IMPORTANCE OF FINANCIAL TECHNOLOGY IMPLICATIONS FOR PROFESSIONALS IN INDONESIA

The focus of the study was to test the financial technology for professionals and its influence on the financial system. The study notes that those professionals who fails to align with the ever-changing technology will not be able to survive their field. Therefore, it is recommended that professionals must be proactive to use financial technology. Furthermore, the regulators in particular field must be technologically inclined with regard to financial technology. Based on regulators pressure and personal motivation, the professionals and firms must take efforts to develop workers for financial technology such as data protections of customers. The government can also develop policies to boost financial technology in Indonesia

Motivation and Foreign Language Learning: Exploring the Rise of Motivation Strategies in the EFL Classroom

Students facing difficulties in learning English because of a range of factors and issues are often demotivated to learn. This has a direct impact on the entire learning process. Research into motivation in the EFL classroom has discovered that certain strategies can encourage learners to think more positively and thus be more motivated in their language learning process. This paper critically discusses types of motivation strategies in the EFL classroom and their increase in popularity. Following this, it critically considers ways in which motivation strategies are still lacking and hence presents some approaches to better promote these from the perspective of students, teachers and policy makers. Along with providing specific recommendations for further research on L2 motivation, the paper concludes by calling on for adopting a range of motivational strategies that can improve student foreign language learning

Questioning in the Saudi EFL University classroom :student perspectives and teacher practices

PhD ThesisQuestioning is perhaps the most common form of discourse between teachers and students in classroom settings, however, research interest in questioning in second/foreign language classrooms has largely applied to the measurement and development of teachers’ questioning skills. This focus on the teacher may however obscure the potential importance of student perspectives and practice preference towards questioning in the classroom discourse. Although questioning is a central aspect of any classroom discourse, it is still an under-researched area in the Saudi classroom context. This thesis is an investigation into some practices and perspectives pertaining to the questioning behaviour of teachers and students in a higher education English as a foreign language (EFL) classroom context. Participants included 12 experienced EFL teachers and 341 first-year students at a public university in Medina, Saudi Arabia. The study aimed to investigate student perspectives on questioning that was undertaken in their classes and to identify the functions of teachers’ questions and the question modifications (if any) that teachers employ in instances where students do not answer. The study also considered, however not as a main focus of attention, whether there are any gender-related differences or commonalities in the teachers’ and students’ perspectives and reported classroom questioning practices. In order to triangulate the sources of the study’s data, a mixed method approach for data collection was used. The study was conducted in two phases, one quantitative, using statistical formula; and the other qualitative, using principles of discourse analysis and content analysis. Three methods were utilised in order to obtain data for this study and establish a better understanding of the EFL classroom questioning under consideration. These were namely, questionnaires, video-recorded classroom observation, and stimulated recall and semi-structured interviews. The findings show that, in addition to functioning as elicitation tools, teachers’ questions possess different discursive functions, such as the assistance of students’ production of fluent L2 talk, the repair of communication breakdown, the invitation students’ guesses, and the management of classroom practice. Teachers also employed various question modification techniques to their unanswered questions. The results of this study’s discourse analysis, together with those from student surveys and teacher interviews, indicate to a number of implications and contributions as regards EFL classroom discourse and language pedagogy.Saudi Arabian Government (Saudi Cultural Bureau in London)

Twitter Sentiment Analysis via Bi-sense Emoji Embedding and Attention-based LSTM

Sentiment analysis on large-scale social media data is important to bridge the gaps between social media contents and real world activities including political election prediction, individual and public emotional status monitoring and analysis, and so on. Although textual sentiment analysis has been well studied based on platforms such as Twitter and Instagram, analysis of the role of extensive emoji uses in sentiment analysis remains light. In this paper, we propose a novel scheme for Twitter sentiment analysis with extra attention on emojis. We first learn bi-sense emoji embeddings under positive and negative sentimental tweets individually, and then train a sentiment classifier by attending on these bi-sense emoji embeddings with an attention-based long short-term memory network (LSTM). Our experiments show that the bi-sense embedding is effective for extracting sentiment-aware embeddings of emojis and outperforms the state-of-the-art models. We also visualize the attentions to show that the bi-sense emoji embedding provides better guidance on the attention mechanism to obtain a more robust understanding of the semantics and sentiments

Motivation and Foreign Language Learning: Exploring the Rise of Motivation Strategies in the EFL Classroom

Students facing difficulties in learning English because of a range of factors and issues are often demotivated to learn. This has a direct impact on the entire learning process. Research into motivation in the EFL classroom has discovered that certain strategies can encourage learners to think more positively and thus be more motivated in their language learning process. This paper critically discusses types of motivation strategies in the EFL classroom and their increase in popularity. Following this, it critically considers ways in which motivation strategies are still lacking and hence presents some approaches to better promote these from the perspective of students, teachers and policy makers. Along with providing specific recommendations for further research on L2 motivation, the paper concludes by calling on for adopting a range of motivational strategies that can improve student foreign language learning.</p

Social and Cultural Focus in EFL Learning. Does Understanding Target Language Culture Increase Interaction in the EFL Classroom?

The value of encouraging interaction in the EFL classroom has been well documented in the literature and numerous methods have been indicated as being beneficial in this respect. Similarly, there is also a growing recognition of the value of incorporating social and cultural learning about the target language and its speakers into the EFL curriculum. In line with Vygotsky’s view that learning is social construction that occurs when individual integrate and participate in activities and knowledge sharing, this would suggest that incorporating cultural and social learning into the language learning classroom can increase the integration of students. Drawing on definitions of culture, highlighting potential routes to providing information about target language culture and identifying the connections between cultural knowledge and language proficiency and communicative competence, the perspective is put forward that social and cultural learning can lead to increased integration in the EFL classroom

The Impact of Students’ Proficiency in English on Science Courses in a Foundation Year Program

English plays a crucial role in determining a student’s academic success and career path in Saudi Arabia. This is one of the reasons why Saudi universities offer mandatory foundation year programs to university entrants. The assumption is that if a student has high proficiency levels in the English language, the student will be able to meet the challenges and demands of other science courses that are taught in the English language in the first-year program as well as the subsequent bachelor's programs. In order to prepare students for academic success, the tendency at most Saudi universities is to use international, mostly US or UK, publishers to provide the resources for its curriculum which is based on the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR) as a standard for designating language ability. This study investigates the relationship between university students’ English language levels and their performance in science courses in a foundation year program at a Saudi university. Using Oxford University’s Q: Skills Placement Test, quantitative data is used to establish the students’ language levels according to the internationally accepted CEFR scales. The scores were then correlated with students’ overall averages in the science courses. Data was gathered over a period of five academic years and statistical analyses were conducted using Pearson’s Correlation Coefficient formula and scatter plots. The findings and conclusions have fundamental implications for curriculum designers at universities in Saudi Arabia as well as institutions of higher education in the Middle East and the Arab world

Representation of Culture in EFL Textbooks and Learners’ Preference

This research represents the importance of culture in English as Foreign Language (EFL) Textbooks and learners' preference in the English classrooms. The study analyzes the cultural representation in three types of culture: source, target, and international of English as a foreign language (EFL) textbooks used in English classrooms at public universities in Saudi Arabia. Through the method of content analysis, it was discovered that a cultural representation balance was not maintained, indeed, as the contents were skewed toward target culture representation. Analyses of the study data, including a survey taken by EFL learners (N= 120), showed that source culture was the least interesting for these participants. The analyses also showed that skill development and target and international cultural training were prioritized by the study subjects. The findings of the current study suggest the need for thoroughness in developing rigorous frameworks for EFL textbooks' cultural integration, and for future experimental trials focusing on culture and foreign language research