An investigation of the impact of flipped instruction on EFL students’ engagement in academic writing classes: A case study of foundation students in Oman

Developing adequate English as a Foreign Language (EFL) academic writing skills is of paramount importance for students’ success in higher education in Oman. The traditional teaching approaches adopted in writing courses often lead to students’ disengagement, however. Although several studies have examined students and teachers’ perceptions of flipped instruction in various EFL courses, no study has examined the impact of flipping on students’ engagement in writing courses. This practice-based research project, where the instructor was the researcher, explored the impact of flipped teaching on 57 General Foundation Program (GFP) EFL learners’ behavioural, cognitive, emotional and agentic engagement in academic writing in a higher education institution in Oman, and the variations that exist in students’ engagement according to gender, age, English language proficiency and technology skills. The study adopted a mixed-methods design and used a student engagement questionnaire, focus group interviews and participant observations to collect data. Descriptive and inferential statistics and deductive and inductive analytical procedures were used to analyse the quantitative and qualitative data respectively. The study presents new practicable knowledge about the implementation and implications of flipped instruction for Omani EFL students’ engagement in academic writing at the GFP level. It proposes flipping as an instructional approach which helps to address GFP students’ lack of 4 behavioural, cognitive, emotional and agentic engagement in writing courses in the Omani context. Behaviourally, students in the flipped classroom experience increased effort, improved concentration levels, persistence, communication and collaboration, and amelioration in their attitude to class attendance. It is reasonable to conclude that learners undergo cognitive growth and develop self-regulatory strategies and meta-cognitive awareness. At the level of emotional engagement, learners initially experience negative emotions such as anger and frustration, and then more positive emotions such as contentment and increased interest in the subject as they adapt to the flipped teaching-learning model. Flipping also seems to influence students’ autonomy and ability to ask questions and express opinions. It appears, however, that this approach does not influence students’ capacity to contribute to their own learning resources and activities. This study makes a valuable contribution to knowledge about students’ engagement in EFL writing courses. It revealed that a strong positive correlation exists between students’ behavioural, cognitive and emotional engagement, and that a positive correlation exists between students’ technology skills and linguistic proficiency and several aspects of their engagement. The study demonstrated, however, that no correlation exists between gender and age and students’ engagement in the flipped classroom. Furthermore, this practice-based research indicated that although flipped instruction helps to address the problem of students’ disengagement in writing courses in our context, factors such as students’ linguistic proficiency and technology skills should be taken into consideration before implementing this instructional approach in the current setting

Herz-Type Hardy Spaces for the Dunkl Operator on the Real Line

2000 Mathematics Subject Classification: Primary 46F12, Secondary 44A15, 44A35We introduce some new weighted Herz spaces associated with the Dunkl operator on R. Also we characterize by atomic decompositions the corresponding Herz-type Hardy spaces. As applications we investigate the Dunkl transform on these spaces and establish a version of Hardy inequality for this transform.* The authors are supported by the DGRST research project 04/UR/15-02

Information extraction of cybersecurity concepts: An LSTM approach

Extracting cybersecurity entities and the relationships between them from online textual resources such as articles, bulletins, and blogs and converting these resources into more structured and formal representations has important applications in cybersecurity research and is valuable for professional practitioners. Previous works to accomplish this task were mainly based on utilizing feature-based models. Feature-based models are time-consuming and need labor-intensive feature engineering to describe the properties of entities, domain knowledge, entity context, and linguistic characteristics. Therefore, to alleviate the need for feature engineering, we propose the usage of neural network models, specifically the long short-term memory (LSTM) models to accomplish the tasks of Named Entity Recognition (NER) and Relation Extraction (RE).We evaluated the proposed models on two tasks. The first task is performing NER and evaluating the results against the state-of-the-art Conditional Random Fields (CRFs) method. The second task is performing RE using three LSTM models and comparing their results to assess which model is more suitable for the domain of cybersecurity. The proposed models achieved competitive performance with less feature-engineering work. We demonstrate that exploiting neural network models in cybersecurity text mining is effective and practical. - 2019 by the authors.This publication was made possible by the support of Qatar University and DISP laboratory (Lumi?re University Lyon 2, France).Scopu

Convolution Operators and Bochner-Riesz Means on Herz-Type Hardy Spaces in the Dunkl Setting

We study the Dunkl convolution operators on Herz-type Hardy spaces ℋα,2p and we establish a version of multiplier theorem for the maximal Bochner-Riesz operators on the Herz-type Hardy spaces ℋα,∞p

The Bessel-Struve intertwining operator on ℂ

We give a description of all transmutation operators from the Bessel-Struve operator to the second-derivative operator. Next we define and characterize the mean-periodic functions on the space ℋ of entire functions and we characterize the continuous linear mappings from ℋ into itself which commute with Bessel-Struve operator

400 ans d'exploration botanique en zone méditerranéenne algérienne Une histoire méconnue et inachevée

Cet article fait une mise au point quasi exhaustive de l'exploration botanique en Algérie. Exploration couronnée, en 1962, par la publication de la flore de Quézel et Santa, dont la révision reste toujours d'actualité

Caractérisation des émergences du piémont de jbel Ayachi : contrôle structural et impact du changement climatique

Le massif calcaire de jbel Ayachi (Haute Atlas de Midelt), montre une structure complexe liée aux calcaires karstiques du Lias. Les nombreuses sources du relief indiquent l’existence d’importantes réserves d'eau. Dans le but de caractériser cet aquifère et de préciser les relations hydrodynamiques entre les zones de recharges et les sources de l’aquifères, une méthodologie a été utilisée. Elle comporte la synthèse des données géologiques, l’utilisation des techniques d’analyse structurale couplées aux études des débits et des chroniques de pluies. Les résultats de cette étude ont permis d’établir une comparaison des conditions d’émergence des deux sources (Ain Tatiouine, Ain Anzar Oufounès) et de l’évolution de leurs paramètres hydrodynamiques. Et une bonne corrélation entre les zones de recharges et les zones d’émergences. Elles permettront, à terme d’établir l’influence des changements climatiques sur les comportements hydrodynamiques de ces émergences.Mots-clés : sources, jbel Ayachi, Haute Atlas, lias, calcaire, karstique, débit, pluie, hydrodynamique, recharge, fissuration, fluctuations, émergence.Characterization of emergences piedmont of Jbel Ayachi. Structural control, and impact of climate changeThe calcareous solid mass of jbel Ayachi (High atlas of Midelt), shows a structure complex related to karstic limestones of Lias. The many sources of the relief indicate the existence of important water reserves. In order to characterize the aquifer and to clarify the relationship between hydrodynamic areas and springs of recharge of the aquifers, a methodology was used. It involves the synthesis of geological data, the use of structural analysis techniques coupled with studies of flow and chronic rain. The results of this study were used to compare the conditions of emergence of the two springs (Ain Tatiouine, Ain Anzar Oufounès) and changes in their hydrodynamic parameters. And good correlations between areas of recharge areas and emergences. They will eventually establish the influence of climate change on the hydrodynamic behavior of these emergences.Keywords : spring, Jbel Ayachi, High Atlas, lias, limestone, karst, flow, rain, hydrodynamics, recharge, cracking, fluctuations, emergence

Fatty acid composition of the seed oils of selected Vicia L. taxa from Tunisia

Whole mature seeds of eight selected varieties, subspecies and accessions of three Vicia L. species grown in Tunisia were investigated for their fatty acid (FA) profile. The FA composition ranged from lauric (C12:0) to lignoceric (C24:0) acids. The total FA content was 1235.14 to 1580.34 mg 100 g–1 dry matter (DM). Linoleic acid (C18:2 c9c12; 647.87 to 801.93 mg 100 g–1 DM, i.e. >50% of total FA), oleic acid (C18:1 c9; 181.32 to 346.79 mg 100 g–1 DM, i.e. 13.2 to 24.6% of total FA) and a-linolenic acid (C18:3 c9c12c15; 42.01 to 97.72 mg 100 g–1 DM, i.e. 3.4 to 7.1% of total FA) were the most abundant unsaturated FA. Palmitic acid (C16:0; 189.86 to 281.07 mg 100 g–1 DM, i.e. 15.4 to 17.8% of total FA) and stearic acid (C18:0; 24.35 to 52.75 mg 100 g–1 DM, i.e. 2.0 to 4.0% of total FA) were the major saturated ones. The sum of all other FA did not exceed 3.0% of TFA. The favourable FA profile of the studied vetch seeds makes them interesting cheap diet components to be used in the nutrition of ruminants and non-ruminants reared in the dryland agricultural regions of Mediterranean countries

Les forêts d'Algérie, de Césarée la romaine à ce jour.

D'après de nombreux auteurs, les forêts d'Algérie furent jadis luxuriantes. L'état de déliquescence dans lequel elles se retrouvent aujourd'hui, pose la problématique de ce qu'elles ont subi durant les diverses époques de l'histoire de ce pays. Peu d'écrits existent sur le sujet a constitué et en fonction des convictions politiques ou religieuses des auteurs, chaque publication s'accorde à dire que c'est telle ou telle autre période de l'histoire fort tourmentée de ce pays, qui a été déterminante. La situation géographique de celui-ci, a fait qu'il a subi, de tout temps, des invasions, et que ce sera toujours la forêt qui payera le plus lourd tribut. Actuellement, la situation est encore plus complexe, du fait de la mondialisation