When general skills are not enough: the influence of recent shifts in Australian skilled migration policy on migrant employment outcomes

This report focusses on the effects on migrant labour market outcomes of Australia’s recent shift from a points-based “supply driven” model that favoured independent General Skilled Migrants, to a “hybrid model” that balances supply driven migration against Employer Sponsored “demand driven” migration. Abstract Although many countries are now using skilled migration to offset declining fertility and increased longevity, there is thin empirical evidence concerning the effects of alternative approaches to managing the skilled migrant intake. This study focusses on the effects on migrant labour market outcomes of Australia’s recent shift from a points-based “supply driven” model that favoured independent General Skilled Migrants, to a “hybrid model” that balances supply driven migration against Employer Sponsored “demand driven” migration. We find that the shift to a hybrid model of skilled migration resulted in substantively improved rates of employment amongst skilled migrants without an accompanying deterioration in the average distribution of occupational outcomes. &nbsp

Beyond the Spoken Word: Examining the Nature of Teacher Gesturing in the Context of an Elementary Engineering Curriculum for English-Learner Students

Our research team performed an exploratory analysis of teacher gesturing via a case study of an elementary teacher. We focused on gesturing, a practice found to support both bilingual English learner students’ linguistic development and mathematics achievement, during the teacher’s engineering and science lessons. The research team systematically analyzed teacher video data using McNeill’s gestural dimensions framework and found variation of gesturing types and rates when comparing engineering and baseline science lessons. Additionally, specific types of teacher-gestures appear to be associated with either behavioral or classroom management practices, procedural instructions, and discussion facilitation. We suggest that teacher-gestures such as these have the potential to facilitate bilingual English learners’ language acquisition, while also developing their STEM literacy in general and engineering capacity in particular. Further exploration of teacher-gestures in elementary engineering curricula could lead to an integrated STEM pedagogy that incorporates gesturing as a fundamental teaching strategy, bridging STEM instruction with linguistically responsive instructional practices.Educatio

Improving Statistical Language Model Performance with Automatically Generated Word Hierarchies

An automatic word classification system has been designed which processes word unigram and bigram frequency statistics extracted from a corpus of natural language utterances. The system implements a binary top-down form of word clustering which employs an average class mutual information metric. Resulting classifications are hierarchical, allowing variable class granularity. Words are represented as structural tags --- unique $n$-bit numbers the most significant bit-patterns of which incorporate class information. Access to a structural tag immediately provides access to all classification levels for the corresponding word. The classification system has successfully revealed some of the structure of English, from the phonemic to the semantic level. The system has been compared --- directly and indirectly --- with other recent word classification systems. Class based interpolated language models have been constructed to exploit the extra information supplied by the classifications and some experiments have shown that the new models improve model performance.Comment: 17 Page Paper. Self-extracting PostScript Fil

THE FLOWS OF IDEAS OF ENGLISH ARGUMENTS BY INDONESIAN WRITERS FOUND IN THE OPINION FORUM OF THE JAKARTA POST: AN INDICATION OF LANGUAGE SHIFT

English writing ability is badly needed by professionals and university students, to facilitate their study and career. However, writing coherently is difficult for many of them. Tangkiengsirisin (2010, 1) states that flow of ideas is the main criterion for advanced writing. This study is aimed at finding out the flows of ideas of English Arguments by Indonesian writers. The study is descriptive and qualitative, analyzing 14 articles from The Jakarta Post. The findings reveal that 64 % of the data are developed linearly, contradicting with Kaplan’s explanation that oriental groups express their ideas mostly indirectly, circularly. The socio-cultural context, i.e. globalization has changed the circular into linear pattern