Unscrambling jumbled sentences: An authentic task for English language assessment?

Jumbled sentence items in language assessment have been criticized by some authors as inauthentic. However, unscrambling jumbled sentences is a common occurrence in real-world communication in English as a lingua franca. Naturalistic inquiry identified 54 instances of jumbled sentence use in daily life in Dubai/Sharjah, where English is widely used as a lingua franca. Thus it is seen that jumbled sentence test items can reflect real-world language use. To evaluate scrambled sentence test items, eight test item types developed from one jumbled sentence instance (“Want taxi Dubai you?”) were analyzed in terms of interactivity and authenticity. Items ranged from being completely decontextualized, non-interactive, and inauthentic to being fully contextualized, interactive, and authentic. To determine appropriate assessment standards for English tests in schools in this region, the English language standards for schools and English language requirements for university admission in the UAE were analyzed. Schools in Dubai/Sharjah use Inner Circle English varieties of English (e.g., British or American English) as the standard for evaluation, as well as non-native-English-speaker varieties (e.g., Indian English(es)). Also, students applying to English-medium universities in the UAE must meet the required scores on standardized English tests including the IELTS and TOEFL. Standards for evaluation of communication in English involving tasks of jumbled sentences in classroom tests must reflect the language learning goals of the school and community. Thus standards for classroom assessment of English in Dubai/Sharjah are determined by local schools’ and universities’ policies

Rehabilitation and social behavior: Experiments in prison

Despite the economic and social significance of crime reduction and criminals’ rehabilitation, research evaluating the effects of incarceration on behavior is surprisingly scarce. We conduct an experiment with 105 prison inmates and complement it with administrative data in order to explore several aspects of their social behavior. We first perform a comprehensive analysis of behavior in three economic games, finding evidence of discrimination against a sample from outside prison. In addition, our regression analysis reveals that inmates generally become less pro-social towards this out-group the longer they remain incarcerated. Finally, we introduce and evaluate a priming intervention that asks inmates to reflect on their time spent in prison. This intervention has a very sizeable and significant impact, increasing pro-sociality towards the out-group. Hence, a simple, low-cost intervention of this sort can have desirable effects in promoting rehabilitation and integration into social and economic life after release

Analysis and correction of the helium speech effect by autoregressive signal processing

SIGLELD:D48902/84 / BLDSC - British Library Document Supply CentreGBUnited Kingdo

Application Architecture Adequacy through an FFT case study

International audienceApplication Architecture Adequacy (AAA) aims at tuning an application to a given hardware architecture. However it is still a difficult and error prone activity. As like as in Hardware/Software co-design, it requires a model of both the application and the architecture. With the new highly-parallel architectures, AAA should also allow a fast exploration of different software mapping granularity in order to leverage better the hardware resources without sacrifying too much productivity. The main contribution of this paper is to extract from a case study a methodology based on dataflow modeling to make the software both faster to develop and suited to the target. Then we show how this methodology can solve some of these issues

Licensing effect in consumer choice

Many real world choices require consumers to make decisions after other choices or judgments. We show that prior choices, which activate and boost the self-concept, are likely to subsequently license more self-indulgent choices. We propose that licensing can operate through an expression of intent to be virtuous, which reduces negative self-attributions associated with the purchase of relative luxuries. Five studies are conducted to illustrate our proposed licensing effect of expressing an initial virtuous intent on subsequent decision to be more indulgent. Consistent with our theory, the preference for an indulgent option diminishes if the licensing decision can be attributed to an external motivation. We also report a mediation analysis in support of our theoretical explanation that the licensing effect operates by providing a temporary boost in relevant self-concept. 2 Imagine a person who is making a choice between two items, one of which is a relative luxury or indulgence. Is this person more or less likely to buy something more self-indulgent if she previously expressed an unrelated altruistic intent? Most choice research focuses on the decision rules by which consumers choose among a set of alternatives, independent of the manner in which they arrive at the choice. In contrast to this focus on single shot decisions

Task-based lessons as a teaching strategy to develop non-fictional writing skills in english with emphasis on grammatical cohesion.

Este estudio propone lecciones basadas en tareas como una estrategia de enseñanza para desarrollar habilidades de escritura de ficción no en Inglés con énfasis en la cohesión gramatical. La investigación se llevó a cabo con una muestra de población de 8 estudiantes de segundo semestre de la Tecnología en Negocios Internacionales en el SENA en Apartadó, Antioquia.This study proposes task-based lessons as a teaching strategy to develop non fictional writing skills in English with emphasis on grammatical cohesion. The research was carried out with a sample population of 8 students from second semester of the Technology in International Business at SENA in Apartadó, Antioquia