Freshman English Seminar Class Goals: A portfolio approach

研究ノー

The Complexity of Brokering Teacher Classroom-language

研究ノー

Life-long English learning: How lexis-based instruction and use of corpora can help

研究ノー

A Critical Review of Swain and Hammond

The motivations and outcomes of studying for part-time mature students in higher education (Swain and Hammond, 2011) is an interesting article because it lays out clearly and succinctly its background, aims, purposes and results in a clear and readable way. However, according to the judgement criteria contained in the Open University Course Educational Enquiry, it has failings both in laying out its stance toward the focus of its investigation and in the clarity of the way it treats the notion of ethical treatment of research participants. The purpose of this research is to give an example of how to critically appraise the quality of scholarly work in the field of educational enquiry with the further aim of giving the reader insight into the key terms of transparency, relevancy and validity. This research has two main parts. Part one contains a discussion of important terminology used in educational enquiry, while part two contains an appraisal of how well the research done by Swain and Hammond (2011) is transparent, relevant and valid

Implementing Communicative Language Teaching: A Case Study of English Language Teaching Reform in a Japanese Science University

This thesis considers an example of English language teaching (ELT) reform in the context of internationalisation at Noda campus, Tokyo University of Science, Japan. Research questions not only enquire into institutional policy, but also teacher beliefs, attitudes and perceptions about a greater use of communicative language teaching activities and how these notions play out in examples of teaching practice. I take an interpretive stance to the enquiry and conduct a qualitative case study. As a participant in the research context, I am able to gain insight into the wider social processes of a purposely chosen group of seven Japanese English teachers. I employ Wolcott's (2008) notion of an ethnographic perspective on data gathering with 1) institutional documents regarding ELT reform and other ethnographic material, 2) field notes taken during classroom observations; and, 3) a theme analysis of semi-structured interview transcripts. Findings suggest there has been a move towards 1) the implementation of communicative language teaching activities with a large increase in the number of oral English courses, 2) a more student-centred approach; and, 3) the introduction of oral communication activities on a trial-and-error basis. I contend that findings are relevant to educational theory in illuminating the extent to which perceived negative attitudes towards ELT reform may be mitigated through constructive engagement. Moreover, in terms of educational practice, the study of participants’ apparent attitudes and beliefs may be analogous to other groups of teachers engaging with foreign language education reforms. The thesis concludes by recommending future investigation into educational contexts viewed as inter-related systems (Larsen-Freeman and Cameron, 2008). Such future investigations will focus on the constant mutual restructuring of teaching policy, theory and practice (Johnson, 2008). This type of research will provide insight into how educators mediate national and institutional policy initiatives in order that they be suitable for local contexts

A Multi-Dimensional Trust Model for Heterogeneous Contract Observations

In this paper we develop a novel probabilistic model of computational trust that allows agents to exchange and combine reputation reports over heterogeneous, correlated multi-dimensional contracts. We consider the specific case of an agent attempting to procure a bundle of services that are subject to correlated quality of service failures (e.g. due to use of shared resources or infrastructure), and where the direct experience of other agents within the system consists of contracts over different combinations of these services. To this end, we present a formalism based on the Kalman filter that represents trust as a vector estimate of the probability that each service will be successfully delivered, and a covariance matrix that describes the uncertainty and correlations between these probabilities. We describe how the agents’ direct experiences of contract outcomes can be represented and combined within this formalism, and we empirically demonstrate that our formalism provides significantly better trustworthiness estimates than the alternative of using separate single-dimensional trust models for each separate service (where information regarding the correlations between each estimate is lost)

Creation, Verification, and Validation of a Panel Code for the Analysis of Ship Propellers in a Steady, Uniform Wake

This report describes the governing equation and boundary conditions for a marine propeller operating in a uniform flow field of inviscid and irrotational fluid. A method is presented by which the velocity and pressure on the blade surface of the propeller can be numerically simulated, using hyperboloidal, constant strength source and doublet panels. Accuracy of the numerical method is verified through comparison with analytically known results and the ability of the numerical simulation to predict the thrust and torque on a propeller in open water is assessed through comparison with published experimental results. The thrust and torque results for the propeller are near the experimental measurements but do not converge to a common value as the panel size decreases