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

Are Emojis Creating a New or Old Visual Language for New Generations? A Socio-semiotic Study

The increasing use of emojis, digital images that can represent a word or feeling in a text or email, and the fact that they can be strung together to create a sentence with real and full meaning raises the question of whether they are creating a new language amongst technologically savvy youth, or devaluing existing language.  There is however a further depth to emoji usage as language, suggesting that they are in fact returning language to an earlier stage of human communication. Parallels between emojis and hieroglyphs and cuneiform can be seen which indicates the universality of visual communication forms, rather than written alphabetised language.  There are also indications that emojis may be cultural or gender-specific with indications that women use more emojis than men to express their feelings and that age is less of an indicator of usage than technological awareness and capability.  It appears that emojis are filling the need for adding non-verbal cues in in digital communication about the intent and emotion behind a message.  Examinations of the way that emojis have developed and evolved and their current and forecast usage leads to the conclusion that they are not a “new” language developed by the technological adept younger generations, but instead are an evolution of older visual language systems that make use of digital technology to create greater layers and nuance in asynchronous communications.  Furthermore, emojis are devices for demonstrating tone, intent and feelings that would normally be conveyed by non-verbal cues in personal communications but which cannot be achieved in digital messages.  It is also evident from prior works and analyses of usage that there are universal meanings to Emojis.  This suggests that as a language form, emojis may be able to contribute to increased cross-cultural communication clarity.  Further research is however recognised as being necessary to fully understand the role that emojis can play as a visual language for all generations, not just those termed millennials or technologically savvy youths. Keywords: Emojis, socio-semiotic analysis, new language, old language, pictogram

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

Are Emojis Creating a New or Old Visual Language for New Generations? A Socio-semiotic Study

The increasing use of emojis, digital images that can represent a word or feeling in a text or email, and the fact that they can be strung together to create a sentence with real and full meaning raises the question of whether they are creating a new language amongst technologically savvy youth, or devaluing existing language. There is however a further depth to emoji usage as language, suggesting that they are in fact returning language to an earlier stage of human communication. Parallels between emojis and hieroglyphs and cuneiform can be seen which indicates the universality of visual communication forms, rather than written alphabetised language. There are also indications that emojis may be cultural or gender-specific with indications that women use more emojis than men to express their feelings and that age is less of an indicator of usage than technological awareness and capability. It appears that emojis are filling the need for adding non-verbal cues in in digital communication about the intent and emotion behind a message. Examinations of the way that emojis have developed and evolved and their current and forecast usage leads to the conclusion that they are not a “new” language developed by the technological adept younger generations, but instead are an evolution of older visual language systems that make use of digital technology to create greater layers and nuance in asynchronous communications. Furthermore, emojis are devices for demonstrating tone, intent and feelings that would normally be conveyed by non-verbal cues in personal communications but which cannot be achieved in digital messages. It is also evident from prior works and analyses of usage that there are universal meanings to Emojis. This suggests that as a language form, emojis may be able to contribute to increased cross-cultural communication clarity. Further research is however recognised as being necessary to fully understand the role that emojis can play as a visual language for all generations, not just those termed millennials or technologically savvy youths. Keywords: Emojis, socio-semiotic analysis, new language, old language, pictogram

Are Emojis Creating a New or Old Visual Language for New Generations? A Socio-semiotic Study

The increasing use of emojis, digital images that can represent a word or feeling in a text or email, and the fact that they can be strung together to create a sentence with real and full meaning raises the question of whether they are creating a new language amongst technologically savvy youth, or devaluing existing language.  There is however a further depth to emoji usage as language, suggesting that they are in fact returning language to an earlier stage of human communication. Parallels between emojis and hieroglyphs and cuneiform can be seen which indicates the universality of visual communication forms, rather than written alphabetised language.  There are also indications that emojis may be cultural or gender-specific with indications that women use more emojis than men to express their feelings and that age is less of an indicator of usage than technological awareness and capability.  It appears that emojis are filling the need for adding non-verbal cues in in digital communication about the intent and emotion behind a message.  Examinations of the way that emojis have developed and evolved and their current and forecast usage leads to the conclusion that they are not a “new” language developed by the technological adept younger generations, but instead are an evolution of older visual language systems that make use of digital technology to create greater layers and nuance in asynchronous communications.  Furthermore, emojis are devices for demonstrating tone, intent and feelings that would normally be conveyed by non-verbal cues in personal communications but which cannot be achieved in digital messages.  It is also evident from prior works and analyses of usage that there are universal meanings to Emojis.  This suggests that as a language form, emojis may be able to contribute to increased cross-cultural communication clarity.  Further research is however recognised as being necessary to fully understand the role that emojis can play as a visual language for all generations, not just those termed millennials or technologically savvy youths. Keywords: Emojis, socio-semiotic analysis, new language, old language, pictogram

Is Multilingualism a Problem? The Effects of Multilingualism at the Societal Level

This research paper aims at illuminating some of the effects that multilingualism and linguistic diversity might have at the societal level with regard to various attributes of social life. In doing so, a thematic review of previous research on the effects of multilingualism is carried out. Particular focus was paid here to a number of areas in which multilingualism can have specific and major effects on social life, e.g. education, economy, as well as employment and language policy. Following attempts to problematize the notion of multilingualism, the article concludes that language-related problems evident in multilingual societies appear to be largely attributable to (language and language education) policies implemented by governments concerned