A Study on the Cohesion of English Teaching Materials Between Primary and Junior High School

English teaching materials, as the main teaching media, play an important role in teaching. Many scholars have attached great importance to teaching materials, but they took little heed to the cohesion of teaching materials between different stages of basic education. This study intended to investigate the cohesion of primary-secondary teaching materials by exploring the problems in terms of language knowledge and language skills in the selected English teaching materials for primary and secondary schools, which was finally succeeded by some practical suggestions for the English teachers and the students alike to effectively facilitate the cohesion problems in the primary-secondary stages

Cultural Awareness in Primary School English Teaching

The English curriculum at the stage of compulsory education is of the dual nature of instrumentality and humanity. When it comes to humanity, the task of English curriculum is to improve students’ comprehensive humanity qualities, one of which is to deepen their understanding of different cultures. Cultural awareness is a reflection of the core literacy in English learning. The cultivation of students’ cultural awareness not only contributes to students’ strengthening of national identity, enhancing of cultural self-confidence in the traditional culture of the nation, but also helps develop an inclusive attitude towards excellent foreign cultures, thereby improving their cross-cultural communication competence. Since the textbooks are regarded as core teaching materials, it is essential for textbooks to contain various cross-cultural elements to better cultivate learners’ cultural awareness. Therefore, cultural content in English textbooks is a necessary issue to be investigated. This paper took 6A Unit 8 Chinese New Year (Yilin Edition) as an example to integrate more cultural knowledge into the specific teaching design. The results in this paper reveal that teachers play four roles in primary school English teaching in terms of raising students’ cultural awareness, namely, the emotion motivator, the cognition inspirator, the behavior guide and the morality regulator

Fractal Dimensions and Mixing Structures of Soot Particles during Atmospheric Processing

Soot particles strongly absorb sunlight and hence act as a short-lived warming agent. Atmospheric aging of soot particles changes their morphology and mixing state and consequently alters their optical properties. Here we collected soot particles at tunnel, urban, mountaintop, and background sites in the North China Plain and analyzed their mixing structures and morphology using transmission electron microscopy. Soot particles were further classified into three types: bare-like, partly coated, and embedded. Bare-like soot particles were dominant at the tunnel site, while most soot particles were of the partly coated or embedded type at other sites. Fractal dimensions (<i>D</i>_f) of different types of soot particles ranged from 1.80 to 2.16 and increased in the following order: bare-like < partly coated < embedded. Moreover, their average <i>D</i>_f changed from 1.8 to 2.0 from the tunnel to the background site. We conclude that the <i>D</i>_f can characterize the shape of soot aggregates reasonably well, and its variation reflects soot aging processes. Compared with the reported <i>D</i>_f of soot particles, we found that the <i>D</i>_f value of 1.8 used in previous optical models primarily represents freshly emitted soot aggregates, rather than the ambient ones