9,070 research outputs found

    An exploration of the attitudes and beliefs of teacher trainers and teacher trainees concerning the use of the L1 in the EFL classroom

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    One important conflict within English language teaching methodology is concerning the use or exclusion of learners’ first languages (L1) when learning English. Perspectives on the topic range from those in favour of complete avoidance of the L1 in the EFL classroom, constantly striving for an exclusively L2 classroom to those who believe in the value and learning benefit of allowing and, to some extent, encouraging the use of all manner of languages available to the learner. This thesis conducted interviews and surveys in order to provide an in-depth exploration of the attitudes and beliefs of teacher trainers and teacher trainees in North Rhine Westphalia concerning the use of the L1, as well as other potential languages, in the English language classroom. Although the two groups of participants held many similar attitudes and beliefs concerning L1 use, some significant and interesting differences were found. Teacher trainees showed themselves to be more open concerning the use of the L1 than their more experienced counterparts. It remains, however, unclear what exactly the reason for these differences is. A further aspect which became apparent is how the pressures of language choice and of exclusive L2 instruction in the EFL classroom during observed and examination lessons is felt by teacher trainees. This is potentially adding to the overall burden of the teacher training period in NRW. The thesis concludes that an increase in evidence-based teacher education, concerning not only the aspect of L1 use in the EFL classroom but also many other aspects of language teaching could be prudent in the continued development of well-informed best-practice approaches. This thesis holds the standpoint that complete eradication of the L1 in the EFL classroom is counterproductive to successful language learning. Judicious use of the L1 and the development of a more plurilingusitic attitude to language learning, enabling learners to make use of any available linguistic resources, can offer both learners and teachers helpful scaffolding which can facilitate the successful learning of further languages

    Identity, Power, and Prestige in Switzerland's Multilingual Education

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    Switzerland is known for its multilingualism, yet not all languages are represented equally in society. The situation is exacerbated by the influx of heritage languages and English through migration and globalization processes which challenge the traditional education system. This study is the first to investigate how schools in Grisons, Fribourg, and Zurich negotiate neoliberal forces leading to a growing necessity of English, a romanticized view on national languages, and the social justice perspective of institutionalizing heritage languages. It uncovers power and legitimacy issues and showcases students' and teachers' complex identities to advocate equitable multilingual education

    Effects of IPSAS Adoption in Public Institutions in Romania on the Quality of Financial Reporting

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    This paper examines the practical improvement on the quality of financial reporting in the Romanian public institutions after implementing IPSAS. To test our hypothesis, we used a questionnaire addressed to the accounting professionals from the local public administration, in which 164 respondents participated. In this revision, we use a linear regression analysis method to examine the relationship between the implementation of IPSAS and the quality of financial reporting in the Romanian public institutions. The introduction of IPSAS, as demonstrated by empirical studies, is significantly positively related to the quality of financial reporting in the Romanian public institutions. The findings of this research recommend that regulators take appropriate measures to ensure compliance by those responsible for the preparation of financial statements of public sector entities. Efforts should also be made to improve the quality of disclosure of relevant financial reports to help users make beneficial economic decisions

    Religion, Education, and the ‘East’. Addressing Orientalism and Interculturality in Religious Education Through Japanese and East Asian Religions

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    This work addresses the theme of Japanese religions in order to rethink theories and practices pertaining to the field of Religious Education. Through an interdisciplinary framework that combines the study of religions, didactics and intercultural education, this book puts the case study of Religious Education in England in front of two ‘challenges’ in order to reveal hidden spots, tackle unquestioned assumptions and highlight problematic areas. These ‘challenges’, while focusing primarily on Japanese religions, are addressed within the wider contexts of other East Asian traditions and of the modern historical exchanges with the Euro-American societies. As result, a model for teaching Japanese and other East Asian religions is discussed and proposed in order to fruitfully engage issues such as orientalism, occidentalism, interculturality and critical thinking

    The Entrenched Political Limitations of Australian Refugee Policy: A Case Study of the Australian Labor Party (2007-2013)

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    This thesis deconstructs Australia’s asylum and refugee policy trajectory under the Labor government between 2007 and 2013. For a short time after the 2007 election, in accordance with its promise to abolish the LNP’s Pacific Solution, Labor began to unwind certain policy structures of externalisation and deterrence that had been in place since the introduction of mandatory detention in 1992. By 2013 however, the ALP had declared that asylum seekers arriving by boat had no prospect of resettlement in Australia. This thesis analyses the political strategy of the ALP in rhetoric, policy choices and policy justifications to derive lessons from Labor’s mitigated challenge to the deterrence/externalisation paradigm. Critical Discourse Analysis is used to examine the political strategies of lead actors, particularly the ALP and the LNP, and to reconcile these strategies with policy outcomes such as irregular arrivals, detention figures, deaths at sea and compliance with obligations under international law. A central argument of this thesis is that Labor’s attempt to sustainably depart from the dominant externalisation paradigm was impaired, not by a lack of commitment to its stated program of reform, but rather by entrenched political limitations of the Australian context. These limitations include the LNP’s rigid partisanship and lack of policy compromise, the deep-rooted nature of mandatory detention, and the Australian public’s historical and continued support for controlled migration. A precise and detailed analysis of the impact of these limitations on Labor’s proposed reform fills a gap in academic knowledge about the political influences on policy action in Australian asylum and refugee policy. I contend that these limitations must be effectively engaged with in any attempt to reform the Australian asylum and refugee policy space

    Tourism and heritage in the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone

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    Tourism and Heritage in the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone (CEZ) uses an ethnographic lens to explore the dissonances associated with the commodification of Chornobyl's heritage. The book considers the role of the guides as experience brokers, focusing on the synergy between tourists and guides in the performance of heritage interpretation. Banaszkiewicz proposes to perceive tour guides as important actors in the bottom-up construction of heritage discourse contributing to more inclusive and participatory approach to heritage management. Demonstrating that the CEZ has been going through a dynamic transformation into a mass tourism attraction, the book offers a critical reflection on heritagisation as a meaning-making process in which the resources of the past are interpreted, negotiated, and recognised as a valuable legacy. Applying the concepts of dissonant heritage to describe the heterogeneous character of the CEZ, the book broadens the interpretative scope of dark tourism which takes on a new dimension in the context of the war in Ukraine. Tourism and Heritage in the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone argues that post-disaster sites such as Chornobyl can teach us a great deal about the importance of preserving cultural and natural heritage for future generations. The book will be of interest to academics and students who are engaged in the study of heritage, tourism, memory, disasters and Eastern Europe

    Bilex Rx: Lexical Data Augmentation for Massively Multilingual Machine Translation

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    Neural machine translation (NMT) has progressed rapidly over the past several years, and modern models are able to achieve relatively high quality using only monolingual text data, an approach dubbed Unsupervised Machine Translation (UNMT). However, these models still struggle in a variety of ways, including aspects of translation that for a human are the easiest - for instance, correctly translating common nouns. This work explores a cheap and abundant resource to combat this problem: bilingual lexica. We test the efficacy of bilingual lexica in a real-world set-up, on 200-language translation models trained on web-crawled text. We present several findings: (1) using lexical data augmentation, we demonstrate sizable performance gains for unsupervised translation; (2) we compare several families of data augmentation, demonstrating that they yield similar improvements, and can be combined for even greater improvements; (3) we demonstrate the importance of carefully curated lexica over larger, noisier ones, especially with larger models; and (4) we compare the efficacy of multilingual lexicon data versus human-translated parallel data. Finally, we open-source GATITOS (available at https://github.com/google-research/url-nlp/tree/main/gatitos), a new multilingual lexicon for 26 low-resource languages, which had the highest performance among lexica in our experiments

    Exploring the mental health and psychosocial experiences of asylum seekers, refugees and undocumented migrants in the post-migration context

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    Background and aims: Migration phases (pre-, during and post-) are known to negatively impact on the mental health and psychosocial experiences of asylum seekers, refugees and undocumented migrants. In this thesis, the focus was on post-migration experiences. Research shows that particular areas of concern include: migration detention, the asylum system, fear of deportation, poverty, destitution, housing issues, language and communication difficulties, and poor access to care. However, more in-depth understanding of the mental health and psychosocial experiences of asylum seekers, refugees and undocumented migrants in the postmigration context is needed. The aim of this thesis was to investigate asylum seekers’, refugees’, and undocumented migrants’ mental health and psychosocial experiences in the postmigration context, including an exploration of social determinants of mental health and the barriers and facilitators to access to services. This was met by addressing three objectives: To investigate asylum seekers’, refugees, and undocumented migrants’ mental health experiences in the context of social determinants of health. To explore how social determinants of health influence the pathway to healthcare services amongst asylum seekers, refugees, and undocumented migrants. To explore the barriers and facilitators to asylum seekers’, refugees and undocumented migrants’ pathways to accessing the services that they need. Methods: This thesis employed three methodological approaches to collect and analyse data: a systematic review and meta ethnography, Reflexive Thematic Analysis (RTA) and a re-analysis of interview data, applying the theory of Candidacy. These qualitative approaches were built on one another in a sequential manner. The systematic review included the qualitative component of 20 studies (11 qualitative and 9 mixed methods), assessed against pre established inclusion criteria. These were analysed by applying a meta-ethnographic approach. Eighteen asylum seekers, refugees and undocumented migrants based in the Glasgow area were interviewed. RTA was the primary qualitative study. The interviews were then reanalysed using the theory of Candidacy to understand in more detail participants’ journeys to accessing the services needed. Results: Combined, the findings from this thesis indicate that the asylum system is a social determinant of health for asylum seeker, refugee and undocumented migrant populations in the UK and internationally. For asylum seekers and undocumented migrants, the inability to work and financial insecurity stemming from Home Office restrictions were found to compound distress. In relation to mental health, psychosomatic symptoms and difficulties with sleep were found, whilst protective factors included family, friends, religion, and hobbies such as exercise and playing music. Access to care was described as arduous due to language and communication difficulties, limited availability of interpreters, and issues registering with a GP. This was due to the limited information and knowledge available to them. Often this was mitigated by third sector organisations. Access to mental health services was consistently shown to be undermined by the Western biomedical approach, which failed to consider socio cultural factors that may further limit access. Often, consultations relating to mental health often resulted in prescriptions for psychotropic medications, which were considered socio-culturally inappropriate by some individuals in these communities and led to the discontinuation of treatment and heightened feelings of isolation. The secondary analysis of the interviews also showed that the operating conditions that influenced access to services comprised of three levels: micro-, meso- and macro. These encompass proximal as well as broader factors that influence these populations’ ability and willingness to access the services that they require. Conclusion: Efforts to improve asylum seekers’, refugees’ and undocumented migrants’ access to services, including healthcare, need to consider the psychosocial and cultural aspects of mental health in these populations. These are found to affect individuals’ and communities’ abilities and willingness to engage with existing services, including the NHS. Health services have a responsibility in lessening the structural barriers and inequity in access that these populations face
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