The Impact of English Language Proficiency and Workplace Readiness on the Employment Outcomes of Tertiary International Students (Executive Summary)

This project examines the influence of English language proficiency (ELP) on workplace readiness and employment outcomes for international students and graduates who seek to work in Australia. The study adopts a mixed method approach involving a detailed review of relevant literature, semi-structured individual interviews and focus groups, and quantitative analyses of three statistical data sets — Australian 2006 Census data, Australian Education International (AEI) data from January 2002 to June 2008, and the former Department of Immigration and Multicultural and Indigenous Affairs (DIMIA) Longitudinal Survey of Immigrants to Australia (October 2005 and October 2006). The qualitative data from the interviews enabled the authors to analyse the topic of investigation from several different perspectives including those of: international students and graduates; local (permanent resident or citizen) students and graduates; representatives of tertiary institutions and VET providers; recent offshore graduate job seekers with overseas qualifications; and Australian employers and regulatory bodies in five professional and three trade fields. The findings show that international students employment outcomes are not as good as their Australian domestic counterparts and that they face greater challenges in finding full-time employment after graduation. While ELP is a key factor influencing their employment outcomes — particularly if graduates have low levels of ELP — the findings from this study show that ELP is not the only or principal issue. Employers\u27 first priority is to engage graduates with strong profession-specific skills and then to consider their ‘well-roundedness’. The ‘well-roundedness’ includes graduates’ personal characteristics and attributes, the diversity of their experiences and skills, as well as their ‘cultural fit’ into the workplace. There is potential to respond to this expectation through policies and practices that support integrated approaches for enhancing ELP and workplace readiness within educational institutions, as well as increasing international students’ awareness of the value of the experiences and skills they can develop outside of their studies

Developing a sustainable nation brand: a study of Sri Lanka

This study examines the degree to which the Earth Lung Project, a carbon mitigation initiative in Sri Lanka has developed a coherent nation brand. Findings indicate that a shared sense of national identity amongst all stakeholder groups is critical in the development of a national brand. However, whilst concern for the environment was found to be an embedded aspect of national identity within Sri Lanka, conflicting stakeholder perspectives reveal a lack of belief amongst private sector stakeholders in the ELP. Thus there are doubts over the degree to which the ELP is currently capable of generating a sustainable national brand

Accommodations for English Language Learners on Statewide English Language Proficiency Assessment

This exploratory research study was conducted to examine federally- mandated annual English language proficiency (ELP) assessment of English language learners (ELLs) and their use of accommodations on the assessment. The literature was examined for differences and similarities between the three types of testing scenarios as well as identifying gaps in the literature for students who are both ELLs and who also have a disability and how their ELP is assessed, taking into account their disability. The results from investigating data related to ELLs with disabilities and specific accommodations used by ELLs with disabilities contributes to the limited current research available regarding this subgroup as well as how the annual ELP assessment mandate is actuated at the state, district, and classroom levels. The researchers used one state’s existing quantitative ELP assessment data to examine types of accommodations for ELLs with disabilities on the statewide ELP assessment and then explored potential relationships between specific disabilities and accommodations used. The researchers investigated factors that contribute to the relationships between disabilities, accommodations, and performance on the ELP assessment through qualitative data from interviews with state, district, and school level personnel to further expand on results from the quantitative ELP assessment data

Global Optimization by Energy Landscape Paving

We introduce a novel heuristic global optimization method, energy landscape paving (ELP), which combines core ideas from energy surface deformation and tabu search. In appropriate limits, ELP reduces to existing techniques. The approach is very general and flexible and is illustrated here on two protein folding problems. For these examples, the technique gives faster convergence to the global minimum than previous approaches.Comment: to appear in Phys. Rev. Lett. (2002

A Compact Representation of Histopathology Images using Digital Stain Separation & Frequency-Based Encoded Local Projections

In recent years, histopathology images have been increasingly used as a diagnostic tool in the medical field. The process of accurately diagnosing a biopsy sample requires significant expertise in the field, and as such can be time-consuming and is prone to uncertainty and error. With the advent of digital pathology, using image recognition systems to highlight problem areas or locate similar images can aid pathologists in making quick and accurate diagnoses. In this paper, we specifically consider the encoded local projections (ELP) algorithm, which has previously shown some success as a tool for classification and recognition of histopathology images. We build on the success of the ELP algorithm as a means for image classification and recognition by proposing a modified algorithm which captures the local frequency information of the image. The proposed algorithm estimates local frequencies by quantifying the changes in multiple projections in local windows of greyscale images. By doing so we remove the need to store the full projections, thus significantly reducing the histogram size, and decreasing computation time for image retrieval and classification tasks. Furthermore, we investigate the effectiveness of applying our method to histopathology images which have been digitally separated into their hematoxylin and eosin stain components. The proposed algorithm is tested on the publicly available invasive ductal carcinoma (IDC) data set. The histograms are used to train an SVM to classify the data. The experiments showed that the proposed method outperforms the original ELP algorithm in image retrieval tasks. On classification tasks, the results are found to be comparable to state-of-the-art deep learning methods and better than many handcrafted features from the literature.Comment: Accepted for publication in the International Conference on Image Analysis and Recognition (ICIAR 2019

The Impact of English Language Proficiency and Workplace Readiness on the Employment Outcomes of Tertiary International Students (Full Report)

This project examines the influence of English language proficiency (ELP) on workplace readiness and employment outcomes for international students and graduates who seek to work in Australia. The study adopts a mixed method approach involving a detailed review of relevant literature, semi-structured individual interviews and focus groups, and quantitative analyses of three statistical data sets — Australian 2006 Census data, Australian Education International (AEI) data from January 2002 to June 2008, and the former Department of Immigration and Multicultural and Indigenous Affairs (DIMIA) Longitudinal Survey of Immigrants to Australia (October 2005 and October 2006). The qualitative data from the interviews enabled the authors to analyse the topic of investigation from several different perspectives including those of: international students and graduates; local (permanent resident or citizen) students and graduates; representatives of tertiary institutions and VET providers; recent offshore graduate job seekers with overseas qualifications; and Australian employers and regulatory bodies in five professional and three trade fields. The findings show that international students employment outcomes are not as good as their Australian domestic counterparts and that they face greater challenges in finding full-time employment after graduation. While ELP is a key factor influencing their employment outcomes — particularly if graduates have low levels of ELP — the findings from this study show that ELP is not the only or principal issue. Employers\u27 first priority is to engage graduates with strong profession-specific skills and then to consider their ‘well-roundedness’. The ‘well-roundedness’ includes graduates’ personal characteristics and attributes, the diversity of their experiences and skills, as well as their ‘cultural fit’ into the workplace. There is potential to respond to this expectation through policies and practices that support integrated approaches for enhancing ELP and workplace readiness within educational institutions, as well as increasing international students’ awareness of the value of the experiences and skills they can develop outside of their studies

Intercultural encounters and the European Language Portfolio (ELP): Some thoughts on the development of the intercultural dimension of the LOLIPOP-ELP and its potential role in language teaching and learning

The European Language Portfolio (ELP) is a language learning tool developed by the Council of Europe (CoE) and intended to support the development of both linguistic skills and intercultural competence in the user. It has to date, however, been used primarily in the development of linguistic abilities . This paper presents an online ELP, the LOLIPOP-ELP , which contains an enhanced intercultural dimension. It also discusses ways in which this ELP could be used to develop intercultural competence in the language classroom. The first section of this paper outlines the background to the ELP Initiative and goes on to describe the portfolio itself and its constituent elements. The second section presents the German version of the LOLIPOP-ELP with a particular focus on its intercultural dimension. Finally, the paper concludes with some remarks regarding the use of the LOLIPOP-ELP in developing intercultural competence in the language undergraduate

Production of the main celiac disease autoantigen by transient expression in Nicotiana benthamiana

Celiac Disease (CD) is a gluten sensitive enteropathy that remains widely undiagnosed and implementation of massive screening tests is needed to reduce the long term complications associated to untreated CD. The main CD autoantigen, human tissue transglutaminase (TG2), is a challenge for the different expression systems available since its cross-linking activity affects cellular processes. Plant-based transient expression systems can be an alternative for the production of this protein. In this work, a transient expression system for the production of human TG2 in Nicotiana benthamiana leaves was optimized and reactivity of plant-produced TG2 in CD screening test was evaluated. First, a subcellular targeting strategy was tested. Cytosolic, secretory, endoplasmic reticulum (C-terminal SEKDEL fusion) and vacuolar (C-terminal KISIA fusion) TG2 versions were transiently expressed in leaves and recombinant protein yields were measured. ER-TG2 and vac-TG2 levels were 9- to 16-fold higher than their cytosolic and secretory counterparts. As second strategy, TG2 variants were co-expressed with a hydrophobic elastin-like polymer (ELP) construct encoding for 36 repeats of the pentapeptide VPGXG in which the guest residue X were V and F in ratio 8:1. Protein bodies (PB) were induced by the ELP, with a consequent two-fold-increase in accumulation of both ER-TG2 and vac-TG2. Subsequently, ER-TG2 and vac-TG2 were produced and purified using immobilized metal ion affinity chromatography. Plant purified ER-TG2 and vac-TG2 were recognized by three anti-TG2 monoclonal antibodies that bind different epitopes proving that plant-produced antigen has immunochemical characteristics similar to those of human TG2. Lastly, an ELISA was performed with sera of CD patients and healthy controls. Both vac-TG2 and ER-TG2 were positively recognized by IgA of CD patients while they were not recognized by serum from non-celiac controls. These results confirmed the usefulness of plant-produced TG2 to develop screening assays. In conclusion, the combination of subcellular sorting strategy with co-expression with a PB inducing construct was sufficient to increase TG2 protein yields. This type of approach could be extended to other problematic proteins, highlighting the advantages of plant based production platforms.Fil: Marin Viegas, Vanesa Soledad. Provincia de Buenos Aires. Gobernación. Comisión de Investigaciones Científicas. Centro de Investigación y Desarrollo en Criotecnología de Alimentos. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - La Plata. Centro de Investigación y Desarrollo en Criotecnología de Alimentos. Universidad Nacional de La Plata. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas. Centro de Investigación y Desarrollo en Criotecnología de Alimentos; ArgentinaFil: Acevedo, Gonzalo Raúl. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Instituto de Investigaciones en Ingeniería Genética y Biología Molecular "Dr. Héctor N. Torres"; ArgentinaFil: Bayardo, Mariela Paula. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - La Plata. Instituto de Estudios Inmunológicos y Fisiopatológicos. Universidad Nacional de La Plata. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas. Instituto de Estudios Inmunológicos y Fisiopatológicos; ArgentinaFil: Chirdo, Fernando Gabriel. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - La Plata. Instituto de Estudios Inmunológicos y Fisiopatológicos. Universidad Nacional de La Plata. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas. Instituto de Estudios Inmunológicos y Fisiopatológicos; ArgentinaFil: Petruccelli, Silvana. Provincia de Buenos Aires. Gobernación. Comisión de Investigaciones Científicas. Centro de Investigación y Desarrollo en Criotecnología de Alimentos. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - La Plata. Centro de Investigación y Desarrollo en Criotecnología de Alimentos. Universidad Nacional de La Plata. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas. Centro de Investigación y Desarrollo en Criotecnología de Alimentos; Argentin