Enjoyable Vocabulary Teaching and Learning with Cultural Differences

Language learners have to learn sufficient quantity of words to communicate by using the target language, but learning vocabulary is not easy at all. It is essential that learners motivate themselves and pay a lot of attention to the words. This can be done by comparing cultural differences in a context or using the words in sentences, the meanings of which reveal different application of cultural values. For culture is what shapes our behaviour in life, they represent the way we are. So that utterances, statements, sentences which have something to do with our culture or foreign cultures are very likely to attract our attention and motivate us. In fact, by speaking about cultural differences, we give life to vocabulary in class settings. Students are able to learn the meanings of words by actually living them. So that it is not only learning some words but also dealing with different understandings and applications of life as well. These differences can be acted out, discussed, written, or drawn. In any case, students find themselves in an atmosphere where learning is not dull and boring, but pleasant and enjoyable.vocabulary, cultural differences, multiculturalism, ELT methods, EFL, ESL.

Engage Me: Using New Literacies to Create Third Space Classrooms that Engage Student Writers

Adolescents use a wide variety of literacy practices in their daily lives. Preservice teachers in this study looked for ways to motivate their students to write by asking them about their in-school and out-of-school writing practices. This survey shows a gap between what motivates students to write for school and why they write out of school. The results suggest that English teachers can forge a “third space” in which out-of-school literacy practices are integrated into the curriculum. This survey provides insights for improving writing pedagogy in regards to students’ expressed desire to communicate, express themselves, and to be involved

Presenting the SCL model: adding value to business strategy through UCD principles

This paper presents the Sustainable Consumption Leveraging (SCL) Model and its toolkit, which was developed to help businesses examine their potential for enabling sustainable consumption whilst identifying areas of opportunity to improve their business model and value proposition. The paper begins by establishing the contribution of business towards sustainable consumption and sets out user-centred design (UCD) principles as a valuable approach to leverage sustainable consumption. The relationship between UCD principles and sustainable consumption in a business context was studied through qualitative research. The findings of in-depth interviews with experts, a focus group and a document analysis led to the construction of a theoretical framework, which was used to develop the SCL Model and its toolkit

An analysis of core-competences of successful multinational team leaders

Copyright @ 2010 The Authors. This is the author's accepted manuscript. The final published article is available from the link below.Researchers have endeavoured to understand the factors that enable effective functioning of multinational teams (MNTs) but with few exceptions they have ignored studying the competences of MNT leaders. In this paper we present those competences leaders must possess in order to effectively lead MNTs. Our findings are based on 70 problem-centred interviews with MNT leaders and members from five multinational corporations. The competences our interviewees mentioned most frequently for effective leadership were knowledge management and transfer. Results further indicated that a leader must be cross-culturally competent and multilingual in order to motivate MNT members to fully explore, exploit and transfer valuable knowledge within the team and beyond

Self-endorsed Cybersecurity Capability Improvement for SMEs

Low cybersecurity awareness and the lack of good practices have led to a growing number of cyber-attacks and incidents in small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). This study introduces CYSEC, a new lightweight Do-It-Yourself (DIY) approach to communicate cybersecurity awareness training to a large number of SMEs and encourage them to improve their capability continuously. CYSEC is a method and tool that implements the Self-Determination Theory (SDT) to motivate SME end-users to sustainable self-endorsed forms of security behavior and guide them to carry out the security improvement on their own. The paper describes the theoretical framework for modeling self-determination and explains how the adoption of cybersecurity recommendations can be internalized step-by-step by an SME by following an iterative process in CYSEC. Finally, significant lessons learned about the use of CYSEC and its intervention in pursuit of cybersecurity adoption in the pilot SMEs are presented

Tailoring climate change communication to female target groups – an experimental analysis of voting and consumer behavior in Switzerland

Climate change is a reality. Despite increasing materialization of this phenomenon and calls for immediate action to limit its underlying causes, only a limited uptake of pro-environmental behavior has been registered so far. One of its main reasons has been concluded to be the faulty pro-environmental communication, that is in most cases built ineffectively on erroneous assumptions about the nature of human behavior. The goal of the here presented research was thus to find out, what aspects communication strategy should be built on to motivate pro-environmental behavior, individual as well as collective. Considering the need to specialize communication strategies for higher impact and their potential swing voter role in Switzerland, a female target group was selected. To answer the research question, an experiment was conducted, exposing the participants to three variations of a communication strategy, preceded and followed by an online questionnaire. The results showed that shorter and, namely, peer effects-based strategies are the most effective to motivate pro-environmental action in general and among women in particular. The conclusions of this experiment thus importantly contribute to the on-going discussion on how to effectively communicate to motivate pro-environmental action, with insightful findings for both practice and further research

EMPOWERING THE STUDENTS THROUGH LISTENING DIARIES TO MOTIVATE THEM TO IMPROVE THEIR LISTENING ABILITY

Menyimak (listening) dalam bahasa asing tidak sesederhana menyimak dalam bahasa ibu. Ketidakberhasilan siswa menemukan cara yang tepat dalam menyimak membuat nilai untuk mata kuliah ini sering tidak maksimal akibatnya semangat untuk belajar listening menurun. Proses belajar mengajar yang hanya mengandalkan pada pertemuan di kelas dirasa kurang memberikan hasil yang maksimal. Kendala tidak hanya secara teknis namun juga terletak pada materi yang diberikan. Input yang diterima siswa terbatas pada materi yang diberikan oleh pengajar yang tidak selalu sesuai dengan tingkat penguasaan, kebutuhan, dan keinginan masing-masing pembelajar. Mereka cenderung bertindak sebagai penerima yang pasif dan kendali sepenuhnya ada pada pengajar. Situasi formal di kelas sering membuat siswa tertekan dan kurang dapat berkonsentrasi. Pemberian tugas yang berupa catatan harian menyimak (listening diaries) diharapkan mampu mendorong mereka untuk meningkatkan kemampuan menyimak mereka. Mereka akan berpengalaman mencari dan memilih materi yang sesuai dengan keinginan dan kebutuhan. Mereka juga mendapat kesempatan mendengarkan dan melihat pemakaian Bahasa Inggris di dalam kehidupan sehari-hari melalui berbagai teks yang autentik maupun non-autentik dengan situasi yang lebih santai. Selain itu listening diaries memungkinkan siswa memantau perkembangan kemampuan listening mereka sendiri