Accommodating multiculturalism and biculturalism in Aotearoa New Zealand: implication for language education.

The field of language education in Aotearoa New Zealand, as elsewhere, has developed significantly since its early and almost exclusive focus on the acquisition of English literacy in schools. As the field has expanded, so too has the range of language education sectors addressed and the theoretical approaches and understandings employed in relation to language and literacy education. Both developments have resulted in a more coordinated literacy education policy - exemplified to date most clearly in the New Zealand Literacy Taskforce - and a more situated, less monolithic understanding of the widely different literacies available to learners. Despite these developments, however, one area still remains noticeably under-theorised and marginalized in relation to the ongoing development of language and literacy education policy in Aotearoa New Zealand - the place of second language learners within it. This paper explores this lacuna and the potential policy implications of addressing and integrating first and second language educational concerns within an evolving national literacy education policy. This has particular implications for the further development of bilingual education - both for Maori and, possibly, other minority groups - and for the related possibilities of multicultural education. It also requires a wider and clearer recognition of minority language education rights, as developed within both international law and political theory, in order to apply these rights appropriately to an Aotearoa New Zealand context which is currently witnessing rapid and extensive demographic (and linguistic) change

Advances on Tensor Network Theory: Symmetries, Fermions, Entanglement, and Holography

This is a short review on selected theory developments on Tensor Network (TN) states for strongly correlated systems. Specifically, we briefly review the effect of symmetries in TN states, fermionic TNs, the calculation of entanglement Hamiltonians from Projected Entangled Pair States (PEPS), and the relation between the Multi-scale Entanglement Renormalization Ansatz (MERA) and the AdS/CFT or gauge/gravity duality. We stress the role played by entanglement in the emergence of several physical properties and objects through the TN language. Some recent results along these lines are also discussed.Comment: Invited Colloquium for EPJB, 31 pages, 13 figures; revised version, accepted for publicatio

Hard Translation: Persian Poetry and Post-National Literary Form

This essay examines how translation theory can globalize contemporary literary comparison. Whereas Persian studies has historically been isolated from the latest developments within literary theory, world literature has similarly been isolated from the latest developments within the study of non-European literatures. The methodology of hard translation developed here can develop these links. Hard translation incorporates translation in the form of exegesis, while preserving traces of the source language in the target language. Coined in 1929 by the Chinese critic, writer and translator Lu Xun, hard translation (yingyi) is here considered alongside Walter Benjamin's cognate and nearly contemporaneous arguments for translation in a context of linguistic incommensurability

Relational frame theory: A new paradigm for the analysis of social behavior

Recent developments in the analysis of derived relational responding, under the rubric of relational frame theory, have brought several complex language and cognitive phenomena within the empirical reach of the experimental analysis of behavior. The current paper provides an outline of relational frame theory as a new approach to the analysis of language, cognition, and complex behavior more generally. Relational frame theory, it is argued, also provides a suitable paradigm for the analysis of a wide variety of social behavior that is mediated by language. Recent empirical evidence and theoretical interpretations are provided in support of the relational frame approach to social behavior