Chinese Students' Perceptions of Using Mobile Devices for English Learning

The advance of mobile technology has turned portable, handheld devices into an integral part of students' daily life, and also paved the way for the rise of mobile assisted language learning. This study focused on how Chinese students perceive the use of using mobile devices for English practice in and out of class, in order to see whether they are interested in mobile-assisted language learning (MALL) and how they construct the technology with regard to English learning. One hundred and one students from eighteen universities in mainland China participated in this study. All of them completed an anonymous questionnaire and 20 randomly selected students were interviewed. The results illuminate a strong motivation among students for learning English via mobiles, and diverse types of m-learning activities were discovered. The results also revealed that students' attitudes toward mobile learning can be impacted by their regions or more specifically their surroundings

Development of a submillimeter wave gyrotron, Gyrotron FU VA, with a carefully designed cavity

A new submillimeter wave gyrotron, called Gyrotron FU VA, is now in an advanced stage of development which is being pursued in collaboration between the FIR Research Center at Fukui University, the Institute for Plasma Research at the University of Stuttgart and the Institute for High Power Pulse and Microwave Technology at the Research Center (FZK) in Karlsruhe. One of the main design goals of this device is to achieve a high purity mode output. For this reason, a carefully designed resonant cavity has been developed and installed. Another objective is to attain a long-term operation by the use of an 8T He-free superconducting magnet. Here we summarize some recent results obtained in the experiments with the Gyrotron FU VA