270 research outputs found
American K-12 CFL Teachers’ Expected Competence, Actual Qualifications, and Needs for Professional Training: A Concurrent Mixed-method Study
In recent years, there has been a growing demand in the global labor market for proficiency in Chinese as a foreign or second language. Yet not much is known regarding how Chinese language education is provided by the U.S. schools in order to meet this demand. The present study investigated the competence that a Chinese teacher is expected to have as well as the qualification that currently in-service K-12 teachers of Chinese are actually possess. In addition, this research explored teaching philosophies, attitudes, pedagogy, challenges and needs for professional training among the Chinese teachers who are currently hired by U.S. K-12 schools. A concurrent mixed method design was employed in this study to collect both quantitative and qualitative data with a questionnaire from a sample of 45 Chinese teachers. Result showed that most U.S. K-12 schools have minimum and preferred qualifications specified for a long-term Chinese teaching position, however there is a gap between the preferred qualification from the perspective of employers and the actual qualifications that current K-12 Chinese teachers possess. Teachers’ attitudes and beliefs about Chinese teaching competency are consistent with the expectations of their employers to some extent. Main finding suggests that K-12 Chinese teachers’ teaching philosophies are influence by both traditional Chinese culture and modern western culture. Lastly but not least, the majority of the participants rated classroom management and pedagogy as the two areas where professional training is needed the most
Spin/momentum properties of the paraxial optical beams
Spin angular momentum, an elementary dynamical property of classical
electromagnetic fields, plays an important role in spin-orbit and light-matter
interactions, especially in near-field optics. The research on optical spins
has led to the discovery of phenomena such as optical spin-momentum locking and
photonic topological quasiparticles, as well as applications in high-precision
detection and nanometrology. Here, we investigate spin-momentum relations in
paraxial optical systems and show that the optical spin angular momentum
contains transverse and longitudinal spin components simultaneously. The
transverse spin originates from inhomogeneities of field and governed by the
vorticity of the kinetic momentum density, whereas the longitudinal spin
parallel to the local canonical momentum is proportional to the polarization
ellipticity of light. Moreover, the skyrmionlike spin textures arise from the
optical transverse spin can be observed in paraxial beams, and their topologies
are maintained free from the influence of the Gouy phase during propagation.
Interestingly, the optical singularities, including both phase and polarization
singularities, can also affect the spin-momentum properties significantly. Our
findings describe the intrinsic spin-momentum properties in paraxial optical
systems and apply in the analysis of the properties of spin-momentum in optical
focusing, imaging, and scattering systems.Comment: 20 pages; 6 figures, 151 reference
American K-12 CFL Teachers’ Expected Competence, Actual Qualifications, and Needs for Professional Training: A Concurrent Mixed-method Study
In recent years, there has been a growing demand in the global labor market for proficiency in Chinese as a foreign or second language. Yet not much is known regarding how Chinese language education is provided by the U.S. schools in order to meet this demand. The present study investigated the competence that a Chinese teacher is expected to have as well as the qualification that currently in-service K-12 teachers of Chinese are actually possess. In addition, this research explored teaching philosophies, attitudes, pedagogy, challenges and needs for professional training among the Chinese teachers who are currently hired by U.S. K-12 schools. A concurrent mixed method design was employed in this study to collect both quantitative and qualitative data with a questionnaire from a sample of 45 Chinese teachers. Result showed that most U.S. K-12 schools have minimum and preferred qualifications specified for a long-term Chinese teaching position, however there is a gap between the preferred qualification from the perspective of employers and the actual qualifications that current K-12 Chinese teachers possess. Teachers’ attitudes and beliefs about Chinese teaching competency are consistent with the expectations of their employers to some extent. Main finding suggests that K-12 Chinese teachers’ teaching philosophies are influence by both traditional Chinese culture and modern western culture. Lastly but not least, the majority of the participants rated classroom management and pedagogy as the two areas where professional training is needed the most
Chinese Text Recognition with A Pre-Trained CLIP-Like Model Through Image-IDS Aligning
Scene text recognition has been studied for decades due to its broad
applications. However, despite Chinese characters possessing different
characteristics from Latin characters, such as complex inner structures and
large categories, few methods have been proposed for Chinese Text Recognition
(CTR). Particularly, the characteristic of large categories poses challenges in
dealing with zero-shot and few-shot Chinese characters. In this paper, inspired
by the way humans recognize Chinese texts, we propose a two-stage framework for
CTR. Firstly, we pre-train a CLIP-like model through aligning printed character
images and Ideographic Description Sequences (IDS). This pre-training stage
simulates humans recognizing Chinese characters and obtains the canonical
representation of each character. Subsequently, the learned representations are
employed to supervise the CTR model, such that traditional single-character
recognition can be improved to text-line recognition through image-IDS
matching. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed method, we conduct
extensive experiments on both Chinese character recognition (CCR) and CTR. The
experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method performs best in CCR
and outperforms previous methods in most scenarios of the CTR benchmark. It is
worth noting that the proposed method can recognize zero-shot Chinese
characters in text images without fine-tuning, whereas previous methods require
fine-tuning when new classes appear. The code is available at
https://github.com/FudanVI/FudanOCR/tree/main/image-ids-CTR.Comment: ICCV 202
Orientation-Independent Chinese Text Recognition in Scene Images
Scene text recognition (STR) has attracted much attention due to its broad
applications. The previous works pay more attention to dealing with the
recognition of Latin text images with complex backgrounds by introducing
language models or other auxiliary networks. Different from Latin texts, many
vertical Chinese texts exist in natural scenes, which brings difficulties to
current state-of-the-art STR methods. In this paper, we take the first attempt
to extract orientation-independent visual features by disentangling content and
orientation information of text images, thus recognizing both horizontal and
vertical texts robustly in natural scenes. Specifically, we introduce a
Character Image Reconstruction Network (CIRN) to recover corresponding printed
character images with disentangled content and orientation information. We
conduct experiments on a scene dataset for benchmarking Chinese text
recognition, and the results demonstrate that the proposed method can indeed
improve performance through disentangling content and orientation information.
To further validate the effectiveness of our method, we additionally collect a
Vertical Chinese Text Recognition (VCTR) dataset. The experimental results show
that the proposed method achieves 45.63% improvement on VCTR when introducing
CIRN to the baseline model.Comment: IJCAI 202
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