Orature: The Political Interpretation of Performance Framework in \u3cem\u3eAnthills of the Savannah\u3c/em\u3e and \u3cem\u3eHalf of a Yellow Sun\u3c/em\u3e

The focus of discussion in this paper lies in a perception that orature of African written literature is not innocent but a form of control. Operated through its performance framework, the concept of orature provides an angle to observe how African oral tradition penetrates written literature and cultivates an awareness of the political nature both of the material to be written and of the writing process itself. This paper explores the performance framework in two African novels — Achebe’s Anthills of the Savannah and Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun. Through such key concepts as event, narrative and self-reflexivity in performance theory, readers can perceive how the spatiotemporal dimension and audience-performer relationship are manipulated and how the four realms of African orature are reflected in these two novels and thereby help decipher their specific political connotations. Achebe and Adichie’s writing practices have indeed created a new purpose for orature in Nigerian literature

Anti-proliferation effect of Scutellaria barbata D. Don extract on lung cancer

Purpose: To investigate the effect of Scutellaria barbata D. Don extract (SBDE) on apoptosis and proliferation in A549 human lung cancer cells. Methods: Inverted microscope was used to observe morphological changes in A549 cells after exposure to SBDE. Trypan blue staining of living cells was applied to construct cell growth curve after treatment with varying concentrations of SBDE. The influence of SBDE on cell proliferation, apoptosis and cell cycle was determined by MTT assay while protein expressions of key apoptosis-related enzymes were evaluated by immuno-cytochemical method. Results: SBDE inhibited the growth of A549 lung cancer cells at a concentration range of 20 - 160 μg/mL. Flow cytometry showed that SBDE induced apoptosis in the A549 cells. The proportion of cells in G0/G1-phase increased significantly (p < 0.01), while the proportion of cells in S-phase and G2/Mphase decreased correspondingly, indicating that the cells were in G0/G1-phase arrest. Cell cycle arrest and apoptosis-inducing effect gradually increased with increase in SBDE concentration. With increasing concentrations of SBDE, there were significant increases in the expressions of caspase-3 (p < 0.05), caspase-8 (p < 0.01) and caspase-9 (p < 0.05), and significant decreases in Ki-67 (p < 0.01) and p21 ras protein (p < 0.01). Conclusion: SBDE exerts significant inhibitory effect on the proliferation of A549 lung cancer cells, which can be developed for the treatment of lung cancer patients

Story as a Vehicle to Promote EFL Learners’ English

With the increase of the interest in foreign language teaching at early stages over the last few years in China, more and more researchers and teachers devote to teaching English to young learners. They try to find out the most effective way or approach to teach English to young learners and English story teaching is one of them. The paper reviews previous research on English story as a vehicle to promote young learners English as a foreign language in China and the supply with the criteria of selecting a story for young English learner

An Empirical Study of Using Stories to Promote Learners’ Motivation Towards English

Stories are often used in English teaching. The present case study intends to explore how English story learning and teaching promotes learners’ motivation towards English and English learning. Five students were involved in this case study. The participants learnt 10 short stories in 9 months. Data was collected through interviews and classroom observations. The analysis shows that all the participants have more motives in English learning after the English story teaching practice. The participants only had an instrumental or no motivation in English learning at the beginning of the study and one or two more types of motivation had been found by the end of the teaching practice

Semantics and Vocabulary Acquisition and Teaching

Vocabulary teaching is an important and difficult part of language acquisition and teaching, The appearance of different semantic theories has helped people to know the words better than ever before and thus are put forward to the words acquisition and learning. This paper introduces the semantic feature, prototype theory, relational models, semantic space across languages and schema semantics and their application in vocabulary acquisition and teaching. The paper also gives a description of general vocabulary learning and learner strategies and vocabulary pedagogy and teaching strategies

Supervised cross-modal factor analysis for multiple modal data classification

In this paper we study the problem of learning from multiple modal data for purpose of document classification. In this problem, each document is composed two different modals of data, i.e., an image and a text. Cross-modal factor analysis (CFA) has been proposed to project the two different modals of data to a shared data space, so that the classification of a image or a text can be performed directly in this space. A disadvantage of CFA is that it has ignored the supervision information. In this paper, we improve CFA by incorporating the supervision information to represent and classify both image and text modals of documents. We project both image and text data to a shared data space by factor analysis, and then train a class label predictor in the shared space to use the class label information. The factor analysis parameter and the predictor parameter are learned jointly by solving one single objective function. With this objective function, we minimize the distance between the projections of image and text of the same document, and the classification error of the projection measured by hinge loss function. The objective function is optimized by an alternate optimization strategy in an iterative algorithm. Experiments in two different multiple modal document data sets show the advantage of the proposed algorithm over other CFA methods