Discovering Emerging Research in a Qualitative Study of ESL Academic Writing

This article focuses on the complexities of the qualitative methodology employed in my doctoral study of the academic writing experiences and perceptions of Chinese graduate students in sciences and engineering at the University of British Columbia. In particular, I explain the emerging nature of the study by relating how and why I repeatedly revised the research questions, modified the research locations, re-selected the participants, adjusted the data collection methods, and amended the data analysis coding system. The study concludes that research designs should be elastic to accommodate the dynamic and emerging nature of qualitative studies

Faculty Perceptions of Chinese Graduate Students’ Communication Challenges in the Science and Engineering Disciplines

This paper reports the findings of in-depth interviews with six science and engineering faculty members at a major Canadian university regarding their experiences with and perceptions of Mainland Chinese ESL graduate students’ challenges in using English in the disciplines. Results suggest great cultural and linguistic challenges of the students; however, helpful guidance and interactive feedback-based conferencing could lead to student progress. Nevertheless, the faculty longed for English and technical writing courses for ESL graduate students. The faculty did not perceive plagiarism to be a major issue among Chinese ESL graduate students and adopted an educational approach toward sporadic inappropriate textual borrowing. Cet article expose les résultats obtenus lors d’entrevues avec six professeurs de science et d’ingénierie dans une université canadienne. Les entrevues se centraient sur leurs expériences et leurs perceptions sur les étudiants chinois de troisième cycle et les défis que ces derniers rencontraient en utilisant l’anglais dans les différentes disciplines. Les résultats montrent en effet de gros défis linguistiques et culturels à surmonter mais qu’un service de conseils et d’aide interactive pourrait aider les étudiants à progresser. Le département a néanmoins choisi des cours d’écriture technique en anglais pour les étudiants de troisième cycle. Cependant, les professeurs ne perçoivent pas que le plagiat est un problème majeur chez les étudiants chinois en cours d’anglais et ont de ce fait adopté une approche éducative envers des emprunts textuels sporadiques inappropriés

Role of dendritic cells in the induction of regulatory T cells

Dendritic cells (DCs) play a key role in initiating immune responses and maintaining immune tolerance. In addition to playing a role in thymic selection, DCs play an active role in tolerance under steady state conditions through several mechanisms which are dependent on IL-10, TGF-β, retinoic acid, indoleamine-2,3,-dioxygenase along with vitamin D. Several of these mechanisms are employed by DCs in induction of regulatory T cells which are comprised of Tr1 regulatory T cells, natural and inducible foxp3+ regulatory T cells, Th3 regulatory T cells and double negative regulatory T cells. It appears that certain DC subsets are highly specialized in inducing regulatory T cell differentiation and in some tissues the local microenvironment plays a role in driving DCs towards a tolerogenic response. In this review we discuss the recent advances in our understanding of the mechanisms underlying DC driven regulatory T cell induction

Employer Perspectives on EAL Employee Writing Problems

In academic disciplines, content rather than writing accuracy is usually emphasized (Hyland, 2013), leaving many English-as-an-additional-language (EAL) students unmotivated to improve writing accuracy. However, the workplace may demand accurate and clear writing. Thus, Ferris (2002, 2011) calls for research into employers’ perspectives on inaccurate and unclear writing of EAL employees to help raise academic faculty and EAL student consciousness. To respond to Ferris\u27 call, this study investigated: 1) employers’ expectations regarding writing accuracy of EAL employees, 2) EAL employees’ language problems in work-related writing, and 3) the impact of writing problems on EAL employees’ employment and career opportunities. The study employed qualitative interviews with ten Canadian employers for data collection and a grounded theory approach for data analysis. Results indicated that the participants generally maintained the same writing standards for EAL and native-English-speaking (NES) employees. The study showed a disconnect between the academic and professional worlds regarding EAL writing standards

ESL Student Plagiarism Prevention Challengesand Institutional Interventions

Research has found unintentional plagiarism to be the most common type of university plagiarism, yet what underlies it is not adequately understood. Thus, our study examines ESL student perspectives on academic integrity challenges, especially unintentional plagiarism and university interventions. The study employed semi-structured individual qualitative interviews with 20 ESL students who had just completed an advanced EAP writing course at a Canadian university in the Winter semester of 2021. The course discussed plagiarism and the APA 7th edition extensively. One interview per participant was conducted online and the data were analyzed qualitatively. Research findings indicate that the predominant cause of the participants\u27 challenges was their lack of experience using citations before entering the university. The participants had written no formal essays or only opinion-based essays without source requirement. Therefore, the participants found the APA 7th edition hard to observe initially. They all found paraphrasing a challenge. A less serious one was to create a reference list of various types of sources in APA 7. Regarding assistance, the participants felt that the style templates and models were valuable, but, that even more, so were the interactive workshops at the semester’s start. Thus, a combination of resources, workshops, and teacher-facilitated practices, along with improved writing are expected to empower ESL students (Khoo, 2021)

Gene editing: A new step and a new direction toward finding a cure for Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD)

AbstractDuchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD) is a progressive muscle degenerative disease affecting one out of 3500 male births. Patients usually succumb to the disease by age 25. It has been shown that skipping exons of the DMD gene that contain disease-causing mutations from the pre-mRNA can result in a shortened, but functional, dystrophin protein that could bring clinical benefits to patients. A recent breakthrough has been reported in Science by three groups who demonstrated that genetically deleting exon 23 by gene editing can restore the expression of dystrophin (albeit a shortened version) and improve the muscle function in a mouse model of DMD

Biological Pathways Associated with Wild and Domestic Animals

Background: Zoonotic diseases are problematic, in that, they impact both wild and domestic animals alike. Thus, there is a need to investigate the genomes of wild and domestic. Gene ontology (GO) is a major bioinformatics initiative, whereby descriptions of gene products across the database are developed and unified to describe all species. This process is performed by biocurators, who gather, annotate, and validate information on the databases, consequently affording easy access to accurate and updated data. In this study, we investigated the biocuration of two biological processes, DNA integration, which is used for DNA coding, and the tricarboxylic acid (TCA) cycle that occurs in all aerobic organisms. The objective of this study was to compare the genomes of 271 mammals, birds, reptiles and some aquatic animals to determine the number of wild versus domesticated animals, where DNA integration and the TCA cycle have annotations. We hypothesized that there would be more annotations on domesticated animals than wild animals because of easier access to domesticated animal genomes. Methods: To test this hypothesis, we first accessed the National Center of Biotechnology Information (NCBI) to retrieve the taxonomy ID for 271 species of animals found in this study. Then the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI) database, QuickGO, was accessed to retrieve all annotations associated with the taxonomy ID of the species. Data was assembled into a wiki-database that is now publicly available online. Results and Conclusion: Data indicated that more annotations for DNA integration and the TCA cycle were 22% higher in domestic animals than in wild animals. Therefore, we propose that more biocuration needs to be done for wild animals. The number of wild animals’ sequences available are growing, but if they are not annotated, detailed investigations are not possible. If more resources are dedicated to the investigation of the genomes of wild animals, more work can be done to study the genetic factors affecting zoonotic diseases