The underlying factors of foreign language reading anxiety: Their effects on strategy use and orientation toward reading

Both positive and negative emotions have been the focus of a wealth of language learning research in recent years. This can mostly be attributed to the established links between an individual’s psychological responses, existing and emerging from learning, the learning processes they engage in, and the outcomes they achieve. A look at advanced research on language anxiety, a negative emotion that appears to be strongly involved in learning, has shown that specific information about reading anxiety is comparatively insufficient. This study, therefore, examines the underlying factors of reading anxiety in Korean university students, using the Foreign Language Reading Anxiety Scale. Subsequently, it explores how these anxiety factors are related to strategy use (i.e., metacognitive, cognitive, and support strategies) and orientation toward reading, which demonstrates a reader’s active involvement while reading. Three sub-factors of reading anxiety were found: anxiety experienced during the process of reading English, confidence in reading, and anxiety when reading English characters. Interestingly, confidence or positive emotion was found to be a far more powerful positive contributor to Korean EFL university readers’ use of metacognitive strategies and the degree of orientation to reading than was anxiety experienced while reading. Pedagogical implications are discussed

Nurturing Peace: United Nations Peacebuilding Operations in the Aftermath of Intrastate Conflicts, 1945-2002

After World War II, intrastate conflicts rapidly replaced interstate conflicts as the dominant threat to international peace and security, a trend that has become all the more evident in the post-Cold War era. Given the prevalence of civil wars, there is increasing awareness of the need for post-conflict settlement procedures, development of local capacity for conflict resolution, and long-term peacebuilding efforts. In his 1992 An Agenda for Peace, former UN Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali encouraged the international community to take responsibility for the full range of post-conflict management roles by introducing ?post-conflict peace-building.? Even though the term ?peacebuilding? did not exist prior to Boutros-Ghali?s 1992 An Agenda for Peace, the UN from its inception after World War II has engaged in various types of operations to maintain peace and to build local capacities for conflict resolution. In addition to the UN, a number of NGOs in the field of humanitarian relief and development, such as World Vision, Oxfam, Save the Children, CARE, Catholic Relief Services, and the International Committee of the Red Cross, have decisively responded with a resolution offering to support efforts toward peace in the aftermath of intrastate conflicts after 1945. The goal of this paper is to investigate theoretically and empirically the success of the UN and the NGOs in intrastate peacebuilding operations from 1945-2002. My empirical findings indicate that overall UN peacebulding operations contribute to promoting sustainable peace for war-torn societies. The findings also point out no statistical relationship between the efforts of the humanitarian NGOs and the duration of peace. A main reason might be that the NGOs primarily seek to relieve human sufferings rather than to remove the root causes of internal violence. For the 21st UN peace operations, this study offers several recommendations for an enhanced and strengthened UN

Experimental verification of the commutation relation for Pauli spin operators using single-photon quantum interference

We report experimental verification of the commutation relation for Pauli spin operators using quantum interference of the single-photon polarization state. By superposing the quantum operations $\sigma_z \sigma_x$ and $\sigma_x \sigma_z$ on a single-photon polarization state, we have experimentally implemented the commutator, $[\sigma_{z}, \sigma_{x}]$, and the anticommutator, $\{\sigma_{z}, \sigma_{x}\}$, and have demonstrated the relative phase factor of $\pi$ between $\sigma_z \sigma_x$ and $\sigma_x \sigma_z$ operations. The experimental quantum operation corresponding to the commutator, $[\sigma_{z}, \sigma_{x}]=k\sigma_y$, showed process fidelity of 0.94 compared to the ideal $\sigma_y$ operation and $|k|$ is determined to be $2.12\pm0.18$.Comment: 4pages, 3 figure

Realizing Physical Approximation of the Partial Transpose

The partial transpose by which a subsystem's quantum state is solely transposed is of unique importance in quantum information processing from both fundamental and practical point of view. In this work, we present a practical scheme to realize a physical approximation to the partial transpose using local measurements on individual quantum systems and classical communication. We then report its linear optical realization and show that the scheme works with no dependence on local basis of given quantum states. A proof-of-principle demonstration of entanglement detection using the physical approximation of the partial transpose is also reported.Comment: 5 pages with appendix, 3 figure

Highly-stretchable and water impermeable thermally-grown silicon dioxide thin film with wavy structures

To ensure chemical stability and long-term operation, organic electronic devices require encapsulation layer with low water vapor transmittance rate because organic components in organic electronic device are vulnerable to humidity. Encapsulation of commercialized OLEDs are rigid glass and epoxy resin, which are not suitable for flexible devices requiring high flexibility. TFE (thin-film encapsulation) technique has been studied for flexible device encapsulation. Amorphous materials are selected for TFE materials because they are dense and transparent and do not have fast diffusion paths like grain boundary. Thermally-grown silicon dioxide, oxidized from single crystal silicon substrate at high temperature, has ultra-low water vapor transmittance rate due to high density without pinholes and defects. However, the thermally-grown silicon dioxide thin films have a low elastic limit (\u3c 1%) and show brittle fracture alike typical amorphous materials. For that reasons, it is necessary to improve the mechanical properties of the thermally-grown silicon dioxide thin film for flexible encapsulation. In this study, we tried to improve the stretchability by applying the wavy structure to thermally-grown silicon dioxide and developed the wavy structure texturing of single crystal silicon substrate by using photo-lithography and various etching process. we fabricated a highly-stretchable wavy thermally-grown silicon dioxide TFE by oxidizing wavy textured crystalline silicon substrate. Also, we carried out cyclic tensile test of submicron scale wavy thermally-grown silicon dioxide films and defined the elastic limit, and the stretchability. And then, we analyze the enhancement of stretchability by finite element analysis on the wavy and flat thermally-grown silicon dioxide TFE and discussed about the correlation between the improvement of stretchability and wavy structure

Experimental Implementation of the Universal Transpose Operation

The universal transpose of quantum states is an anti-unitary transformation that is not allowed in quantum theory. In this work, we investigate approximating the universal transpose of quantum states of two-level systems (qubits) using the method known as the structural physical approximation to positive maps. We also report its experimental implementation in linear optics. The scheme is optimal in that the maximal fidelity is attained and also practical as measurement and preparation of quantum states that are experimentally feasible within current technologies are solely applied.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figure