THE EFFECTS OF THINK-ALOUD STRATEGY ON EFL YOUNG LEARNERS’ READING SKILL PRACTICE

Think-aloud is described as a strategy in which students verbalize their thoughts while they read. This strategy is used to help students monitor their own thinking and comprehend the text. This current study aimed to examine the effects of the think-aloud strategy on EFL young learners’ reading skill practice and identify their attitudes towards the think-aloud strategy used by the teacher in teaching at a foreign language center in Can Tho city (Southern Vietnam’s Mekong Delta region). This study was experimental research using both quantitative and qualitative approaches. The quantitative approach was used to investigate the effects of the think-aloud strategy on young learners’ reading skill practice while the qualitative data was collected to understand the young learners’ attitudes towards the use of the think-aloud strategy in teaching and learning reading skills. Pre-test, post-test, and semi-structured interviews were used to collect the data. The study was conducted with one group of participants. The participants included 25 students who were at the age of 10-12 years old. The results from the pre-test and post-test showed that there was a significant difference in the students‘ reading comprehension performance after the intervention. Thus, the think-aloud strategy has a great impact on the improvement of students’ reading comprehension. Besides, there was no difference in reading comprehension achievement between males and females before and after the treatment. Especially, the results from the semi-structured interview revealed that all students had positive attitudes towards the think-aloud strategy.  Article visualizations

Plastic Goes Concrete: Plasticnic and Plasticpoems , Two Animated Poetry Videos about Plastic Pollution

The author describes the creation of two short animated video poems about plastic pollution that originated in concrete/visual poems. Plasticnic is a humorous and colourful narrated video based on a shaped poem depicting how we enjoy nature while simultaneously harming it through plastic consumption. Plasticpoems is a text-based, unnarrated animated video poem about plastic pollution based on two shaped/visual/concrete poems

Reproductive biology of sagor catfish (Hexanematichthys sagor Hamilton, 1822) in Can Gio water, Vietnam

835-840Sagor catfish (Hexanematichthys sagor Hamilton, 1822) is one of the most popular fish caught in Can Gio reserve biosphere. A study on reproductive biology was conducted to evaluate the reproductive parameters, including male–female distinction, gonadal development stages, sex ratio, spawning season, fecundity, and size at first sexual maturity. The results showed that the number of males and females in the nature was not significantly different. Male and female fish can be distinguished when they reach the mature size. Gonadal of the fish pass through five stages of maturation. The histological screening of gonad, percentage of maturation stage and gonadal somatic index value of the fish showed all year round spawning with a peak of spawning female from March to August. The length at first sexual maturity of the fish is 25.39 cm. Fecundity ranged from 60 to 145 ovaries/individuals strongly related to weight and length. The current findings provide the scientific foundation for the purpose of fishery resource management and artificial breeding of the blue sagor catfish

A Robust and Low Complexity Deep Learning Model for Remote Sensing Image Classification

In this paper, we present a robust and low complexity deep learning model for Remote Sensing Image Classification (RSIC), the task of identifying the scene of a remote sensing image. In particular, we firstly evaluate different low complexity and benchmark deep neural networks: MobileNetV1, MobileNetV2, NASNetMobile, and EfficientNetB0, which present the number of trainable parameters lower than 5 Million (M). After indicating best network architecture, we further improve the network performance by applying attention schemes to multiple feature maps extracted from middle layers of the network. To deal with the issue of increasing the model footprint as using attention schemes, we apply the quantization technique to satisfies the number trainable parameter of the model lower than 5 M. By conducting extensive experiments on the benchmark datasets NWPU-RESISC45, we achieve a robust and low-complexity model, which is very competitive to the state-of-the-art systems and potential for real-life applications on edge devices.Comment: 8 page

Production and processing of canna vermicelli in Hung Yen province toward sustainable development

Located in the Red River Delta region, Hung Yen province has 923000 ha of total land area, of which agricultural land area occupied 60.67%. The agricultural land area per labor is 0.1 ha. However, it has been annually decreasing due to the development of industrial zone, construction of urban zone, expansion of road… For these reasons, the stainable development for production and processing of agricultural products plays a very important role in job creation for farmers who loosed their own agricultural land, avoidance of quantity and quality loosing of raw agricultural products and increase in economic efficiency of agricultural production and processing. The production and processing of canna are traditional jobs of rural households in Hung Yen. They not only have been creating jobs for rural households but also increasing in their income. Beside the social and economic benefit created by these activities, the processing activity has caused many negative consequences. It led to environmental pollution due to its waste, overuse of chemical substances. Desiccated of vermicelli in bad condition resulted in the unsafe food. Therefore, this study is conducted to deeply investigate both positive effects and negative consequences created by production and processing of canna vermicelli in term of economic, social and environmental aspects. This study concentrates on the farm households; discuss advantages and disadvantages of production inputs, processing techniques and output market of their products from arrowroot to vermicelli; and find out solutions for the sustainable development for production and processing of vermicelli

First occurrence of the little-known genus Noteriades (Hymenoptera, Megachilidae) from Vietnam: discovery of a new species and a key to the Southeast Asian fauna

The little-known megachiline genus Noteriades Cockerell, 1931 is recorded from Vietnam for the first time. A new species, Noteriades hangkia Tran, Engel & Nguyen sp. nov. is described and figured based on a series of females collected from the provinces of the northern and central highlands of Vietnam. The genus is briefly discussed and a new subtribe is established, Noteriadina Engel, Tran & Nguyen subtrib. nov. of Megachilini. Lastly, an identification key and distribution map are provided for those species occurring in Southeast Asia