Exploring ‘unknown worlds’: The lives and careers of non-native speaking teachers of English in Asia

It is a decade since Richards remarked that “How the teacher believes, thinks, acts and reacts is central to educational endeavour, but about the EFL (English as a foreign language) language teacher we know almost nothing” (1997:243), going on to suggest that the world of the teacher of English as a foreign language was terra incognita (1997:251). Regrettably, this remains particularly true of non-native speaking teachers of English working in their own state educational systems. Even within particular countries the experiences of ‘ordinary’ teachers – who are far from ‘ordinary’ in so many ways – is given little prominence in debates about educational innovation and improvement. We hear so much about methods and materials in English language teaching but too little about the teachers who work with these in their classrooms on a daily basis. This paper argues, then, that much greater importance needs to be given to investigating and understanding the contexts of English language teaching in all their variety, within countries and across countries, from the perspective of teachers themselves. It will draw on life history interview data from teachers in Sri Lanka and Thailand to illustrate what may be gained from such research in three important areas: as a means of extending the knowledge base of English language teaching worldwide; as a means of redressing western – non-western imbalances in status, power and prestige within ELT; and as a means of enabling teachers to reflect on their own lives and careers as a means of professional self-realisation and self-empowerment. It is surely time that the voices of classroom teachers were heard more widely, their experiences and perceptions given greater prominence in our professional thinking and this paper hopes to contribute to that process

A Refinement Calculus for Logic Programs

Existing refinement calculi provide frameworks for the stepwise development of imperative programs from specifications. This paper presents a refinement calculus for deriving logic programs. The calculus contains a wide-spectrum logic programming language, including executable constructs such as sequential conjunction, disjunction, and existential quantification, as well as specification constructs such as general predicates, assumptions and universal quantification. A declarative semantics is defined for this wide-spectrum language based on executions. Executions are partial functions from states to states, where a state is represented as a set of bindings. The semantics is used to define the meaning of programs and specifications, including parameters and recursion. To complete the calculus, a notion of correctness-preserving refinement over programs in the wide-spectrum language is defined and refinement laws for developing programs are introduced. The refinement calculus is illustrated using example derivations and prototype tool support is discussed.Comment: 36 pages, 3 figures. To be published in Theory and Practice of Logic Programming (TPLP

Study of orifice fabrication technologies for the liquid droplet radiator

Eleven orifice fabrication technologies potentially applicable for a liquid droplet radiator are discussed. The evaluation is focused on technologies capable of yielding 25-150 microns diameter orifices with trajectory accuracies below 5 milliradians, ultimately in arrays of up to 4000 orifices. An initial analytical screening considering factors such as trajectory accuracy, manufacturability, and hydrodynamics of orifice flow is presented. Based on this screening, four technologies were selected for experimental evaluation. A jet straightness system used to test 50-orifice arrays made by electro-discharge machining (EDM), Fotoceram, and mechanical drilling is discussed. Measurements on orifice diameter control and jet trajectory accuracy are presented and discussed. Trajectory standard deviations are in the 4.6-10.0 milliradian range. Electroforming and EDM appear to have the greatest potential for Liquid Droplet Radiator applications. The direction of a future development effort is discussed

INSURING AGAINST LOSSES FROM TRANSGENIC CONTAMINATION

Concerns about contamination of the food supply and the financial losses that would result have limited the promise of certain genetically engineered plants. This article addresses the situation by constructing an insurance pricing model to protect against those losses. The model first estimates the physical dispersal of corn pollen subject to a number of parameters. This physical distribution is then used to calculate the premium for fair valued insurance that would be necessary to destroy contaminated fields. The flexible framework can be readily adapted to other crops, management practices, and regions.contemporaneous fertility, insurance, Lagrangian stochastic model, pharmaceutical-corn, pollen dispersal, Crop Production/Industries, Risk and Uncertainty,

What's in the Numbers? Child Welfare Statistics and the Children (NI) Order

This article draws attention to the importance of routinely collected administrative data as an important source for understanding the characteristics of the Northern Ireland child welfare system as it has developed since the Children (Northern Ireland) Order 1995 became its legislative base. The article argues that the availability of such data is a strength of the Northern Ireland child welfare system and urges local politicians, lobbyists, researchers, policy-makers, operational managers, practitioners and service user groups to make more use of them. The main sources of administrative data are identified. Illustration of how these can be used to understand and to ask questions about the system is provided by considering some of the trends since the Children Order was enacted. The “protection” principle of the Children Order provides the focus for the illustration. The statistical trends considered relate to child protection referrals, investigations and registrations and to children and young people looked after under a range of court orders available to ensure their protection and well-being