ALANZ handbook

Co-edited Handbook for participants at December ALANZ Symposiu

Relaxing Lorentz invariance in general perturbative anomalies

We analyze the role of Lorentz symmetry in the perturbative non-gravitational anomalies for a single family of fermions. The theory is assumed to be translational invariant, power-counting renormalizable and based on a local action, but is allowed to have general Lorentz violating operators. We study the conservation of global and gauge currents associate with general internal symmetry groups and find, by using a perturbative approach, that Lorentz symmetry does not participate in the clash of symmetries that leads to the anomalies. We first analyze the triangle graphs and prove that there are regulators for which the anomalous part of the Ward identities exactly reproduces the Lorentz invariant case. Then we show, by means of a regulator independent argument, that the anomaly cancellation conditions derived in Lorentz invariant theories remain necessary ingredients for anomaly freedom.Comment: 18 pages, 1 figure. Few comments added. Article published in Physical Review

ALANZ handbook 2018

Co-edited Handbook for participants at December ALANZ Symposiu

ALANZ 2018

1st December 2018 Waikato Institute of Technology (Wintec) Hamilton We are pleased to announce that the Call for Papers for the ALANZ SYMPOSIUM 2018 is now open. We invite proposals for paper presentations, interactive sessions and posters. The landscape of English language teaching is constantly changing and as teachers contemplate new cohorts of learners, they face this question: Is business as usual enough? In today’s settings there are new technologies to incorporate into learning and teaching, different teaching spaces becoming available, a need to balance fostering learner autonomy with the pastoral care of students, as well as ensuring that our teaching is relevant to the world our students face. We would like to adopt a collegial approach to this question and so invite abstracts from members and non-members of ALANZ and in particular from new and emerging researchers. Presentation types: * Oral Presentations: These will be allocated 20 minutes and 5 minutes for questions (25 minutes total) usually supported with visual aids. * Interactive sessions: These could be workshops or informal discussions around points of interest in Applied Linguistics (45 minutes) and could be supported by visual aids or activities. * Posters: Often some research projects can be best presented in a visual manner in the form of a poster. Abstracts (250 words max.) can be submitted to one of two committee members: * Anthea Fester email: [email protected] or * Celine Kearney email: [email protected] Deadline for abstract submission: 7th September 2018 Notification of acceptance: 28th September 201

NEH-based heuristics for the permutation flowshop scheduling problem to minimize total tardiness

Since Johnson׳s seminal paper in 1954, scheduling jobs in a permutation flowshop has been receiving the attention of hundreds of practitioners and researchers, being one of the most studied topics in the Operations Research literature. Among the different objectives that can be considered, minimising the total tardiness (i.e. the sum of the surplus of the completion time of each job over its due date) is regarded as a key objective for manufacturing companies, as it entails the fulfilment of the due dates committed to customers. Since this problem is known to be NP-hard, most research has focused on proposing approximate procedures to solve it in reasonable computation times. Particularly, several constructive heuristics have been proposed, with NEHedd being the most efficient one, serving also to provide an initial solution for more elaborate approximate procedures. In this paper, we first analyse in detail the decision problem depending on the generation of the due dates of the jobs, and discuss the similarities with different related decision problems. In addition, for the most characteristic tardiness scenario, the analysis shows that a huge number of ties appear during the construction of the solutions done by the NEHedd heuristic, and that wisely breaking the ties greatly influences the quality of the final solution. Since no tie-breaking mechanism has been designed for this heuristic up to now, we propose several mechanisms that are exhaustively tested. The results show that some of them outperform the original NEHedd by about 25% while keeping the same computational requirements.Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación DPI2010-15573/DPIMinisterio de Ciencia e Innovación DPI2013-44461-P/DP

Teaching English in Elqubba Primary Schools: Issues and Directions

The Libyan Ministry of Education has taken important steps to introduce English from the 1st grade (age 6) since autumn semester 2018/2019, yet without taking into considerations the issues that will be faced in teaching English in primary schools. This study, therefore, aimed to identify the issues encountered in the teaching of English from the 1st grade to the 4th grade in primary schools in Elqubba, a city in Eastern Libya and how to overcome these issues. Data were collected through focussed observations and semi-structured interviews. The findings revealed that crowded classrooms, lack of teaching tools and equipments, insufficient exposure to the target language, extensive use of Arabic language, some deficiencies in "English for Libya" coursebooks, poor knowledge of teaching methods, and non-English major teachers were the challenges faced in teaching English. Directions are proposed to overcome these issues

Contextualisation and authenticity in TBLT: voices from Chinese classrooms

In view of ongoing debates about the future of TBLT in EFL contexts (Thomas & Reinders, 2015; Zheng & Borg, 2014), we present a detailed case study of teacher beliefs and practices regarding TBLT conducted in a secondary school in mainland China with a long history of communicative and task-based teaching approaches. We used a mixed-methods approach to gather a broad range of triangulated data, combining individual interviews, material analysis and observations coded using a novel task-focused version of the COLT scheme (Littlewood, 2011; Spada & Fröhlich, 1995). Quantitative and qualitative findings revealed positive beliefs about TBLT principles in general, reflecting strong institutional support for communicative teaching. However, there was marked variability between beliefs and practices in using tasks, especially with beginner-level learners. Most teachers demonstrated an intrinsic lack of confidence in using tasks as more than a communicative ‘add-on’ to standard form-focused teaching. We argue this demonstrates a need for building teacher autonomy (Aoki, 2002; Benson, 2007), in implementing TBLT, even in supportive settings, to support successful authentic contextualising TBLT principles in different EFL contexts

O ensino de línguas baseado em tarefas e o foco na forma: contributos para uma didática do PL2 em cabo verde

The main purpose of this article is to present a reflection on the Task Based Language Teaching (TBLT) and the focus on form approach due to the importance they currently have in the learning of an L2 and because they are thought to allow a more efficient and effective learning of Portuguese in Cape Verde. The TBLT aims to develop the students’ interlanguage through the execution of a task in which the students need the language to solve it. By resorting to the focus on form approach we want to call students’ attention to the linguistic forms that come up spontaneously in activities whose main focus is the meaning, which is the case of TBLT. Based on these theoretical principles, we present the partial results of a study that counted with the participation of three Cape Verdean teachers who have adopted the TBLT for a month and have included a focus on form approach for the teaching of grammar as an alternative to the more traditional teaching that predominates in the language less the main purpose of this article is to present a reflection on the Task Based Language Teaching (TBLT) and the focus on form approach due to the importance they currently have in the learning of an L2 and because they are thought to allow a more efficient and effective learning of Portuguese in Cape Verde. The TBLT aims to develop the students’ interlanguage through the execution of a task in which the students need the language to solve it. By resorting to the focus on form approach we want to call students’ attention to the linguistic forms that come up spontaneously in activities whose main focus is the meaning, which is the case of TBLT. Based on these theoretical principles, we present the partial results of a study that counted with the participation of three Cape Verdean teachers who have adopted the TBLT for a month and have included a focus on form approach for the teaching of grammar as an alternative to the more traditional teaching that predominates in the language lessons