Temporary Language Adaptation Classrooms: One of the Great Unknowns for Future Primary School teachers

El presente estudio pretende indagar en la opinión sobre la formación universitaria recibida por los futuros maestros de educación primaria en relación con la atención al alumnado inmigrante en las escuelas y, particularmente, con las aulas temporales de adaptación lingüística (ATAL) andaluzas. Se discuten los datos arrojados del análisis de un cuestionario formado por diez ítems, que combinaron tanto preguntas de índole cuantitativa como cualitativa, al que respondieron 54 estudiantes del último curso del Grado en Educación Primaria de la Universidad de Almería (España). Según los resultados, al acabar la carrera, las estrategias y el aprendizaje adquirido se muestran insuficientes de acuerdo con la naturaleza multicultural que presenta la mayoría de los centros educativos españoles, mientras que se aprecia gran interés por cursar estudios de posgrado sobre enseñanza del español como segunda lengua. En conclusión, con el propósito de lograr una integración auténtica del alumnado inmigrante, se reivindica una conexión efectiva entre la formación académica de grado y la realidad multicultural y multilingüe de las aulas en la sociedad española actual.The present study aims to look into the opinion of prospective primary school teachers about their training for assisting migrant students. Special attention is drawn to their views on the linguistic adaptation temporary classes (ATAL) in Andalusia. The data obtained from the analysis of a questionnaire are discussed. This questionnaire consists of ten items, which combined both quantitative and qualitative questions, and was completed by 54 students in the last year of the Degree in Primary Education at University of Almería (Spain). According to the results, upon completion of training, the knowledge and strategies developed appear to be insufficient for the multicultural nature of most Spanish schools. At the same time, respondents show a great interest in postgraduate courses on teaching Spanish as a second language. In conclusion, in order to achieve the integration of migrant students, a more effective connection between teacher training programs and the multicultural and multilingual reality of Spanish schools nowadays is needed

Classroom communication skills: the need to fill a gap in the training of teachers of Spanish as a foreign language

This paper sets out the necessity of examining the communication skills of teachers of Spanish as a foreign language as conducted in other socio-educative contexts. According to this objective, the paper begins with a review of theoretical efforts that have been made during recent years referring to research methodology (such as instruments), and to their main results. This leads to a discussion of the training needs that teachers of Spanish as a foreign language presently face for the development of their communication s kills in the classroom and, in general terms, the paper discusses the different types of ideas and strategies that must be considered during teachers’ instruction. Finally, this brief proposal expects to be the seed of future research projects that impact positively on the improvement of teachers’ communication competence, whereby the ideas discussed here are taken as a nuclear component in the frame of future teaching competence

Genetic algorithm optimization of entanglement

We present an application of a genetic algorithmic computational method to the optimization of the concurrence measure of entanglement for the cases of one dimensional chains, as well as square and triangular lattices in a simple tight-binding approach in which the hopping of electrons is much stronger than the phonon dissipationComment: 26 pages with 13 figures, based on Chapter 3 of the Master thesis of the first author defended at IPICyT, San Luis Potosi, Mx, on 22nd of February 2006, similar to the published version [Fig. 5 left out but contains the Appendix figure

Methodologies for teaching an engineering subject in different countries: comparison and results

Engineering or technical degrees are difficult to teach and, consequently, have always been characterized by a large number of academic failures. Therefore, continuous assessment has been applied to classes of similar content, related to Port and Coastal Engineering during these last years in three different Universities worldwide: University of La Republica (Montevideo, Uruguay), Nova de Lisboa (Portugal) and Cadiz (Spain). This paper presents different methodologies used to teach and evaluate these courses at each University, together with the results of the evaluations of the students who were enrolled during the current and previous stages. Generally, a decrease in the number of students who abandon the classes has been noticed together with an increase in the percentage of students who pass and an improvement of their grades, except at the University Nova de Lisboa were the results have remained stable. In addition, changes experienced in the courses are discussed herein by comparing the percentage of success in the different locations. Moreover, influence of the different methodologies and the possible reasons for these changes are also presented and analysed. As a conclusion, the improvement in educational outcomes has been achieved through the concurrence of different factors: the existence of more frequent written and/or oral exams, practical examples of case studies as well as access to specific tools of new technology and to documentation specifically prepared for the classes and available online. Evidently, the above mentioned tasks require a strong commitment and great effort by the teaching staff. If human resources diminish, as it is happening in Spain and Portugal due to the budget reduction in education, two difficult questions arise: For how long will teachers’ current effort be maintained? What impact will have their complete devotion to teaching in their research performance

c-Jun N-terminal kinase phosphorylation is a biomarker of plitidepsin activity

Plitidepsin is an antitumor drug of marine origin currently in Phase III clinical trials in multiple myeloma. In cultured cells, plitidepsin induces cell cycle arrest or an acute apoptotic process in which sustained activation of c-Jun N-terminal kinase (JNK) plays a crucial role. With a view to optimizing clinical use of plitidepsin, we have therefore evaluated the possibility of using JNK activation as an in vivo biomarker of response. In this study, we show that administration of a single plitidepsin dose to mice xenografted with human cancer cells does indeed lead to increased phosphorylation of JNK in tumors at 4 to 12 h. By contrast, no changes were found in other in vitro plitidepsin targets such as the levels of phosphorylated-ERK, -p38MAPK or the protein p27KIP1. Interestingly, plitidepsin also increased JNK phosphorylation in spleens from xenografted mice showing similar kinetics to those seen in tumors, thereby suggesting that normal tissues might be useful for predicting drug activity. Furthermore, plitidepsin administration to rats at plasma concentrations comparable to those achievable in patients also increased JNK phosphorylation in peripheral mononuclear blood cells. These findings suggest that changes in JNK activity provide a reliable biomarker for plitidepsin activity and this could be useful for designing clinical trials and maximizing the efficacy of plitidepsin.This work has been partially supported by grants (Programa Cenit, CEN-20091016, SAF2010-18302 and Fondo Europeo de Desarrollo Regional-Instituto de Salud Carlos III, RD12/0036/0021) from Ministerio de Economíay Competitividad of Spain.S

Effect of band-filling and structural distortions on the Curie temperature of Fe-Mo double perovkites

By means of high resolution neutron powder diffraction at low temperature we have characterized the structural details of $\rm La_{x}Sr_{2-x}FeMoO_6$ ($0\leq {\rm x}\leq 0.5$) and $\rm Ca_{x}Sr_{2-x}FeMoO_6$ ($0\leq {\rm x}\leq 0.6$) series of compounds. This study reveals a similar variation of the mean bond-angle \FeOMo in both series. In contrast, the mean bond-distance \FeMoO\ increases with La but not with Ca substitution. Both series also present a different evolution of the Curie temperature ($T_C$), which raises in the La series and slightly decreases in the Ca one. We thus conclude that the enhancement of $T_C$ in the La series is due to the electron filling of the conduction band and a concomitant rising of the density of states at the Fermi level.Comment: Revtex, 4 Journal pages, 2 figures, 1 tabl

Seamless optimization of the GEMM kernel for task-based programming models

The general matrix-matrix multiplication (GEMM) kernel is a fundamental building block of many scientific applications. Many libraries such as Intel MKL and BLIS provide highly optimized sequential and parallel versions of this kernel. The parallel implementations of the GEMM kernel rely on the well-known fork-join execution model to exploit multi-core systems efficiently. However, these implementations are not well suited for task-based applications as they break the data-flow execution model. In this paper, we present a task-based implementation of the GEMM kernel that can be seamlessly leveraged by task-based applications while providing better performance than the fork-join version. Our implementation leverages several advanced features of the OmpSs-2 programming model and a new heuristic to select the best parallelization strategy and blocking parameters based on the matrix and hardware characteristics. When evaluating the performance and energy consumption on two modern multi-core systems, we show that our implementations provide significant performance improvements over an optimized OpenMP fork-join implementation, and can beat vendor implementations of the GEMM (e.g., Intel MKL and AMD AOCL). We also demonstrate that a real application can leverage our optimized task-based implementation to enhance performance.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Identifying Topics in Social Media Posts using DBpedia

This paper describes a method for identifying topics in text published in social media, by applying topic recognition techniques that exploit DBpedia. We evaluate such method for social media in Spanish and we provide the results of the evaluation performed