“It’s never too late”: A Narrative Inquiry of Older Polish Adults’ English Language Learning Experiences

Globally, the number of adults aged over 50 is increasing and this group is becoming more active in second language (L2) learning. Despite these demographic changes, little research has focused on the issues faced by older learners. They are either omitted from research studies or viewed as part of a homogenous group of adult learners. Several assumptions appear to exist about this group, for example, that they are too old to learn, or they are likely to have memory problems. These assumptions can impact the pedagogical approach taken by language instructors. This study aims to supplement existing research by exploring the L2 learning experiences of a group of Polish learners of English aged 55 to 68. We conducted a series of interviews using a narrative inquiry approach to uncover the participants’ L2 learning stories in order to understand their aims, challenges and aspirations. Our findings suggest that older adults can be highly motivated and aware of the challenges they face, but also eager to overcome them. This study emphasises that older learners are a neglected group within the field of second language acquisition (SLA) and pedagogical adjustments are needed to meet their learning needs

University language teachers’ contextually dependent uses of instrumental emotion regulation

Emotion regulation is increasingly positioned as a skill that is developed ontogenetically across careers as language teachers come to recognise the impact that their emotional behaviour has on themselves and their classrooms. While recent research has attended to the connection between a teacher's regulation strategy choices and well-being, a broad view that recognises the full impact of emotion regulation actions on language teacher and student outcomes in highly contextualised circumstances is urgently needed. Adopting the position that emotion regulation is a motivated activity employed to achieve dynamic, contextually relevant goals, this study investigates the instrumental emotion regulation of 15 experienced non-Japanese EFL teachers at a university in Japan. Drawing on a corpus of 300,000 words obtained from 45 interviews and stimulated recall sessions, findings analysed through a complexity-informed approach demonstrate how emotion regulation strategies were employed to achieve a range of instrumental outcomes pertaining to identity projection, behavioural management, content engagement, and relational development. The data further illustrates that this emotion regulation was contextually dependent, informed by macro-level and internal factors, and that the participants' motive and strategy choices had a direct impact on their well-being.</p

Establishing Aboriginal health research priorities in Victoria

The Victorian Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Organisation (VACCHO) conducted a research project to find out the impact of social determinants such as education, employment, income, racism and housing on the health and wellbeing of Aboriginal peoples. Forums and workshops were conducted to establish future research outcomes and priorities. The project will help in developing localised and community-oriented solutions to Aboriginal health issues

The 2014 TeV γ-Ray Flare of Mrk 501 Seen with H.E.S.S.: Temporal and Spectral Constraints on Lorentz Invariance Violation

The blazar Mrk 501 (z = 0.034) was observed at very-high-energy (VHE, E ≳ 100 GeV) gamma-ray wavelengths during a bright flare on the night of 2014 June 23-24 (MJD 56832) with the H.E.S.S. phase-II array of Cherenkov telescopes. Data taken that night by H.E.S.S. at large zenith angle reveal an exceptional number of gamma-ray photons at multi-TeV energies, with rapid flux variability and an energy coverage extending significantly up to 20 TeV. This data set is used to constrain Lorentz invariance violation (LIV) using two independent channels: a temporal approach considers the possibility of an energy dependence in the arrival time of gamma-rays, whereas a spectral approach considers the possibility of modifications to the interaction of VHE gamma-rays with extragalactic background light (EBL) photons. The non-detection of energy-dependent time delays and the non-observation of deviations between the measured spectrum and that of a supposed power-law intrinsic spectrum with standard EBL attenuation are used independently to derive strong constraints on the energy scale of LIV (E QG) in the subluminal scenario for linear and quadratic perturbations in the dispersion relation of photons. For the case of linear perturbations, the 95% confidence level limits obtained are E QG,1 > 3.6 ×1017 GeV using the temporal approach and E QG,1 > 2.6 ×1019 GeV using the spectral approach. For the case of quadratic perturbations, the limits obtained are E QG,2 > 8.5 ×1010 GeV using the temporal approach and E QG,2 > 7.8 ×1011 GeV using the spectral approach