Learner autonomy and awareness through distance collaborative group work in English for Academic Purposes

The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-40956-6_13Learner autonomy is considered to be both an important skill and attitude of learners, which involves responsibility for and control of the learning process. A key notion in autonomy is interdependence, developed through collaboration and which results in heightened awareness. Precisely, this concept lies at the core of technology applications, which facilitate interaction and collaboration at a distance. With a growing number of online ESP situations, more attention needs to be paid to virtual classrooms and the development of learner autonomy through collaboration. In the context of a distance EAP course, this chapter examines how students carry out a collaborative language awareness task, considering that peer interaction can be an appropriate setting to develop language awareness, whether in face-to-face or online situations. Based on the framework of 'community of inquiry' (Garrison et al. 2000), this study looks at how group members interact through forum posts and wiki edits, showing how students initiate, manage and carry out the task, together with the social, cognitive, and meta-cognitive processes that are generated. Given the nature of the task, creating a language learning activity, special attention is paid to students’ focus on and discussion of topics related to language and learning. From these observations we can derive implications for online language teaching and materials design.Peer ReviewedPreprin

Domestic oven heated by a concentrating solar collector

A project to power a domestic oven by solar energy was developed. The focal axis of a cylindrical parabolic reflector usually reaches temperatures of up to 250ºC. A heat transfer fluid carries this heat to the heat exchanger in the oven. Current domestic ovens are generally electric and can reach 250ºC with a power of 2-3 kW. The installation is composed of pumps, valves, thermally insulated pipes, exchanger, etc. These elements transfer the heat collected by the solar collector to the oven in the house. If the installation has an accumulator tank with thermal insulation, the high temperature liquid makes it possible to use the oven at any time. Unlike current domestic solar ovens, this technology can reach the same temperature and power as an electric oven, and be used indoors at any time. Additionally, this system could be used for sanitary hot water purposes and radiating floors. In these cases, the high temperature is degraded mixing with cold water.Postprint (published version

Numerical simulation of a supersonic ejector for vacuum generation with explicit and implicit solver in openfoam

Supersonic ejectors are used extensively in all kind of applications: compression of refrigerants in cooling systems, pumping of volatile fluids or in vacuum generation. In vacuum generation, also known as zero-secondary flow, the ejector has a transient behaviour. In this paper, a numerical and experimental research of a supersonic compressible air nozzle is performed in order to investigate and to simulate its behaviour. The CFD toolbox OpenFOAM 6 was used, with two density-based solvers: explicit solver rhoCentralFoam, which implements Kurganov Central-upwind schemes, and implicit solver HiSA, which implements the AUSM+up upwind scheme. The behaviour of the transient evacuation ranges between adiabatic polytropic exponent at the beginning of the process and isothermal at the end. A model for the computation of the transient polytropic exponent is proposed. During the evacuation, two regimes are encountered in the second nozzle. In the supercritic regime, the secondary is choked and sonic flow is reached. In the subcritic regime, the secondary flow is subsonic. The final agreement is good with the two different solvers, although simulation tends to slightly overestimate flow rate for large values region.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

The role of content and language in content and language integrated learning (CLIL) at university: Challenges and implications for ESP

In a context characterized by the increasing presence of CLIL programs in universities with a tradition of ESP courses, we analyze the case of a university in Catalonia (Spain) with regard to the position of CLIL and ESP. As CLIL programs are promoted to improve students' language proficiency in English, we explore the importance of language learning in these programs and the implications derived for ESP. Data were obtained from institutional documentation, class observation, and lecturer and student views on CLIL expressed in focus groups and a questionnaire. Findings show imprecise guidelines for CLIL implementation. Although we can observe an institutional shift from ESP to CLIL, the latter courses do not generally include language support. Lecturer and student perspectives provide useful insights for action that can be taken by ESP course designers to adapt courses to make them more relevant to students' discipline-related needs. Faced with these findings, we propose engaging in collaboration with content lecturers to develop graduates' proficiency in English. This collaboration can take place both through the integration of language in content courses and through the integration of content in ESP courses to make them more relevant to disciplines' communicative needs. (C) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.Postprint (published version

ESP, EMI and interculturality: How internationalised are university curricula in Catalonia?

This study analyses Internationalisation at Home (IaH) courses across a wide range of bachelor’s degrees, from humanities to hard sciences, in public universities in Catalonia, as an in-depth analysis of a South European context. IaH courses selected for analysis included courses (i) on international topics, (ii) taught in English and focusing on content (English-medium Instruction, EMI) and (iii) focusing on language, i.e. English for Specific Purposes (ESP). Results point to a high presence of international content courses, especially in humanities and social sciences, followed by EMI courses, although quantitatively scarce and mainly found in engineering. ESP courses are the least present despite their potential to prepare students for EMI. Reasons that may account for this IaH picture are presented. All in all, it seems that current policies leave language and intercultural competence in the hands of content lecturers, who may not have explicit language and intercultural learning outcomes in mind while it appears that the potential role of ESP as an internationalisation driver may be neglected. This paper thus argues for giving visibility to ESP courses and lecturers in their role for the promotion of curricular internationalisation.Postprint (published version

Delocalization of quasimodes on the disk

This note deals with semiclassical measures associated to {(sufficiently accurate)} quasimodes $(u_h)$ for the Laplace-Dirichlet operator on the disk. In this time-independent set-up, we simplify the statements of our preprint arXiv:1406.0681 and their proofs. We describe the restriction of semiclassical measures to every invariant torus in terms of two-microlocal measures. As corollaries, we show regularity and delocalization properties for limit measures of $|u_h|^2 dx$: these are absolutely continuous in the interior of the disk and charge every open set intersecting the boundary.Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1406.068

Describing synchronization and topological excitations in arrays of magnetic spin torque oscillators through the Kuramoto model

The collective dynamics in populations of magnetic spin torque oscillators (STO) is an intensely studied topic in modern magnetism. Here, we show that arrays of STO coupled via dipolar fields can be modeled using a variant of the Kuramoto model, a well-known mathematical model in non-linear dynamics. By investigating the collective dynamics in arrays of STO we find that the synchronization in such systems is a finite size effect and show that the critical coupling-for a complete synchronized state-scales with the number of oscillators. Using realistic values of the dipolar coupling strength between STO we show that this imposes an upper limit for the maximum number of oscillators that can be synchronized. Further, we show that the lack of long range order is associated with the formation of topological defects in the phase field similar to the two-dimensional XY model of ferromagnetism. Our results shed new light on the synchronization of STO, where controlling the mutual synchronization of several oscillators is considered crucial for applications.Comment: Accepted for publication in Scientific Reports. Corrected typo in Eq.(9) from previous versio