Attitudes & Acculturation: A Qualitative Case Study Of EFL Teachers In Saudi Arabia

L2 Motivation has evolved since Gardner and Lambert introduced the socio-educational model and highlighted the importance of attitudes and affect to the SLA process. Though the field expanded focus, little work has been done into L2 teacher motivation; instead, most studies have focused on student attitudes and motivation. This research addressed that need by examining teaching motivation in Saudi Arabia. This study explored the effects that living in Saudi Arabia, segregated from the host community by a high level of social distance, has on teachers\u27 attitudes and motivation to teach, by asking four questions:Do EFL teachers in Saudi feel isolated from the host culture?Do teachers acculturate to Saudi society?How do EFL teachers in Saudi Arabia percieve the social distance between students and teachers?If teachers feel a great cultural distance, what effect does this have on foreign teachers\u27 attitudes towards their students? What effect does this have on the teachers\u27 motivation? A qualitative design was deemed most appropriate. Operating in the exploratory-interpretive paradigm, it aimed to discover meaning as the participants interpreted it. Both the phenomenological orientation of understanding the essence of lived experiences and the ethnographic orientation of exploring shared behaviors, beliefs, and language were used. Eleven English teachers, who shared a contextual location and a few characteristics, were purposefully selected to participate in two semi-structured interviews, which were intended to elicit meaningful and culturally relevant responses, and provide unanticipated information. The interviews revealed the following: money was the teachers\u27 primary motivation for working in Saudi Arabia; most teachers arrived wanting to learn Arabic; social distance prevented cultural experiences; the subjects reported low levels of job satisfaction and commitment; and the subjects were more motivated by extrinsic than intrinsic work factors. These results contribute to an understanding of L2 teacher motivation and raise further questions about the role of foreign EFL teachers in Saudi Arabia. Limitations of the study and suggestions for further research were identified

Developing a Marketing Mind-Set: Training and Mentoring for County Extension Employees

Marketing the county Extension program is a critical responsibility of the entire county staff. This article describes a unique peer-to-peer training and mentoring program developed to assist county Extension staff in improving marketing skills and successfully developing and implementing a county Extension marketing plan. Data demonstrating success of this program are presented. Additionally, best practices for states wishing to create a similar peer-to-peer program conclude the article

Multi-level, multi-party singlets as ground states and their role in entanglement distribution

We show that a singlet of many multi-level quantum systems arises naturally as the ground state of a physically-motivated Hamiltonian. The Hamiltonian simply exchanges the states of nearest-neighbours in some network of qudits (d-level systems); the results are independent of the strength of the couplings or the network's topology. We show that local measurements on some of these qudits project the unmeasured qudits onto a smaller singlet, regardless of the choice of measurement basis at each measurement. It follows that the entanglement is highly persistent, and that through local measurements, a large amount of entanglement may be established between spatially-separated parties for subsequent use in distributed quantum computation.Comment: Corrected method for physical preparatio

The Impact of Virtual Methodologies on Artificial Intelligence

Recent advances in atomic methodologies and perfect modalities do not necessarily obviate the need for replication. Given the current status of semantic algorithms, information theorists dubiously desire the deployment of superpages, which embodies the un-proven principles of cryptoanalysis. In order to accomplish this purpose, we investigate how courseware can be applied to the analysis of the Internet

Food Habits of Juvenile American Alligators in the Upper Lake Pontchartrain Estuary

Food habits of juvenile (0.49-1.21 m total length) American alligators (Alligator mississippiensis) from an area in southeastern Louisiana were investigated. One-hundred and one stomach samples were obtained by stomach-pumping. Crustaceans (crayfish; blue crabs, Callinectes sapidus; grass shrimp, Palaemonetes sp.), insects (hemipterans, coleopterans), and small fish (least killifish, Heterandria formosa; mosquitofish, Gambusia affinis) constituted the majority of prey items taken. Fish consumption was significantly more frequent during April and May than during June through September (P\u3c0.025). This differential use of prey species may be due to seasonally fluctuating water levels in the study area. Comparisons of juvenile alligator food habits revealed dietary differences between Louisiana and Florida (P\u3c0.001), possibly due to the different prey available at the two areas. Prey utilization was not significantly different between larger alligators (0.9-1.2 m total length) and smaller alligators (0.3·0.9 m total length) (P\u3e0.25)

Uniformity of V minus Near Infrared Color Evolution of Type Ia Supernovae, and Implications for Host Galaxy Extinction Determination

From an analysis of SNe 1972E, 1980N, 1981B, 1981D, 1983R, 1998bu, 1999cl, and 1999cp we find that the intrinsic V-K colors of Type Ia SNe with multi-color light curve shape (MLCS) parameter -0.4 < Delta < +0.2 suggest a uniform color curve. V-K colors become bluer linearly with time from roughly one week before B-band maximum until one week after maximum, after which they redden linearly until four weeks after maximum. V-H colors exhibit very similar color evolution. V-J colors exhibit slightly more complex evolution, with greater scatter. The existence of V minus near infrared color relations allows the construction of near infrared light curve templates that are an improvement on those of Elias et al. (1985). We provide optical BVRI and infrared JHK photometry of the Type Ia supernovae 1999aa, 1999cl, and 1999cp. SN 1999aa is an overluminous "slow decliner" (with Delta = -0.47 mag). SN 1999cp is a moderately bright SN unreddened in its host. SN 1999cl is extremely reddened in its host. The V minus near infrared colors of SN 1999cl yield A_V = 2.01 +/- 0.11 mag. This leads to a distance for its host galaxy (M 88) in agreement with other distance measurements for members of the Virgo cluster.Comment: 57 pages, 13 postscript figures, to appear in the August 20, 2000, issue of the Astrophysical Journal. Contains updated references and a number of minor corrections dealt with when page proofs were correcte

The application of travel demand management initiatives within a university setting

This research was undertaken as part of the UK Energy Research Centre (UKERC) research programme under the ADdressing Valuation of Energy and Nature Together (ADVENT) project, funded by the Natural Environment Research Council (NE/M019691/1) United Kingdom. Funding was also received from the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Aberdeen, United Kingdom. The authors would like to thank Dr Kate Pangbourne, The University of Leeds, for their detailed and constructive feedback on this paper. The authors would also like to acknowledge Dr Alex Douglas for their input in the methodology.Peer reviewedPostprin

Harvest time optimisation for combustion quality of different miscanthus genotypes across Europe

The research work has been carried out as a part of OPTIMISC project, which received funding from the European Union Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under grant agreement No. 289159. Authors would like to acknowledge all project partners for managing field trials at each site and providing samples. The authors wish to thank Dr. Jens Möhring for his support during the statistical analysis. Particular thanks go to the staff of the experimental station, Ihinger Hof, especially Thomas Truckses for providing help during field measurements and sample collection. The chemical analysis was supported by Dagmar Mezger and Martin Zahner. The manuscript was edited by Nicole Gaudet.Peer reviewedPublisher PD