experiences were elicited. The use of several conceptual lenses (including cultural identity, ethnorelativism and ethnocentrism, cultural awareness, structure and agency, and context) and theoretical paradigms (including Bourdieu’s Social Field Theory, Mezirow’s Transformative Learning Theory, Allport’s Intergroup Contact Theory, Tajfel and Turner’s Social Identity Theory and Phinney’s Model of Ethnic Identity Development) not only provided different views into the data, but different ways of seeing it, ensuring fine-grained, nuanced insight into the many and varied ways students perceived, understood and ultimately experienced intercultural interactions. Further, the development of a theoretically-informed and inductively-generated coding framework allowed the systematic and rigorous analysis of students’ accounts of their positive intercultural interactions across affective, behavioural and cognitive dimensions including agency, self-disclosure, duration, contexts, and cultural interest. Positive intercultural interactions were revealed to be complex, multidimensional, and situated phenomena shaped by numerous, layered and often competing intrapersonal and structural dimensions. The findings highlighted the criticality of students’ cultural awareness and understandings in shaping intercultural interaction outcomes. Students who demonstrated higher levels of cultural awareness and ethnorelativist understanding were found to experience interactions at deeper levels of experience than students displaying lower levels of cultural awareness, and ethnocentric understanding. While the research highlighted the potential of transformative intercultural interactions to foster intercultural growth and cultural awareness, its related finding that students who entered an intercultural interaction possessing high levels of cultural awareness were more likely to benefit from intercultural interactions than students possessing low levels was noteworthy. Nuanced insights into the role of student agency (operationalised as the initiation of an intercultural interaction) in mediating intercultural interaction outcomes were also revealed, the findings suggesting that deep level intercultural interactions and intercultural transformation could still occur when agency was not exercised, provided other dimensions were present in the interaction. Related, a student’s failure to exercise agency may not necessarily reflect a lack of interest in culture and diversity, but could suggest contextual factors. Finally, the simultaneous adoption of two ethnic identity theoretical lenses in the analysis of students’ accounts allowed systematic relationships between how students conceptualised and understood their ethnic identity, and the depth at which they experienced an interaction, to be revealed. From a higher education perspective, the findings of this research suggest that the cultural frames and understandings that students bring to university campuses might not simply mediate their intercultural interaction experiences, but also reinforce and perpetuate their existing levels of cultural understanding, thereby possibly constraining their intercultural growth. Related, institutional policies and practices vis-à-vis pedagogy and curriculum were also found to militate against meaningful intercultural interactions and intercultural learning, with this research highlighting the need for higher education institutions to engage in systemic and systematic curriculum and pedagogical redesign to effect changed frames of cultural awareness. Institutions could also consider broadening the range of academic, linguistic, social and cultural capitals that are valued on their campuses so that they are more representative and inclusive of the cultural diversity that is present in its learning and teaching structures, this potentially affording intercultural interactions

FOUND IN SPACE: A CROSS-LINGUISTIC ANALYSIS OF SECOND LANGUAGE LEARNERS IN ENGLISH MAP TASK PERFORMANCE

Understanding the relationship between first and second language use in the area of spatial language has broader implications for our understanding of language learning and consequences for the construction of bilingual assessment instruments for second language learners. This study shows that observing and interpreting the task of map drawing and the related behavior of explaining maps can be a way to explore the linguistic emergence of the conceptualization of spatial language (at a moment of simultaneous and synchronized incarnation). Altogether, 50 dyads (pairs) participated in the New Mexico Map Task Project; the project included native speakers of English, Russian, Japanese, Navajo, and Spanish. In an examination of how the grammatical constructions used for spatial descriptions in a speaker\u27s first language carry over into the usage of this speaker\u27s second language, new observations include the intra-subject comparison of dyadic map task performances. Each non-native English-speaking dyad participates in two map task performances: one in their native language and one in their second language, English. Evidence was generated through morphosyntactic, phonological, and pragmatic analyses performed on the sound files of the transcripts. This evidence confirms the connection between the participants\u27 productions of tokens of selected landmark names both in their native language and their second language. Combining the results of linguistic analyses with educational assessment frameworks predicts the development of an instrument for use with immigrant and refugee students from areas of conflict