Classroom talk and the negotiation of academic English : a linguistic analysis of collaborative text creation

University of Technology Sydney. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences.In Australia, a significant number of international students undertake intensive language instruction immediately prior to tertiary studies (Australia Education International 2014). These courses aim to prepare students for a successful university experience. Difficulties with academic writing pose a barrier to tertiary entrance and also to the completion of future studies, with emotional and financial ramifications for all those involved. With much at stake, effective support for academic writing development is an on-going concern for researchers and educators in many sectors including pre-tertiary teaching and learning contexts. A substantial body of research has analysed the linguistic demands of texts that students are expected to write. However, fewer studies explore how the valued meanings of texts are negotiated through classroom interaction. In this study, I examine five lessons of a collaborative writing step, known as joint construction. In this kind of writing lesson the teacher takes a leading role as the class co-creates one communal text (Callaghan & Rothery, 1988; Rothery, 1996; Rose & Martin, 2012). Previous studies of joint construction with advanced English language learners have provided insight into the overall structure of lessons, the negotiation of social roles, and adaptations to online learning environments (Humphrey & Macnaught, 2011 who draw on Hunt, 1991, 1996; Dreyfus, Macnaught & Humphrey, 2011; Dreyfus, to appear). However, as yet, there is limited understanding of how meanings are negotiated to achieve the ‘end product’, i.e. the scribed text. There is also limited understanding of how language choices are related to each other as well as to future writing. The study aims to better understand the process of co-constructing academic language. Classroom talk is analysed by using methods of qualitative phasal analysis (Gregory & Malcolm, 1995; Malcolm, 2010) and discourse semantics tools of Systemic Functional Linguistics (Martin, 1992; Martin & White, 2005; Martin and Rose, 2007). The transcripts and video recordings of joint construction lessons focus on three main aspects of collaborative text creation: what students do; what teachers do to support student activity (without taking over); and how meanings are negotiated at the time of text creation (rather than through prospective or retrospective instruction). Findings illuminate reoccurring kinds of student activity, how classroom talk is structured to support the negotiation of meaning, and the scope of semiotic resources that teachers and students use to talk about language choices. Overall, findings provide insight into patterns of interaction that target the academic language development of students

The Fijian Colonial Experience: A study of the neotraditional order under British colonial rule prior to World War II

Indigenous Fijians were singularly fortunate in having a colonial administration that halted the alienation of communally owned land to foreign settlers and that, almost for a century, administered their affairs in their own language and through culturally congenial authority structures and institutions. From the outset, the Fijian Administration was criticised as paternalistic and stifling of individualism. But for all its problems it sustained, at least until World War II, a vigorously autonomous and peaceful social and political world in quite affluent subsistence — underpinning the celebrated exuberance of the culture exploited by the travel industry ever since

The Fijian Colonial Experience: a study of the neotraditional order under British colonial rule prior to WWII

This book analyses thematically much of the colonial experience of the Fijians earlier this century - their land rights, village and district politics, chiefly leadership, underground movements and various British efforts to 'improve' them. The major theme is the failure of vague policies fostering individualism and enterprise to interrupt the continuities of a vigorously autonomous social and political world maintaining eight of ten Fijians in a relatively affluent neotraditional order until World War II, despite the deep vein of discontent and material aspirations manifested most clearly in Apolosi R. Nawai's movement, the Viti Company. The epilogue briefly chronicles some of the recent changes in Fijian life which, it is argued, throw into sharper relief the accomplishments of the earlier partnership between Fijian leaders and British officials. Therein lie the historical antecedents of both the economic problems of the Fijian people and the irascendancy in national political life through the first decade of independence

Mainstream to millpond? the Fijian political experience 1897-1940

The prestige of the Fijian community in independent Fiji should surprise those who have been introduced to the country by the development writers of the 1960s or who insist on bringing to Fiji their perceptions of other colonized peoples. The thesis argues that there has been no fundamental shift of power in recent years to Fijians: they have never really lost its substance, namely, a strong leadership supported by effective social structures and traditional sanctions or emotions. It is true historically that the Fijian Administration encouraged parochial loyalties; the issues of district politics seem minute or out of proportion. At the same time the machinery and the leadership were there at each level of village, district and province for effective co-operation towards common goals and for a united front at national level through the Council of Chiefs. It is argued that the Gordon-Thurston system of Fijian administration consolidated in the 19th century retained just sufficient momentum of its own to withstand a half century of official misgivings with those 'communal' aspects of Fijian life that seemed to be hindering the emergence of a new class of sturdy individualists - a kind of Fijian who never was and never would be. The desire of Fijians for education and for expansion into the commercial economy, and their changing concepts of status were not easily accommodated by a society adjusted to comfortable subsistence, nor were they satisfied by the eve of World War II. The familiar contemporary problems of developing countries were lurking in the shadows but at least Fijians had the security of their lands and an alternative design for living that, for all its problems, still seems capable of enviable results and further development

TPSDicyc: Improved deformation invariant cross-domain medical image synthesis

Cycle-consistent generative adversarial network (CycleGAN) has been widely used for cross-domain medical image systhesis tasks particularly due to its ability to deal with unpaired data. However, most CycleGAN-based synthesis methods can not achieve good alignment between the synthesized images and data from the source domain, even with additional image alignment losses. This is because the CycleGAN generator network can encode the relative deformations and noises associated to different domains. This can be detrimental for the downstream applications that rely on the synthesized images, such as generating pseudo-CT for PET-MR attenuation correction. In this paper, we present a deformation invariant model based on the deformation-invariant CycleGAN (DicycleGAN) architecture and the spatial transformation network (STN) using thin-plate-spline (TPS). The proposed method can be trained with unpaired and unaligned data, and generate synthesised images aligned with the source data. Robustness to the presence of relative deformations between data from the source and target domain has been evaluated through experiments on multi-sequence brain MR data and multi-modality abdominal CT and MR data. Experiment results demonstrated that our method can achieve better alignment between the source and target data while maintaining superior image quality of signal compared to several state-of-the-art CycleGAN-based methods