A Comparative Study of College English Teaching Modes and Effects in Chinese Universities and Sino-Foreign Cooperative Universities

College English course in Chinese domestic universities focused on Comprehensive English and could not bring a satisfactory result in a long time. Students in theses universities often underperformed in English and they were left far behind by the students in Sino-foreign cooperative universities (SFCU). Through questionnaires, interviews and classroom observations on 256 students and 30 teachers in five Chinese public universities and four Sino-foreign cooperative universities, a huge gap in teaching objectives and modes, teaching staff, medium of instruction, the number of courses taught in English and class size, students’ English learning motivation and teaching effect between the two types of College English courses was found. The time to study and use English for non-English majors in SFCU in the four-year university study can reach 12,000 to 15,000 hours, which is 10-20 times longer than that of the students in Chinese domestic universities. In addition, 90% of students in SFCU can get Band 6.5 in IELTS, but less than 50% of students in Chinese domestic universities can get Band 5.0 in IELTS and 30%-60% of them will regress in English ability when they graduate. This study finds out that SFCU focus on academic English in College English lessons and their teaching modes and language environment can enhance students’ improvement in English, which shows the significance of reference for the reform of College English and the development of students’ English competence in China and other non-English-speaking countries

ONLINE TEACHING + FLIPPED CLASSROOM + ONLINE CORRECTION: AN EXPERIMENTAL TEACHING REFORM OF COLLEGE ENGLISH WRITING COURSE IN CHINA

One hundred and six sophomore students in English major from four classes in a Chinese university were divided into the experimental group and control group. The experimental group adopted a new teaching model of "online teaching + flipped classroom + online correction", while the control group adopted the traditional teaching model of "classroom instruction + homework + teacher correction". The experiment lasted a semester and the results show that the new teaching model can more effectively stimulate students' interest and enthusiasm for English writing than the traditional one. The mean score of the students in the experimental group increased 10.35 points and the growth is three times as much as that of the control group. The students' overall satisfaction with the new teaching model reaches 90%, while the overall satisfaction of the traditional teaching model is only 20%. This teaching reform experiment has certain significance for the teaching reform of college English writing course in China and other non-English speaking countries.  Article visualizations

A Search Strategy of Level-Based Flooding for the Internet of Things

This paper deals with the query problem in the Internet of Things (IoT). Flooding is an important query strategy. However, original flooding is prone to cause heavy network loads. To address this problem, we propose a variant of flooding, called Level-Based Flooding (LBF). With LBF, the whole network is divided into several levels according to the distances (i.e., hops) between the sensor nodes and the sink node. The sink node knows the level information of each node. Query packets are broadcast in the network according to the levels of nodes. Upon receiving a query packet, sensor nodes decide how to process it according to the percentage of neighbors that have processed it. When the target node receives the query packet, it sends its data back to the sink node via random walk. We show by extensive simulations that the performance of LBF in terms of cost and latency is much better than that of original flooding, and LBF can be used in IoT of different scales

Coherence assisted resonance with sub-lifetime-limited linewidth

We demonstrate a novel approach to obtain resonance linewidth below that limited by coherence lifetime. Cross correlation between induced intensity modulation of two lasers coupling the target resonance exhibits a narrow spectrum. 1/30 of the lifetime-limited width was achieved in a proof-of-principle experiment where two ground states are the target resonance levels. Attainable linewidth is only limited by laser shot noise in principle. Experimental results agree with an intuitive analytical model and numerical calculations qualitatively. This technique can be easily implemented and should be applicable to many atomic, molecular and solid state spin systems for spectroscopy, metrology and resonance based sensing and imaging.Comment: 5 pages 5 figure

Is I-Voting I-Llegal?

The Voting Rights Act was passed to prevent racial discrimination in all voting booths. Does the existence of a racial digital divide make Internet elections for public office merely a computer geek\u27s pipe dream? Or can i-voting withstand scrutiny under the current state of the law? This i-Brief will consider the current state of the law, and whether disproportionate benefits will be enough to stop this extension of technology dead in its tracks

A Research Model Construction of Impact of IT Usage on University Faculty’s Teaching Self-efficacy

Nowadays, the information technology has been widely used in teaching activities, enabling more and more teachers to improve and facilitate their ways of teaching and communicating. However, how does IT usage exert influence on teaching self-efficacy, especially in university classes, still needs to be further studied. Based on Bandura’s self-efficacy theory, and literature review of flipped classroom which is the most representative and latest application scenarios of information technology, we try to identify applicable conceptual dimensions of teaching self-efficacy of university faculty and to construct a research model of influencing mechanism of IT usage on faculty’s teaching self-efficacy. Further study directions are suggested at the end of the research