Corporate Governance in the Emerging Economics of the Caribbean: Peculiarities, Challenges, and a Future Pathway

Building on corporate governance research and responsible leadership theory this paper examines, through a multiple case approach, three major cases of corporate failures in the emerging economies of Barbados, Jamaica, and Trinidad and Tobago, member states of the Caribbean Community trade bloc. The paper accordingly provides valuable insights into the dynamics of corporate governance in the Caribbean and proposes a responsible leadership approach as a framework to mitigating agency-problems and addressing the changing business contexts of the region. The paper suggests that researchers and practitioners need to develop a more holistic approach towards understanding corporate governance by going beyond traditional governance mechanisms and controls, and incorporating responsible leadership levels of analysis into the equation. It also establishes that regulators, boards, management, and auditors are critical to avoiding corporate failures and that good corporate governance is fundamental to the performance and sustainability of firms and economies as a whole

Peace Through Music: Music and Multiculturalism in Fiji

The music of Fiji is as diverse as its population, and acts as both a mirror and catalyst to the culture. Indo-Fijians and indigenous Fijians have been the main players in Fiji’s multiculturalism, and are therefore focused upon. This paper explores the ways in which music is used to extol the benefits and cope with the problems of Fiji’s multiculturalism through cross-cultural listening (viewed from a perspective of radio) and fusion music. Fusion between Indo-Fijian and indigenous Fijian music is especially important – although extremely rare, it is in many ways a metaphor for attempts at racial reconciliation in Fiji.. The paper also seeks to provide a basic foundation of the musical systems involved, with an emphasis on traditional genres

Use of Verb-Noun Collocations by Advanced Learners of Chinese

The important role of collocations has been widely accepted in the current literature, but to date there are still relatively few studies on language learners’ collocation knowledge and development within different local contexts. The current study intends to contribute to the literature by investigating the oral production of Chinese verb-noun (V-N) collocations by a group of highly proficient learners comprised of both Chinese as a foreign language learners (CFL learners) and Chinese heritage language learners (CHL learners), as compared to Chinese native speakers (CNSs). The study brings together current literature on collocation and heritage language learners both from a Western perspective and from the Chinese linguistic and sociolinguistic perspective. Samples of spoken language data discussing both academic and non-academic topics were collected through one-on-one interviews with 10 CFL learners, 10 CHL learners and 10 CNSs. The data are analyzed both quantitatively and qualitatively to yield the following three findings: (1) There is a significant difference in using Chinese verb-noun (V-N) collocations among CFL learners, CHL learners, and CNSs. In general, CNSs produced significantly more V-N collocations in terms of both number (token) and range (type) than CFL learners and CHL learners, (2) The two different oral topics are also found to affect learners’ production of collocations. All three groups used more monosyllabic V-N collocations in discussing daily topics and more disyllabic V-N collocations in discussing academic topics. Moreover, CFL learners and CFL learners exhibited both similarities and differences in applying collocations under the two oral contexts, (3) There are different categories and characteristics of collocation usage in terms of the acceptability and communicativeness of non-conventional collocations produced by learners. The discussion further analyzes several factors that tend to influence CFL learners’ and CHL learners’ production of collocations. The findings of this study expand our understanding about advanced learners’ knowledge and production of Chinese V-N collocations. Moreover, they also provide invaluable information for educators and practitioners who are involved in FL and HL instruction of Chinese

Exploring the N-th Dimension of Language

This paper is aimed at exploring the hidden fundamental\ud computational property of natural language that has been so elusive that it has made all attempts to characterize its real computational property ultimately fail. Earlier natural language was thought to be context-free. However, it was gradually realized that this does not hold much water given that a range of natural language phenomena have been found as being of non-context-free character that they have almost scuttled plans to brand natural language contextfree. So it has been suggested that natural language is mildly context-sensitive and to some extent context-free. In all, it seems that the issue over the exact computational property has not yet been solved. Against this background it will be proposed that this exact computational property of natural language is perhaps the N-th dimension of language, if what we mean by dimension is\ud nothing but universal (computational) property of natural language

Impact of Minnesota's "Profile of Learning"

In 1990, the Minnesota State Board of Education declared its intention to develop a "results-oriented graduation requirement" based on student achievement as opposed to the usual credit/course completion requirement. In addition to a traditional test of basic skills, the state began developing the Profile of Learning, a set of performance-based standards grounded in a constructivist educational philosophy, an approach that differs from the content-based standards found in many states. The Profile was controversial from its inception. Conservatives characterized the Profile as too process- oriented and as lacking subject-matter content; teachers reported that the Profile required a significant amount of additional teacher preparation time; and parents, who were not adequately informed about the Profile, questioned the purpose of the Profile. Teachers were frustrated with the confusing and sometimes contradictory directions they received from the Minnesota Department of Children, Families, and Learning charged with implementing the Profile. In 2000-2001, we surveyed and interviewed selected secondary English and social studies teachers in the state about their perceptions of the Profile’s impact on teaching and learning. Among the positive perceptions was an increase in students’ higher order thinking, students’ understanding of criteria for quality work, and teachers conversations with one another about instructional issues. Increased teacher preparation time and decreased enjoyment of teaching were among the negative perceptions. Teachers also experienced difficulty adopting performance assessment techniques. When teachers believed they received effective preparation and adequate resources for working with the Profile, they were much more likely to report beneficial effects in terms of teaching and learning. The majority of teachers, however, rated their preparation and resources as "fair" or "poor." Results are discussed in terms of school and instructional change

The effects of focused memorisation, delayed character introduction, character colour-coding, and a unity curriculum on the character learning of Beginner CFL learners

Teaching Chinese as a foreign language (henceforth CFL) has undoubtedly grown in popularity worldwide over the past number of years. CFL was first introduced as a module in Irish third-level institutions in the year 2006-2007, around the time when the first Confucius Institutes were founded in Ireland in University College Dublin and University College Cork. In 2014, a short course entitled ‘Chinese Language and Culture’ was introduced to the junior cycle of Irish secondary schools. It was compiled by the National Council for Curriculum and Assessment (NCCA) and provided a set of guidelines for teaching CFL from the beginner level. More recently, in 2017, it was announced that CFL would be introduced as a State-examined subject on the Leaving Certificate curriculum within 10 years. The following describes a quasi-experimental study with a focus on teaching Chinese characters to beginner learners in an Irish secondary school. Approximately 90 participants aged 14-16 years were divided into four groups, whereby each group was taught beginner-level Chinese under one teaching method of focused memorisation (FM), delayed character introduction (DCI), character colour-coding (CCC), or the unity curriculum (UC), which places equal focus on reading, writing, speaking, and listening. Participants were taught for one academic year, during which they conducted four formative evaluations – testing learning progress – and two summative evaluations – testing learning outcomes. These evaluations comprised exercises such as listening dictation, character recall and recognition, using characters in sentences, reordering sentences, and producing Chinese text. Findings from the current study show that a combined methodology of FM, CCC, and UC is possibly beneficial to beginner learners when learning character composition and how to use characters in a variety of contexts, while feedback from participants also demonstrated that the characters were one of the main difficulties in their learning of CFL. Evidence-based recommendations for a future CFL teaching methodology are therefore supplied in the current research, while recommendations for a CFL programme are also discussed