Universal Design for Belonging: Living and Working with Diverse Personal Names

There is great diversity in the names and naming practices of Canada’s population due to the multiple languages and cultures from which names and name-givers originate. While this diversity means that everyone encounters unfamiliar names, institutional agents who work with the public are continually challenged when attempting to determine a name’s correct pronunciation, spelling, structure and gender. Drawing from over a hundred interviews in London (Ontario) and Montréal (Québec), as well as other published accounts, I outline strategies used by institutional agents to manage name diversity within the constraints of their work tasks. I explain how concern with saving face and being polite can involve microaggressions which contribute to exclusion and disadvantage for people with certain kinds of names. Repeated mistreatment of names, whether intentional or not, negatively affects the integration of immigrants and their sense of belonging in the new society. I argue that the respectful treatment of names is a small but meaningful step toward making multilingual and multi-ethnic societies more welcoming and inclusive. Informed by the principles of Universal Design for Learning, I offer a set of recommendations for normalizing name diversity in work and social life. Il est possible de constater une grande diversité de noms et de pratiques de dénomination au sein de la population canadienne ceci en raison des nombreuses langues et cultures d\u27où proviennent ces noms et ceux qui les donnent. Alors que cette diversité a pour effet que chaque personne aura éventuellement à faire face à des noms peu familiers, on note en particulier que les agents institutionnels, qui travaillent avec le public, sont constamment mis à l’épreuve lorsqu\u27ils tentent de déterminer la prononciation, l\u27orthographe, la structure et le genre corrects d\u27un nom. En se fondant sur plus d\u27une centaine d\u27entrevues réalisées à London (en Ontario) et à Montréal (au Québec), ainsi que sur des comptes rendus ayant fait l’objet de publications, nous présentons des stratégies utilisées par des agents institutionnels dans leur gestion de la diversité des noms en tenant compte de leurs contraintes professionnelles. Nous expliquons que, par souci de « préserver les apparences » et de se montrer poli, ces attentions peuvent donner lieu à des micro-agressions menant à l\u27exclusion et à une iniquité envers les personnes portant certains types de noms. La répétition de mauvais traitements, qu\u27ils soient intentionnels ou non, a pour effet de porter atteinte à l’intégration des immigrants et à leur sentiment d\u27appartenance à la nouvelle société d’accueil. Nous soutenons que le traitement respectueux des noms représente une étape modeste mais significative pouvant mener à l’établissement de sociétés multilingues et multiethniques accueillantes et inclusives. En se fondant sur les principes de la conception universelle de l’apprentissage, nous offrons une série de recommandations pour normaliser la diversité des noms dans le travail et la vie sociale

Preschool staff relationships with children with language difficulties : a comparative study in Belarusian and Norwegian preschools

Author's accepted version (post-print).This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor and Francis in European Journal of Special Needs Education on 10/04/2017, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/08856257.2017.1314112

Generating natural language specifications from UML class diagrams

Early phases of software development are known to be problematic, difficult to manage and errors occurring during these phases are expensive to correct. Many systems have been developed to aid the transition from informal Natural Language requirements to semistructured or formal specifications. Furthermore, consistency checking is seen by many software engineers as the solution to reduce the number of errors occurring during the software development life cycle and allow early verification and validation of software systems. However, this is confined to the models developed during analysis and design and fails to include the early Natural Language requirements. This excludes proper user involvement and creates a gap between the original requirements and the updated and modified models and implementations of the system. To improve this process, we propose a system that generates Natural Language specifications from UML class diagrams. We first investigate the variation of the input language used in naming the components of a class diagram based on the study of a large number of examples from the literature and then develop rules for removing ambiguities in the subset of Natural Language used within UML. We use WordNet,a linguistic ontology, to disambiguate the lexical structures of the UML string names and generate semantically sound sentences. Our system is developed in Java and is tested on an independent though academic case study

Classification and Analysis of Errors Reported in Aircraft Maintenance Manuals

Previous research has identified maintenance information as one of the primary causal factors of maintenance error. Incorrect maintenance information has also been cited as a contributing factor in a number of recent aircraft mishaps. To date no one has studied the types of errors found in aircraft maintenance manuals published by manufacturers. The purpose of this research is to analyze Publication Change Requests (PCRs) to document the most frequently reported types of errors found in aircraft maintenance manual, to identify how errors vary across Air Transport Association (ATA) chapters, and identify the corrective actions required to address the cited problem. The most common request was for additional procedural information followed by requests to add or change the language to improve clarity. The results show that the majority of PCRs (42%) cited procedures found in Chapters 27 (Flight controls), 32 (Landing gear), and 71 (Powerplant)