A survey of Vietnamese EAP teacher’s beliefs about grammar teaching

Although it is now generally agreed that grammar should be an integral element of second language programmes, there is still a diversity of opinions about how it should be taught. In this paper, attention is first drawn to relevant issues raised in reviews of the teaching of grammar derived from SLA research and teacher cognition. This paper then reports a survey of Vietnamese teachers‟ attitudes towards grammar and grammar teaching in their own particular teaching contexts. It uses a questionnaire adapted from that used by in a 2002 survey of teachers of English for Academic Purposes (EAP) in British universities and in a 2008 parallel survey of EAP teachers in New Zealand. The findings of the present study indicate that, like the teachers reported in the 2002 and 2008 studies, EAP teachers in Vietnam appreciate the centrality of grammar in their language teaching and have a critical awareness of many of the problems and issues involved. The findings suggest that the teachers favour a discourse, rather than a decontextualised approach to the presentation of grammar and there is an emphasis on systematic practice of grammatical forms and the correction of grammatical errors

Form-focused instruction: A case study of Vietnamese teachers’ beliefs and practices

Despite the reported powerful influence of teachers’ beliefs on their pedagogical practices in the classroom, very few in-depth case studies of foreign language teachers’ beliefs and the correspondence between their beliefs and instructional strategies have been internationally published – Woods (1996) being an important exception. Moreover, not a single in-depth study has ever been conducted in the context of Vietnamese state secondary schools, where teachers are non-native speakers, resources are minimal, and access to published scholarship and research is very limited. The present qualitative case study seeks to occupy this research space because contextual factors such as limited access to expert knowledge, teachers’ isolation, a prescribed curriculum, time constraints, and high-stake examinations need to be part of any analysis of teachers’ beliefs and the correlation between beliefs and practices. It has explored the beliefs about form-focused instruction held by a group of eight teachers with teaching experience ranging from 24 to 2 years and the relationship between their beliefs and practices as well as factors shaping their beliefs. Eighteen interviews (ranging from 30 to 60 minutes long) and observations of 24 naturally occurring form-focused lessons in 12 groups of 10th, 11th, and 12th graders, i.e., all grades of the upper secondary school level, and 18 hours of stimulated recall interviews were conducted to collect the data. The audio- and video-recorded data were fully transcribed and translated from Vietnamese into English, and were subjected to a process of interpretative analysis through a constant comparison and contrast of the various data. As it is revealed in the study that teachers showed a strong inclination to adopt a deductive approach to grammar with pupils memorising of grammatical rules and terminology, and doing the controlled grammar exercises in the textbook as the best way of learning grammar. Neither their beliefs nor practices were related to either current theories of language learning within the mainstream Second Language Acquisition (SLA) research or to the methodology promoted in the prescribed curriculum. Findings of the study also indiate that while teachers’ beliefs were affected by multiple contetxual factors, experiences which were accumulated through the process of socialisation in their professional community played the most influential role. Such beliefs constituted their personal theories for practice, which shaped what they did in the classroom and how they did it. Thus, these teachers shared a ‘collectively normative pedagogy’, which was underpinned by their common beliefs and justified by their common pattern of beliefs and practices. Although this is a case study and as such it is not valid to make generalisations, it has some significant contributions to add to an understanding of teachers’ beliefs in terms of research methodology and theoretical understanding with reference to teacher cognition and teacher professional development in the specific educational context where the teaching of English is undertaken by non-native-English-speaking teachers. These are discussed in the concluding chapter, Chapter VII

A full permutation polygon synthetic indicator (FPPSI) approach for measuring and evaluating city prosperity: case study in Da Nang City, Vietnam

Economic growth has dominated development strategies and goals for many years, but prosperity encompasses more than that. In 2013, UN-Habitat proposed the City Prosperity Initiative (CPI) as a tool to quantify cities' prosperity and sustainable development. The CPI is accompanied by six essential components with 62 indicators associated with the urban settlement, incorporating productivity, infrastructure development, quality of life, social inclusion, environmental sustainability, and urban governance and legislation. The research aims to use the indicators of CPI and adopted the Full Permutation Polygon Synthetic Indicator method to measure and evaluate the level of prosperity of Da Nang City of Vietnam with data from 2004 to 2019. According to the findings of our study, the value of a synthetic indicator for the prosperity of Da Nang City increased, from 0.34 in 2004 to 0.36 in 2009, 0.43 in 2014, and 0.45 in 2019, which indicates a moderate level of wealth. On the one hand, Da Nang City has high levels of quality of life, equity and social inclusion, and urban governance and legislation. However, the city still has modest determinants of prosperity in terms of the environment, productivity and infrastructure. The Full Permutation Polygon Synthetic Indicator technique provides a comprehensive solution that illustrates the system integration idea. As a result, the proposed methodology offers a potential foundation for decision-making to promote sustainable urban development strategies and assess the effectiveness of these action

A meshfree DLO formulation for yield line analysis of reinforced concrete slabs

The yield-line method of analysis is a powerful tool that can be used to rapidly estimate the limit load sustainable by a reinforced concrete slab. In recent years, it has been limited in use due to its difficulties to computerise. Consequently, the Discontinuity Layout Optimization (DLO) procedure has been proposed to provide a systematic means of automating the method. In the DLO formulation, the size of the underlying optimization is highly affected by the number of the potential yield-lines generated. In this paper the concept of domain of influence in the framework of mesh-free methods will be introduced to the DLO method, resulting an efficient DLO method that can provide accurate solutions compared with the original DLO method while the problem size is very much smaller

Computation of limit and shakedown using the NS-FEM and second-order cone programming

This paper presents a novel numerical procedure for computation of limit and shakedown using node-based smoothed finite element method (NS-FEM) in combination with second-order cone programming (SOCP). The obtained discretization formulation is then cast in a form which involves second-order cone constraints, ensuring that the underlying optimization problem can be solved by highly efficient primal-dual interior point algorithm. Furthermore, in the NS-FEM, the system stiffness matrix is computed using the smoothed strains over the smoothing domains associated with nodes. This ensures that the size of the resulting optimization problem is kept to a minimum. The efficiency of the present approach is illustrated by examining several numerical examples

An XFEM based kinematic limit analysis formulation for plane strain cracked structures using SOCP

This paper extends a numerical procedure for limit analysis based on extended finite element method (XFEM) and second-order cone programming (SOCP) to plane strain cracked structures. The cracked structures are easily modelled and simulated using XFEM because it allows discontinuities across elements, and these discontinuities are recognized by means of level set method. The resulting discretization formulation is then cast in a form which involves second-order cone constraints, ensuring that the underlying optimization problem can be solved by highly efficient primal-dual interior point algorithm. The efficiency of the present approach is illustrated by examing several numerical examples

The Potential of the Rice Value Chain in the Mekong Delta to Develop High Value Export Markets

This study aims at analyzing the current status of the rice value chain in the Mekong Delta focusing on export channels. The study assessed primary data collected from respondents related to the chain in the year 2020. Research results show that about 35% of rice in the region is used for export, of which most of the rice exported belongs to the high quality segment. Although improvements achieved recently, the regional rice value chain still faces many limitations. The study proposes solutions to strengthen the rice value chain and increase the volume of high quality rice exported into more demanding high income markets

Numerical simulation of all-normal dispersion visible to near-infrared supercontinuum generation in photonic crystal fibers with core filled chloroform

This study proposes a photonic crystal fiber made of fused silica glass, with the core infiltrated with chloroform as a new source of supercontinuum (SC) spectrum. We numerically study the guiding properties of the fiber structure in terms of characteristic dispersion and mode area of the fundamental mode. Based on the results, we optimized the structural geometries of the CHCl3-core photonic crystal fiber to support the broadband SC generations. The fiber structure with a lattice constant of 1 μm, a filling factor of 0.8, and the diameter of the first-ring air holes equaling 0.5 μm operates in all-normal dispersion. The SC with a broadened spectral bandwidth of 0.64 to 1.80 μm is formed by using a pump pulse with a wavelength of 850 nm, 120 fs duration, and power of 0.833 kW. That fiber would be a good candidate for all-fiber SC sources as cost-effective alternative to glass core fibers

Two Spot Coupled Ring Resonators

Abstract. We consider a model of two coupled ring waveguides with constant linear gain and nonlinear absorption with space-dependent coupling. This system can be implemented in various physical situations as optical waveguides, atomic Bose-Einstein condensates, polarization condensates, etc. It is described by two coupled nonlinear Schrödinger equation. For numerical simulations, we take local two-gaussian coupling.It is found in our previous papers that, depending on the values of involved parameters, we can obtain several interesting nonlinear phenomena, which include spontaneous symmetry breaking, modulational instability leading to generation of stable circular flows with various vorticities, stable inhomogeneous states with interesting structure of currents flowing between rings, as well as dynamical regimes having signatures of chaotic behavior. This research will be associated with experimental investigation planned in Freie Universität Berlin, in the group of prof. Michael Giersig