Trialing project-based learning in a new EAP ESP course: A collaborative reflective practice of three college English teachers

Currently in many Chinese universities, the traditional College English course is facing the risk of being ‘marginalized’, replaced or even removed, and many hours previously allocated to the course are now being taken by EAP or ESP. At X University in northern China, a curriculum reform as such is taking place, as a result of which a new course has been created called ‘xue ke’ English. Despite the fact that ‘xue ke’ means subject literally, the course designer has made it clear that subject content is not the target, nor is the course the same as EAP or ESP. This curriculum initiative, while possibly having been justified with a rationale of some kind (e.g. to meet with changing social and/or academic needs of students and/or institutions), this is posing a great challenge for, as well as considerable pressure on, a number of College English teachers who have taught this single course for almost their entire teaching career. In such a context, three teachers formed a peer support group in Semester One this year, to work collaboratively co-tackling the challenge, and they chose Project-Based Learning (PBL) for the new course. This presentation will report on the implementation of this project, including the overall designing, operational procedure, and the teachers’ reflections. Based on discussion, pre-agreement was reached on the purpose and manner of collaboration as offering peer support for more effective teaching and learning and fulfilling and pleasant professional development. A WeChat group was set up as the chief platform for messaging, idea-sharing, and resource-exchanging. Physical meetings were supplementary, with sound agenda but flexible time, and venues. Mosoteach cloud class (lan mo yun ban ke) was established as a tool for virtual learning, employed both in and after class. Discussions were held at the beginning of the semester which determined only brief outlines for PBL implementation and allowed space for everyone to autonomously explore in their own way. Constant further discussions followed, which generated a great deal of opportunities for peer learning and lesson plan modifications. A reflective journal, in a greater or lesser detailed manner, was also kept by each teacher to record the journey of the collaboration. At the end of the semester, it was commonly recognized that, although challenges existed, the collaboration was overall a success and they were all willing to continue with it and endeavor to refine it to be a more professional and productive approach

Proceedings ICPW'07: 2nd International Conference on the Pragmatic Web, 22-23 Oct. 2007, Tilburg: NL

Proceedings ICPW'07: 2nd International Conference on the Pragmatic Web, 22-23 Oct. 2007, Tilburg: N

Museums as disseminators of niche knowledge: Universality in accessibility for all

Accessibility has faced several challenges within audiovisual translation Studies and gained great opportunities for its establishment as a methodologically and theoretically well-founded discipline. Initially conceived as a set of services and practices that provides access to audiovisual media content for persons with sensory impairment, today accessibility can be viewed as a concept involving more and more universality thanks to its contribution to the dissemination of audiovisual products on the topic of marginalisation. Against this theoretical backdrop, accessibility is scrutinised from the perspective of aesthetics of migration and minorities within the field of the visual arts in museum settings. These aesthetic narrative forms act as modalities that encourage the diffusion of ‘niche’ knowledge, where processes of translation and interpretation provide access to all knowledge as counter discourse. Within this framework, the ways in which language is used can be considered the beginning of a type of local grammar in English as lingua franca for interlingual translation and subtitling, both of which ensure access to knowledge for all citizens as a human rights principle and regardless of cultural and social differences. Accessibility is thus gaining momentum as an agent for the democratisation and transparency of information against media discourse distortions and oversimplifications

Journal of Education Innovation and Communication: Redefining Communication: Social Media and the Age of Innovation

The publications of the Communication Institute of Greece, such as the “Journal of Education, Innovation, and Communication (JEICOM)”, are open access without any costs for the authors or the readers. JEICOM is a Fully Peer-Reviewed, Open Access journal, publishing articles from all areas of education, innovation and communication, independent of the events organized by the Communication Institute of Greece. JEICOM’s scope is to provide a free and open platform to academics, researchers, professionals, and postgraduate students to communicate and share knowledge in the form of high quality empirical and theoretical research that is of high interest not only for academic readers but also for practitioners and professionals. JEICOM welcomes theoretical, conceptual and empirical original research papers, case studies, book reviews that demonstrate the innovative and dynamic spirit for the education and communication sciences, from researchers, scholars, educators, policy-makers, and practitioners in education, communication, and related fields. Articles that show scholarly depth, breadth or richness of different aspects of social pedagogy are particularly welcome. The numerous papers presented every year during the conferences organized by the Communication Institute of Greece, enables us to have access to a plethora of papers. Following a rigorous peer- review process, only a selection of these papers submitted is published biannually. In addition, to the papers presented in the Institute’s conference, we do encourage independent submissions of papers too. Nevertheless, before you submit, please make sure to respect the guidelines and templates provided. The current special issue of the “Journal of Education, Innovation, and Communication (JEICOM)”, is our First Special Issue (December 2019). We consider that education and fruitful exchange can improve our lives with the view to nurture intercultural communication. Academics can contribute significantly to the quality of the educational experience and help educate, communicate, exchange, meet new cultures, create and collaborate! We wish you an excellent reading and for the year to come soon, 2020, Health, Love, Knowledge, Education, Prosperity, Communication and Exchange

The Zipf’s Law and Other Ways of Identifying Culture-Specific Linguistics Units

Every language contains a number of linguistic units that serve as a key to understanding the culture of its language speakers. Therefore, they bear specific information that helps to reveal cultural similarities and dissimilarities. Taking into account contemporary studies and focus of the science, this information can be very critical and relevant in intercultural communication. In this paper, we name such linguistic units as cultural keywords. So, we claim that cultural keywords can serve as a tool for intercultural communication. They are indicators for describing and understanding cultures. This can help to study, learn, discuss and describe the cultures of different nations all over the world. In the paper we suggest methodologies to identify cultural keywords. We claim that a methodological basis for the study may consist of three methods: semantic analysis, argumentative analysis and the Zipf's law. However, these are not comprehensive methods for discovering the keywords. Findings of the research can be applied to intercultural and cross-cultural studies as well as other interdisciplinary cultural studies

A Socio-technical-cultural System Perspective to Rethinking Translation Technology in Intercultural Communication

As technology has radically changed language translation in the age of globalization, the research on translation technology should not only benefit current research on translation of languages but also have a long-term positive impact on technology in the sociocultural context. The focuses of this paper are twofold. Firstly, it discusses how translation technology drives the changes in intercultural communication that bring both bright and dark sides. Secondly, it explores how translation technology’s involvement and interaction with human translator in practice of language translation from a socio-technical-cultural system perspective. Based on the discussion, this paper particularly addresses human translator’s collaboration with translation technology should be regarded as a cultural mediator helping to realize successful intercultural communication; and meanwhile, the human translator’ s subjectivity should be highlighted, and translation technology’s cultural design should be explored in order to improve usability that further brings benefits to the future cultural mediator

A Socio-technical-cultural System Perspective to Rethinking Translation Technology in Intercultural Communication

As technology has radically changed language translation in the age of globalization, the research on translation technology should not only benefit current research on translation of languages but also have a long-term positive impact on technology in the sociocultural context. The focuses of this paper are twofold. Firstly, it discusses how translation technology drives the changes in intercultural communication that bring both bright and dark sides. Secondly, it explores how translation technology’s involvement and interaction with human translator in practice of language translation from a socio-technical-cultural system perspective. Based on the discussion, this paper particularly addresses human translator’s collaboration with translation technology should be regarded as a cultural mediator helping to realize successful intercultural communication; and meanwhile, the human translator’ s subjectivity should be highlighted, and translation technology’s cultural design should be explored in order to improve usability that further brings benefits to the future cultural mediator

Ecology and trust in mangement and business research 1995-2010. Tentative findings. MULTI-TRUST research paper

Trust’ is considered an important driving factor for the development of ‘green growth’ strategies. An understanding of how ‘trust’ is created and maintained is crucial for those strategies. However, b& m research does neither offer consistent nor conclusive definitions of ‘trust’. Based on the review, a tentative suggestion is that the development of promising practices for the creation and maintenance of ‘trust’ is to be related to the organic complexities located in Denmark that characterize the transformation of the social space of organic agribusiness. Organic complexities are amongst others characterized by the highly fragmented meaning and current restructuring of the content of ‘organic’, diverse sale challenges, interdependences in the accreditation and certification processes, and the limited information value of eco labels. In order to meet related trust challenges, the concept of ‘high-trust relationships’ seems to be useful for this pursuit