The effect of using authentic materials on the spoken use of English verb tenses for English as a foreign language among Arab secondary school students in Malaysia

Many Arab learners in Malaysia, who are learning English as a foreign language (EFL), are struggling to use English language proficiently in conversations. The methodology used by the teachers is largely traditional in nature and they still use grammar translation method. This method failed to produce proficient Arabic learners in English, especially in speaking. Although some studies have been conducted on the use of authentic materials in teaching English to EFL learners, there is lack of research on the effects of using authentic materials among Arab EFL learners. Therefore, the present study aimed to examine the effect of using authentic materials on the spoken use of English verb tenses among Arab international secondary school students in Malaysia. The study also examined the ways native Arab speakers learn EFL, and the perceptions of Arab students and EFL teachers on the use of authentic materials. The present study adopted a quasi-experimental design in which the control group which consisted of 25 students was taught using the conventional method while the experimental group of 35 students was taught English using authentic materials. The four types of authentic materials that were used are films, videos, newspapers and photos during 18 hours of experimental teaching. A speaking pre-test, a post-test and structured interviews were conducted with both groups. The data were analysed quantitatively using two non-parametric tests, which are the Wilcoxon Signed-Rank test for checking whether the data samples were matched and the Mann-Whitney test for comparing any significant difference of the means of the post-test of both groups. Findings revealed that the majority of the Arab EFL learners, who learnt English at the international secondary school, learnt English through memorization. The teachers believed that authentic materials could help the students practice English in real life and the students were motivated in learning English. The findings showed that the experimental group performed better than the control group in using tenses in the post-test. It is concluded that the authentic materials could provide stimulating, and enriching learning experience among Arab EFL learners. The study contributed to the use of authentic materials particularly for grammar teaching in an EFL context. The EFL teachers would be able to facilitate EFL learners by improving their pedagogy in terms of creating more interesting, stimulating, interactive and engaging language learning activities

Attribute Selection Based on a Hybrid Approach for Improving Classification of Breast Cancer Recurrence

Background: A commonly occurring disease among women worldwide is breast cancer, the second deadliest form of cancer. However, death chances are remarkably reduced when the cancer is detected and prevented at an early stage. Materials and Methods: The main contribution of the current study is to propose a hybrid approach to attribute selection by combining the information gain method with the correlation method and to exploit the strengths of these methods for improving classification accuracy. The dataset has been obtained from the publicly open UCI machine learning repository. The dataset is used to classify the target class into breast cancer recurrence and non-recurrence. Classification algorithms Naïve Bayes, J48 Decision Tree, and Multi-Layer Perceptron were adopted for performing the accuracy of prediction. Results: The proposed hybrid approach has been combined with each classification model, improving the performance of each model through the reduction of lower-ranked attributes, due to their insignificant contribution and the possibility of misguiding the classifying algorithm. After selecting a set of upper-ranked attributes carefully, it has been found that the accuracy rate, RMSE, and computational costs have improved for all three algorithms. The J48 Decision Tree achieved a significant performance, and it obtained a relatively higher accuracy (75.87 %). Conclusions: It can be concluded that (Inv nodes, deg-malig, node-caps, tumor size, irradiat, and breast) are strong attributes in a dataset and (Age, breast-quad, and menopause) are weak attributes. As noted, the implementation of the hybrid approach improved the accuracy of all classifiers

Optical Investigations of CdSe1-x Tex Thin Films

The alloys of CdSe1-xTex compound have been prepared from their elements successfully with high purity (99.9999%) which mixed stoichiometry ratio (x=0.0, 0.25, 0.5, 0.75 and 1.0) of (Cd, Se and Te) elements. Films of CdSe1-xTex alloys for different values of composition with thickness(0.5?m) have been prepared by thermal evaporation method at cleaned glass substrates which heated at (473K) under very low pressure (4×10-5mbar) at rate of deposition (3A?/s), after that thin films have been heat treated under low pressure (10-2mbar) at (523K) for two hours. The optical studies revealed that the absorption coefficient (?) is fairly high. It is found that the electronic transitions in the fundamental absorption edge tend to be allowed direct transition. It was also found that the optical energy gap vary non-linearly with composition (x) and have a minimum value at x=0.5 and increases after heat treatment. It is found that the optical constants vary non-linearly with composition, and the behavior inverse at x=0.5, and affected by heat treatment. The behavior of ?1 is similar to the behavior of n, while the behavior of ?2 is similar to the behavior of k

Present status of pen and cage culture of finfishes in Southeast Asia

Cage and pen culture practices in certain Southeast Asian countries viz. India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam and Philippines have been reviewed in this paper The various methods adnpted and materials used in the design and construction of cages and pens and the different species of fishes cultured in these two systems are discussed. The possibilities for adopting pen and cage culture practices for fish production in !ndia are also indicate

Different types of agroforestry system in Nintavur area

Agroforestry combines agricultural and forestry technologies to create more diverse, productive, profitable, healthy and sustainable land-use systems. The Agroforestry Program has generated much information about tree integration on farms. Knowledge, careful selection of species and good management of trees and crops are needed to optimize the production and positive effects within the system and to minimize negative competitive effects. In research area Alley Cropping and Home garden systems are practicing. When farmers practicing this method they are facing many problems because research area is very remote area therefore poverty is a main obstacle for improving their farming system and no adequate technologies. Government helps this area people to improve their home garden system through Thivi Neguma project. Agroforestry has an important role to play in the research area both for food and wood security and the conservation of the environment. The programme can‘t do it alone due to limited financial, human and other resources. There are no adequate techniques in gardening system they want to improve sustainable farming system. Thirty families‘ information have been taken for research and thirty farmers have been selected randomly for interview and field observation method also used for this research. Through the research brought out what are the problems they are facing, and in future what type of techniques they have to use to improve the agroforestry gardening system

A new species of Argulus (Brachiura) from a marine fish Psammoperca waigiensis (Cuvier)

A specimen of ArguluJ taken from the body surface of the marine perch Psammo- perca waigiensis (Cuvier) caught from the Palk Bay near Mandapam has been found to be a new species, and its description is given here. Species and subspecies of the genus Argulus Milller so far recorded from India are A. indieus Weber, A. gigan- teus Ramakrishna, A. bengalen.ri.r Ramakrishna, A. siameni-is Wilson, A. siamensis penin.rulari.r Ramakrishna and A. puthenvelien.ri.r Ramakrishna (see Ramakrishna, 1951, 1962 ) . The postembryonic development of A. puthenvelien.ri.r has been dealt with by Thomas (1961). Thomas & Devaraj (in press) have described two new species, namely A. fluviatili.r and A. cauveriensis collected from the river Cauvery

ROS-Based Multi-Agent Systems COntrol Simulation Testbed (MASCOT)

This paper presents a simulation testbed developed for testing and demonstration of decentralized control algorithms designed for multi-agent systems. Aimed at bridging a gap between theory and practical deployment of such algorithms, this testbed provides a simulator with multi-agent systems having quadcopter agents. It is used to test the control algorithms designed assuming simple agent dynamics like a single or double integrator. This is based on the fact that under certain assumptions, quadcopter dynamics can be modeled as a double integrator system. A gazebo simulator with a physics engine as ODE (Open Dynamics Engine) is used for simulating the dynamics of the quadcopter. Robot Operating System is used to develop communication networks and motion control algorithms for the different agents in the simulation testbed. The performance of the test bed is analyzed by implementing linear control laws such as position control, leaderless consensus, leader-follower consensus, and non-linear control law for min-max time consensus. This work is published as an open-source ROS package under MIT license at https://github.com/Avi241/mascot. A docker image is also developed for easy setup of the system.Comment: Accepted at 8th Indian Control Conferenc

A high security and noise immunity of speech based on double chaotic masking

It is known that increasing the security of the information and reducing the noise effect through public channels are two of the main priorities in developing any communication system. In this article, an efficient, secure communication system with two levels of encryption has been applied to the speech signal. The suggested security approach was implemented by using two different stages of chaotic masking on the signal; one masking was conducted by using Lorenz system and the other masking was built by using Rӧssler chaotic flow system. The main goal of developing this two-chaotic masking approach is to increase the key space and the security of the information. Also, an immunity technique has been implemented in the suggested approach to reduce the noise effect. For practical application purposes, this system was tested with additive white gaussian noise (AWGN) channel. The simulation results show that the quality of reconstructed speech signal is changeable according to the used signal to noise ratio (SNR); therefore, a proposed technique based on digital processing method (DPM) was applied to the first masked signal by converting the sampled data from the analog to the binary format. The simulation results show that an 22 dB (SNR) is sufficient to recover the speech signal with minimum noise by using the suggested approach

Object tracking using motion flow projection for pan-tilt configuration

We propose a new object tracking model for two degrees of freedom mechanism. Our model uses a reverse projection from a camera plane to a world plane. Here, the model takes advantage of optic flow technique by re-projecting the flow vectors from the image space into world space. A pan-tilt (PT) mounting system is used to verify the performance of our model and maintain the tracked object within a region of interest (ROI). This system contains two servo motors to enable a webcam rotating along PT axes. The PT rotation angles are estimated based on a rigid transformation of the the optic flow vectors in which an idealized translation matrix followed by two rotational matrices around PT axes are used. Our model was tested and evaluated using different objects with different motions. The results reveal that our model can keep the target object within a certain region in the camera view