English language teachers’ conceptualizations of one-to-one private tutoring: An international phenomenographic study

Private English tutoring, understood as the paid English teaching service offered to students to supplement their learning of English at school or prepare them for an examination in English, has become a popular out-of-school learning activity. In order to obtain deeper insights into its intricacies, the need arises to examine the experience of one of its pivotal stakeholders – the private tutors. This article is based on a phenomenographic study with a view to investigating the conceptions of private tutoring held by 15 English teachers from three countries (Poland, Portugal, and Turkey) who offer private teaching services in English in their local contexts. The findings suggest that there are at least three conceptions according to which private tutoring can be experienced by the participants: as a source of income, as helping, and as professional development. The study also poses the question if there is space for formal training of private tutors and calls for further research into English private tutoring

A Hybrid Neural Network and Virtual Reality System for Spatial Language Processing

This paper describes a neural network model for the study of spatial language. It deals with both geometric and functional variables, which have been shown to play an important role in the comprehension of spatial prepositions. The network is integrated with a virtual reality interface for the direct manipulation of geometric and functional factors. The training uses experimental stimuli and data. Results show that the networks reach low training and generalization errors. Cluster analyses of hidden activation show that stimuli primarily group according to extra-geometrical variables

Decision-focussed resource modelling for design decision support

Resource management including resource allocation, levelling, configuration and monitoring has been recognised as critical to design decision making. It has received increasing research interests in recent years. Different definitions, models and systems have been developed and published in literature. One common issue with existing research is that the resource modelling has focussed on the information view of resources. A few acknowledged the importance of resource capability to design management, but none has addressed the evaluation analysis of resource fitness to effectively support design decisions. This paper proposes a decision-focused resource model framework that addresses the combination of resource evaluation with resource information from multiple perspectives. A resource management system constructed on the resource model framework can provide functions for design engineers to efficiently search and retrieve the best fit resources (based on the evaluation results) to meet decision requirements. Thus, the system has the potential to provide improved decision making performance compared with existing resource management systems

Employer Benefits and Costs of English@Work Participation

Evaluation of English@Work’s benefits and costs for participating employers.The Ray Marshall Center (RMC), with support from the Literacy Coalition of Central Texas (LCCT), has conducted an evaluation of English@Work’s benefits and costs for participating employers, a required component of LCCT’s grant from the Houston Center for Literacy-English@Work which was launched as a small nonprofit in Austin in 2005 and was subsumed by the LCCT in January 2014, is a unique approach to teaching English-language skills by contextualizing, customizing, and providing them in the workplace. Early results indicated that this approach substantially outperformed more traditional approaches that rely heavily on classroom instruction, provide few hours of actual instruction per week, and/or fail to contextualize and tailor instruction in the setting and language of the workplace. Students made larger gains on various literacy measure more quickly than these more traditional approaches. And, students indicated that they felt more motivated to learn in a cohort of their peers that was situated within their workplace. After three years evolving and growing under the auspices of the LCCT, the Texas Workforce Commission’s (TWC) Site-based Workplace Literacy Project has provided grant funding to scale up English@Work in Austin and expand it to the Houston area over the period from May 2016 to June 2017. The grant from TWC supports literacy and career services for more than 700 participants and plans to provide credentials or certificates of completion for around 490 of these participants over the grant period.Literacy Coalition of Central Texas and Houston Center for LiteracyRay Marshall Center for the Study of Human Resource

Development of comprehensive river typology based on macrophytes in the mountain-lowland gradient of different Central European ecoregions

The aim of the study was to identify the vegetation pattern in the different types of watercourses basing on survey in reference conditions in a wide geographical gradient, including mountain, upland and lowland rivers. We tested relationship between composition of macrophytes to environmental variables including: altitude, slope, catchment area, geology of valley, land use, hydromorphological sfeatures, water physical and chemical measurements. Analysis based on 109 pristine river sites located throughout major types of rivers in Central Europe. Qualitative and quantitative plant surveys were carried out between 2005 and 2013. Based on TWINSPAN classification and DCA analysis, six macrophyte types were distinguished. The lowland sites were divided into the following three types: humic rivers and two types of siliceous rivers depending on the catchment area, including medium-large and small rivers. The mountain and upland rivers were divided into three geological types: siliceous, calcareous and gravel. We found that the variation of macrophyte communities was determined by several habitat factors (mainly altitude, flow type, riverbed granulometry, conductivity and alkalinity), whereas the spatial factor was rather limited; further, the plant diversity was not reflected accurately by the European ecoregion approach

Income Inequality and Social Outcomes: Bivariate Correlations at NUTS1 Level

The last two decades have been marked by a growing concern about rising inequality. In a recent book (2012), Joseph Stiglitz, a former Nobel prize winner in Economics argues that rising income inequality is one of the main factors underlying the economic and financial crisis in the United States. The Economist magazine has also recently devoted a special report on income inequality in the world (issue 13th‐19th October 2012). The social and economic challenges associated with rising income inequalities have gained prominence in the public debate, after the publication in 2009, of a widely cited book by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett entitled “The Spirit Level, Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better". Using cross‐national data, the authors show that income inequality correlates with lower levels of social capital as well as with a host of other social challenges from poor health, crime, to underage pregnancies. The current report takes part in this debate by examining the bivariate correlations at subnational level (NUTS 1 level) between income inequality and indicators of education, health, criminality, political participation, social capital and happiness at the EU level. Findings suggest a statistically significant negative relationship between income inequality and recorded voter turnout and participation in voluntary organizations, used as a proxy of social capital; while a significant positive correlation between inequality and crime rates as well as the percentage of early school leavers. On the contrary, rising income inequality seems not to be associated with health and wellbeing indicatorsJRC.G.3-Econometrics and applied statistic

Internationalisation, cultural distance and country characteristics: a Bayesian analysis of SME's financial performance

Relying on the accounting data of a panel of 403 Italian manufacturing SMEs collected over a period of 5 years, we find results suggesting that multinationality per se does not impact on the economic performance of international small and medium sized firms. It is the characteristics of the country selected i.e. the political hazard, the financial stability and the economic performance that significantly influence SMEs financial performance. The management implication for small and medium sized firms selecting and entering new geographic markets is significant, since our results show that for SMEs it is the market selection process that really matters and not the degree of multinationality

Generation of anaphors in Chinese

The goal of this thesis is to investigate the computer generation of various kinds of anaphors in Chinese, including zero, pronominal and nominal anaphors, from the se¬ mantic representation of multisentential text. The work is divided into two steps: the first is to investigate linguistic behaviour of Chinese anaphora, and the other is to implement the result of the first part in a Chinese natural language generation system to see how it works.The first step is in general to construct a set of rules governing the use of all kinds of anaphors. To achieve this, we performed a sequence of experiments in a stepwise refined manner. In the experiments, we examined the occurrence of anaphors in humangenerated text and those generated by algorithms employing the rules, assuming the same semantic and discourse structures as the text. We started by distinguishing between the use of zero and other anaphors, termed non-zeroes. Then we performed experiments to distinguish between pronouns and nominal anaphors within the nonzeroes. Finally, we refined the previous result to consider different kinds of descriptions for nominal anaphors. In this research we confine ourselves to descriptive texts. Three sets of test data consisting of scientific questions and answers and an introduction to Chinese grammar were selected. The rules we obtained from the experiments make use of the following conditions: locality between anaphor and antecedent, syntactic constraints on zero anaphors, discourse segment structures, salience of objects and animacy of objects. The results show that the anaphors generated by using the rules we obtained are very close to those in the real texts.To carry out the second step, we built up a Chinese natural language generation system which is able to generate descriptive texts. The system is divided into a strategic and a tactical component. The strategic component arranges message contents in response to the input goal into a well-organised hierarchical discourse structure by using a text planner. The tactical component takes the hierarchical discourse structure as input and produces surface sentences with punctuation marks inserted appropriately. Within the tactical component, the first task consists of linearising in depth-first order the message units in the discourse structure and mapping them into syntactic-oriented representations. Referring expressions, the main concern in this thesis, are generated within the mapping process. A linguistic realisation program is then invoked to convert the syntactic representation into surface strings in Chinese.After the implementation, we sent some generated texts to a number of native speakers of Chinese and compared human-created results and computer-generated text to investigate the quality of the generated anaphors. The results of the comparison show that the rules we obtained are effective in dealing with the generation of anaphors in Chinese

December 20, 1962

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