8,044 research outputs found
Cosmopolitan speakers and their cultural cartographies
Language learners' increased mobility and the ubiquity of virtual intercultural encounters has challenged traditional ideas of âculturesâ. Moreover, representations of cultures as consumable life-choices has meant that learners are no longer locked into standard and static cultural identities. Language learners are better defined as cosmopolitan individuals with subjective and complex socio-political and historical identities. Such models push the boundaries of current concepts in language pedagogy to new understandings of who the language learner is and a refashioning of the cultural maps they inhabit. This article presents a model for cultural understanding that draws on the theoretical framework of Beck's Cosmopolitan Vision and its related concepts of âBanal Cosmopolitanismâ and âCosmopolitan Empathyâ. Narrative accounts are used to illustrate the experience of a group of students of Arabic and Serbian/Croatian and their use of the cultural resources at their disposal to construct their own subjective cosmopolitan life-worlds. Through the analysis of learners' everyday cultural practices inside and outside the educational environment, the scope of the intercultural experience is revisited and a new paradigm for the language learner is presented. The Cosmopolitan Speaker (CS) described in this article is a subject who adopts a flĂąneur-like disposition to reflect on and scrutinise the target culture. Armed with this highly personal interpretation of reality, CSs will be able to take part in their own cultural trajectories and imagine and âfigureâ their own cartography of the world
Trayectorias: a new model for online task-based learning
This paper discusses a framework for designing online tasks that capitalizes on the possibilities that the Internet and the Web offer for language learning. To present such a framework, we draw from constructivist theories (Brooks and Brooks, 1993) and their application to educational technology (Newby, Stepich, Lehman and Russell, 1996; Jonassen, Mayes and McAleese, 1993); second language learning and learning autonomy (Benson and Voller, 1997); and distance education (Race, 1989; White, 1999). On the one hand our model balances the requirements of the need for control and learning autonomy by the independent language learner; and on the other, the possibilities that online task-based learning offer for new reading processes by taking into account new literacy models (Schetzer and Warschauer, 2000), and the effect that the new media have on studentsâ knowledge construction and understanding of texts. We explain how this model works in the design of reading tasks within the specific distance learning context of the Open University, UK. Trayectorias is a tool that consists of an open problem-solving Web-quest and provides students with âscaffoldingâ that guides their navigation around the Web whilst modelling learning approaches and new learning paradigms triggered by the medium. We then discuss a small-scale trial with a cohort of students (n = 23). This trial had a double purpose: (a) to evaluate to what extent the writing task fulfilled the investigatorsâ intentions; and (b) to obtain some information about the studentsâ perceptions of the task
An Attempt to Probe the Radio Jet Collimation Regions in NGC 4278, NGC 4374 (M84), and NGC 6166
NRAO Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA) observations of NGC 4278, NGC 4374
(M84), NGC 6166, and M87 (NGC 4486) have been made at 43 GHz in an effort to
image the jet collimation region. This is the first attempt to image the first
three sources at 43 GHz using Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI)
techniques. These three sources were chosen because their estimated black hole
mass and distance implied a Schwarzschild radius with large angular size,
giving hope that the jet collimation regions could be studied. Phase
referencing was utilize for the three sources because of their expected low
flux densities. M87 was chosen as the calibrator for NGC 4374 because it
satisfied the phase referencing requirements: nearby to the source and
sufficiently strong. Having observed M87 for a long integration time, we have
detected its sub-parsec jet, allowing us to confirm previous high resolution
observations made by Junor, Biretta & Livio, who have indicated that a wide
opening angle was seen near the base of the jet. Phase referencing successfully
improved our image sensitivity, yielding detections and providing accurate
positions for NGC 4278, NGC 4374 and NGC 6166. These sources are point
dominated, but show suggestions of extended structure in the direction of the
large-scale jets. However, higher sensitivity will be required to study their
sub-parsec jet structure
Absolute kinematics of radio source components in the complete S5 polar cap sample. III. First wide-field high-precision astrometry at 15.4 GHz
We report on the first wide-field, high-precision astrometric analysis of the
13 extragalactic radio sources of the complete S5 polar cap sample at 15.4 GHz.
We describe new algorithms developed to enable the use of differenced phase
delays in wide-field astrometric observations and discuss the impact of using
differenced phase delays on the precision of the wide-field astrometric
analysis. From this global fit, we obtained estimates of the relative source
positions with precisions ranging from 14 to 200 as at 15.4 GHz, depending
on the angular separation of the sources (from 1.6 to 20.8
degrees). These precisions are 10 times higher than the achievable
precisions using the phase-reference mapping technique.Comment: 9 pages, 7 figure
Differential Astrometry over 15 degrees
We observed the pair of radio sources 1150+812 and 1803+784 in November 1993
with a VLBI array, simultaneously recording at 8.4 and 2.3 GHz. We determined
the angular separation between the two sources with submilliarcsecond accuracy
by using differential techniques. This result demonstrates the feasibility of
high precision differential astrometry for radio sources separated in the sky
by almost 15 degrees, and opens the avenue to its application to larger samples
of radio sources.Comment: 6 pages, latex2e, 2 figures, To appear in the proceedings of the
EVN/JIVE Symposium No. 4, New Astronomy Reviews (eds. Garret, M. Campbell,
R., and Gurvits, L.
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