Divided by a common language : English across national, social, and cultural boundaries

Publikacja recenzowana / Peer-reviewed publicationZe wstępu: This monographic volume presents ten selected studies exploring the multiple interrelationships between language and the communities of speakers who sustain it, focusing on the various roles that language plays for its users, both native and non-native. On the empirical side of things, the studies included in this volume focus on the English language and its socio-cultural and educational contexts. The multifarious relationships between language and the communities of its users are addressed here from different perspectives and points of view. All the different threads fi nd their synthesis in the ways in which language, a carrier of culture and marker of national, social and cultural identity, refl ects the changes taking place in the communities using it as a tool for interpersonal communication, accumulation, storage and dissemination of information, social interactions, transmission of culture, and many other purposes, which are the focus of this volume. The diverse topics explored by the authors speak to the richness and complexity of the social and cultural meanings of language and the importance of questions of language ownership, language attitudes, and linguistic as well as cultural diversity

Rational Heuristics ? Expectations and behaviors in Evolving Economies with Heterogeneous interacting agents

We analyze the individual and macroeconomic impacts of heterogeneous expectations and action rules within an agent-based model populated by heterogeneous, interacting firms. Agents have to cope with a complex evolving economy characterized by deep uncertainty resulting from technical change, imperfect information and coordination hurdles. In these circumstances, we find that neither individual nor macroeconomic dynamics improve when agents replace myopic expectations with less naïve learning rules. In fact, more sophisticated, e.g. recursive least squares (RLS) expectations produce less accurate individual forecasts and also considerably worsen the performance of the economy. Finally, we experiment with agents that adjust simply to technological shocks, and we show that individual and aggregate performances dramatically degrade. Our results suggest that fast and frugal robust heuristics are not a second-best option: rather they are “rational” in macroeconomic environments with heterogeneous, interacting agents and changing “fundamentals”

School Counselors\u27 Professional Development Needs for Preparing Diverse Learners for College

Prevalent literature about school counselors\u27 professional development (PD) needs to prepare diverse learners for college is in short supply. Simultaneously, school counselors oftentimes encounter role confusion due to misperceptions of their job responsibilities by educational leaders. This discrepancy has led to the completion of noncounseling assignments, thus prohibiting counselors in this study from appropriate training and adhering to college readiness mandates for all students. This study explored high school counselors\u27 attitudes about their PD needs to prepare diverse students for college in an urban populated school district located in southern Texas. The conceptual framework that guided this study defines school counselors\u27 motivation to improve college access for diverse students when counselors learn information that is practical to their job activities. A qualitative case study was used to answer the question of how counselors perceive their PD needs to prepare diverse learners for college. Data were collected from 8 high school counselors through semistructured interviews and documents of counselors\u27 PD profiles that were analyzed and coded to develop themes. Results established that participants had not received PD about college readiness, and they had not taken the initiative to advocate this need for themselves. Notably, counselors in the study indicated that developing a professional learning community with local colleges would be an effective approach to their professional growth. Although this study immediately benefits counselors in the participating school district, this study also provides information that may expand college enrollment for diverse students. Findings from this study not only will help close the gap between diverse students and their counterparts, but findings from this study may also help enhance PD for school counselors in surrounding school districts

Making A Comeback: An Exploration of Nontraditional Students & Identity Support

The purpose of this qualitative study is to explore the effects of identity supportive messages on nontraditional students in terms of facilitating identification with the student role. Identity support involves the extent to which an individual believes that others understand, accept, and/or provide instrumental support for valued social identities. Considering the life-changing (identity altering) adjustment of resuming school in the middle of adulthood and assuming the new “student†role—especially in connection with other roles and responsibilities—the relationship between nontraditional students and identity support is particularly salient. Twenty-four in-depth interviews helped identify encouraging and discouraging messages students received from a variety of sources. The results indicated that identity support served as an essential resource during the identity work process because it promoted or restored a sense of competence. Consequently, identity encouraging messages (particularly from “credible othersâ€) helped motivate older adults to resume their educations, to persist through challenges and doubts, and to develop identity-preserving counter-discourses to cope with discouragement. Interestingly, counter-discourses were a type of identity work strategy utilized to counter negative identity messages and were co-constructed through a combination of personal agency and encouraging messages from supportive networks. From a practical standpoint, the results indicated that universities also play a role. They convey messages of support indirectly through the resources they provide to assist older learners. However, educational institutions can work to improve full recognition of nontraditional students on campus as valued members of the student body

Contrasting the Polysemy of Prepositions in English and Albanian

The process of learning a foreign language can be exhausting for almost all language learners. In this study, it is aimed at providing students an accessible way to reducing commitment of errors while speaking or learning English as a second language (L2) in the most relevant and practical way, too. The Second Language Acquisition is defined as a subject which is concerned with how a language is learned and has the learner in its focus including the learner’s developing language. The main issues presented throughout the chapters were concentrated on language transfer, semantics and ambiguity. Prepositions were the most concerning analytical headline of all chapters because they are the most vulnerable part of speech students or learners of English (L2) face difficulty with. Many linguists or scholars have been working on the above scopes in order to clarify and recommend learners of English that committing errors depends on the amount of language scientific information they might have.La adquisición de un idioma, especialmente el inglés, ha sido una pasión no solo para los estudiantes de diferentes instituciones educativas en Albania sino también para otras personas de diferentes capas sociales. Por supuesto, su adquisición no es fácil debido a los cambios estructurales léxicos y morfológicos y sintácticos que, generalmente, tienen las lenguas. Dadas las dificultades que enfrentan los estudiantes albaneses o incluso otras personas comunes en la sociedad, centré mi tesis doctoral en algunas áreas específicas de la lingüística, lo que sin duda mejorará el nivel de su adquisición, reduciendo, donde sea posible, la cantidad de errores causados por la falta de información lingüística que pueda existir en ambos idiomas Me he centrado en las áreas de interferencia (transferencia de la lengua), semántica, ambigüedad, así como en oraciones con -ing como complementos preposicionales. Cabe señalar que el estudio de la preposición es el foco principal de la tesis doctoral, ya que esta clase lingüística presenta mayores dificultades en los campos antes mencionados, debido a su frecuencia en la oración

A Foundation For Educational Research at Scale: Evolution and Application

The complexities of how people learn have plagued researchers for centuries. A range of experimental and non-experimental methodologies have been used to isolate and implement positive interventions for students\u27 cognitive, meta-cognitive, behavioral, and socio-emotional successes in learning. But the face of learning is changing in the digital age. The value of accrued knowledge, popular throughout the industrial age, is being overpowered by the value of curiosity and the ability to ask critical questions. Most students can access the largest free collection of human knowledge (and cat videos) with ease using their phones or laptops and omnipresent cellular and Wi-Fi networks. Viewing this new-age capacity for connection as an opportunity, educational stakeholders have delegated many traditional learning tasks to online environments. With this influx of online learning, student errors can be corrected with immediacy, student data is more prevalent and actionable, and teachers can intervene with efficiency and efficacy. As such, endeavors in educational data mining, learning analytics, and authentic educational research at scale have grown popular in recent years; fields afforded by the luxuries of technology and driven by the age-old goal of understanding how people learn. This dissertation explores the evolution and application of ASSISTments Research, an approach to authentic educational research at scale that leverages ASSISTments, a popular online learning platform, to better understand how people learn. Part I details the evolution and advocacy of two tools that form the research arm of ASSISTments: the ASSISTments TestBed and the Assessment of Learning Infrastructure (ALI). An NSF funded Data Infrastructure Building Blocks grant (#1724889, $494,644 2017-2020), outlines goals for the new age of ASSISTments Research as a result of lessons learned in recent years. Part II details a personal application of these research tools with a focus on the framework of Self Determination Theory. The primary facets of this theory, thought to positively affect learning and intrinsic motivation, are investigated in depth through randomized controlled trials targeting Autonomy, Belonging, and Competence. Finally, a synthesis chapter highlights important connections between Parts I & II, offering lessons learned regarding ASSISTments Research and suggesting additional guidance for its future development, while broadly defining contributions to the Learning Sciences community

An Analysis of the Suitability of Philosophy as a Core K-12 Public School Subject

In 2005 Michael Katz invited philosophers of education to reinvigorate the inquiry into what is required to provide a proper education for everyone to lead a productive life. In the literature review, I analyze the suitability of philosophy in teaching K-12 students how to think and reason logically—essential abilities for a productive life. I also examine the educational landscape through the philosophy of Nicholas Rescher’s Cognitive-Values Theory and address the value of learning philosophy. I present a Philosophical Dialectic that shows how epistemic diversity (aporetic clusters) justifies making philosophy a K-12 core subject while analyzing philosophers’ reasons for including philosophy as a core K-12 public school subject. Finally, I assess the Philosophical Dialectic by applying the Heuristic-Systematic Model. Because cognition and metacognition require training the mind, I show how philosophy is most suited to provide this systematically. I assess how Artificial Intelligence (general and generative) is interrupting pedagogy and how a K-12 philosophy curriculum can both mitigate and harness this positively. I demonstrate the importance of neuroscientific research and why this must inform curriculum construction. In Chapter Three, I provide a Scope and Sequence for a Philosophy K-12 curriculum to demonstrate how logic, reasoning, and critical thinking develop students’ cognition and metacognition. I present reasons why philosophy has become the elephant in the room, even though it is the subject best suited to teach children systematically how to think well. I present a rationale for why colleges of education must recruit trainee teachers educated in philosophy to be trained as philosophy teachers and why philosophy should be a core K-12 subject

Designing Effective Interfaces for Older Users

The thesis examines the factors that need to be considered in order to undertake successful design of user interfaces for older users. The literature on aging is surveyed for age related changes that are of relevance to interface design. The findings from the literature review are extended and placed in a human context using observational studies of older people and their supporters as these older people attempted to learn about and use computers. These findings are then applied in three case studies of interface design and product development for older users. These case studies are reported and examined in depth. For each case study results are presented on the acceptance of the final product by older people. These results show that, for each case study, the interfaces used led to products that the older people evaluating them rated as unusually suitable to their needs as older users. The relationship between the case studies and the overall research aims is then examined in a discussion of the research methodology. In the case studies there is an evolving approach used in developing the interface designs. This approach includes intensive contribution by older people to the shaping of the interface design. This approach is analyzed and is presented as an approach to designing user interfaces for older people. It was found that a number of non-standard techniques were useful in order to maximize the benefit from the involvement of the older contributors and to ensure their ethical treatment. These techniques and the rationale behind them are described. Finally the interface design approach that emerged has strong links to the approach used by the UTOPIA team based at the university of Dundee. The extent to which the thesis provides support for the UTOPIA approach is discussed