English as a Basic Requirement for 21st Century Citizens: A Critical Discourse Analysis of English Language Education policy in China

The effect of globalization and the global spread of English have created a significant demand for English all over the world In China English is promoted for its value in socioeconomic development of the nation to cope with globalization The demand of English is illustrated in the introduction of English as a basic requirement for 21stcentury citizens and early English instruction This paper adopts a Critical Discourse Analysis approach to look into a policy document written by the Ministry of Education MoE in China It is concluded that MoE s endorsement of the discourses of globalisation and national development followed by their adoption of enhanced English policies fails to pay sufficient attention to resources and policy implementation issues The result is that the implementation efforts are haphazard and do not lead to the expected increase in proficiency leve

English language education policy in China : a CDA and ethnographic study

IPhD ThesisDespite the growing stream of literature about English language education in China, there has been relatively little discussion of primary English language education. Past research has focused almost exclusively on secondary and tertiary English education. This research seeks to address this gap by examining primary English education policy. More specifically, this research provides insights into the extent to which each instance of language policy and planning can be seen as a product of its specific context. This thesis is based on an ethnographic study conducted in local education bureaus and three primary schools in Yulin, a Northwestern Chinese city with 3 million people. Drawing on critical discourse analysis (CDA) of political discourse(s), ethnographic field notes, questionnaires, interviews and classroom observation, this study investigates the influence of macro and micro levels of policy actors in disseminating and implementing the language policy. It also evaluates the apparent match and mismatch between macro policy and micro levels of practice within the local language policy and planning context. As such, I offer a lens for studying primary English education policy in China. The combination of critical discourse analysis (CDA) and ethnography represents a methodological contribution of this research and is used as a way of seeing if there are gaps between policy and practice; and, if so, what kind(s)? Thus, the main contribution of this study to the literature on language education policy is a framework for analyzing the interaction between policy and practice. This framework combines CDA and ethnography. CDA is used to try and identify underlying ideology and power relations in politically determined educational discourse, whereas the ethnographic part of the study is used to examine and interpret the implementation of policy among local education officials and teachers. Additionally, this research extends the current literature on English education policy by identifying that a lack of communication between macro and micro policy actors is a significant reason behind poor English language education quality. On the surface, local officials and teachers follow the instructions in the political discourse, due to a somewhat rigid hierarchical structure of Chinese society. In some aspects, though, local officials and teachers might veer away from, abandon or even change policy consciously or unconsciously in their daily routines and classes. Importantly, the findings presented in this thesis try to bridge the research on language education policy and teaching and content and methods

Blessing from Experts: Super Reinforcement Learning in Confounded Environments

We introduce super reinforcement learning in the batch setting, which takes the observed action as input for enhanced policy learning. In the presence of unmeasured confounders, the recommendations from human experts recorded in the observed data allow us to recover certain unobserved information. Including this information in the policy search, the proposed super reinforcement learning will yield a super-policy that is guaranteed to outperform both the standard optimal policy and the behavior one (e.g., the expert's recommendation). Furthermore, to address the issue of unmeasured confounding in finding super-policies, a number of non-parametric identification results are established. Finally, we develop two super-policy learning algorithms and derive their corresponding finite-sample regret guarantees

The influence of online opinion leaders on the purchase intention of Chinese university students

The aim of this study is to examine the influence of online opinion leaders on the purchase intention of Chinese university students in the context of social media marketing based on the technical acceptance model. A literature review is conducted that focuses on consumer decision-making models and the characteristics of online opinion leaders. To identify the impact of the independent variable on purchase intention (both with and without the existence of other variables), Pearson correlation coefficient analysis and multiple regression analysis are used. The findings suggest that, for online opinion leaders,their interactivity, personality strength, and homogeneity have a positive impact on the purchase intention of Chinese university students through perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use. Moreover, perceived ease of use plays a partly mediating role between perceived usefulness and the characteristics of online opinion leaders; however, this role is not significant. The study concludes by considering the implications for the findings, taking into consideration the specific attributes to Chinese social media marketing

Parameter Optimization for Preparing Carbon Fiber/Epoxy Composites by Selective Laser Sintering

Carbon fiber (CF) reinforced thermosetting resin composites offer a wide range of high performance features including excellent strength, modulus and thermal resistance and light weight. Consequently, they are increasingly demanded by aerospace and automotive industries due to the tighter requirements of the transport vehicles for lightweight as well as higher payloads. Although thermoplastics and their composites have been widely used in additive manufacturing (AM), to date it is difficult to manufacture carbon fibers reinforced thermosetting composite parts via AM technologies. Therefore, this study developed a novel method based on selective laser sintering (SLS) to fabricate high-performance carbon fiber/epoxy resin composites. The response surface method was employed to study the processing parameters affecting the quality of final parts, and an optimized processing condition was obtained.Mechanical Engineerin

Prompt-Free Diffusion: Taking "Text" out of Text-to-Image Diffusion Models

Text-to-image (T2I) research has grown explosively in the past year, owing to the large-scale pre-trained diffusion models and many emerging personalization and editing approaches. Yet, one pain point persists: the text prompt engineering, and searching high-quality text prompts for customized results is more art than science. Moreover, as commonly argued: "an image is worth a thousand words" - the attempt to describe a desired image with texts often ends up being ambiguous and cannot comprehensively cover delicate visual details, hence necessitating more additional controls from the visual domain. In this paper, we take a bold step forward: taking "Text" out of a pre-trained T2I diffusion model, to reduce the burdensome prompt engineering efforts for users. Our proposed framework, Prompt-Free Diffusion, relies on only visual inputs to generate new images: it takes a reference image as "context", an optional image structural conditioning, and an initial noise, with absolutely no text prompt. The core architecture behind the scene is Semantic Context Encoder (SeeCoder), substituting the commonly used CLIP-based or LLM-based text encoder. The reusability of SeeCoder also makes it a convenient drop-in component: one can also pre-train a SeeCoder in one T2I model and reuse it for another. Through extensive experiments, Prompt-Free Diffusion is experimentally found to (i) outperform prior exemplar-based image synthesis approaches; (ii) perform on par with state-of-the-art T2I models using prompts following the best practice; and (iii) be naturally extensible to other downstream applications such as anime figure generation and virtual try-on, with promising quality. Our code and models are open-sourced at https://github.com/SHI-Labs/Prompt-Free-Diffusion.Comment: Code, models and demos can be found through: https://github.com/SHI-Labs/Prompt-Free-Diffusio