Teacher\u27s Discoursal Strategies in Providing Positive Feedback to Student Responses: A Study of Four English Immersion Teachers in People\u27s Republic of China

This paper investigates the discoursal strategies of four teachers in providing feedback to student responses in English classrooms in Xi’an, People’s Republic of China. The findings indicate that the teachers provide positive feedback for students English learning in various ways, including using the most common strategies such as accepting, encouraging, and repeating, as well as the strategies of extending and prompting. This study indicates that these strategies are beneficial to the students’ linguistic and cognitive development because they provide comprehensible input and require English-speaking on the part of students. Although some of the strategies appear to be common among teachers in English-speaking educational systems, they are identified explicitly in this study because they are strategies different from those used in traditional language classrooms in China. In addition, this study differs from the previous work done in that it posits the analysis of discourses in extended exchanges within one thematic topic. These exchanges usually consist of more than one round of initiation – response – followup (IRF) sequence. Such broadened IRF sequences provide a rich and meaningful situated context from which the education on the function of classroom discourse can be made

Chinese Students' Attitudes towards the Use of English-medium Instruction into the Curriculum Courses: A Case Study of a National Key University in Beijing

This article outlines the necessity for investigating the attitudes of local students towards the use of the English-medium instruction (EMI) strategy in their programs in China. It starts by presenting an overview of English as a global language, how English is emphasized in China, and briefly presents the concept of 'Attitude' and how the motivation factor plays a significant role in the conception processing of attitudes. Semi-structured interviews with six graduate students majoring in different programs are conducted. The analysis of the interviews identified that the participants hold very positive attitudes towards the use of the EMI strategy at their current programs. The participants, furthermore, expressed their complete readiness to join post-graduate programs wherein only the EMI strategy is implemented. In addition to the factors identified in the literature, the current article also recognized new factors that led the participants to conceiving positive attitudes: maintaining a global friendship, obtaining a leadership position, and acquainting with international scholars. Moreover, it is argued that 'quantity' precedes 'quality' in higher education institutions. Finally, the article provides a suggestion for how to meet the students' language needs and maximize the competition in obtaining top world-class university rankings

Journeying : young children’s responses to picture books of traumatic and sensitive issues

This study investigates the response of a class of 35 seven and eight year old children to ten picture books with difficult, traumatic subject matter. Two of the stories deal with areas of emotional loss, including the death of a grandfather; five stories take the area of the Holocaust as their central theme, and three are stories of earthquakes, with the consequent loss of life and destruction. My research findings contribute to the study of children’s literature in education by uniquely analysing and giving insight into especially young children’s responses to this particular genre of children’s literature. In this research programme, the children are invited to engage in reading and four designed activities emerged for response: the central importance of spoken language, the place of writing to capture meaning and significance, the value of drawing to enhance understanding and the place of imaginative role play as children worked on their impressions of events in the stories. My central research questions are: What is young children’s understanding of and response to texts and pictures in selected children’s picture books of trauma? In what ways might young children’s responses to these issues and their accompanying activities reshape their critical thinking? What have I, as the researcher, learnt about my role as a teacher through teaching traumatic issues? The study was conducted in Taiwan using participatory action research methods. My evidence shows that these children are capable of understanding complex and disturbing situations that underpin the picture book narratives. They used their social, interactive, verbal, emotional and imaginative skills to respond to the texts in powerful ways. The significance of the teacher’s role as a listener, questioner and learner was crucial in helping to motive and engage the children. The study’s findings are that picture books that deal with disturbing human issues can be introduced as part of a planned programme of Arts and Life education in Grades 1 to 6 of the primary school curriculum and that children as young as seven are capable of responding to them with maturity and sophistication

Journeying : young children’s responses to picture books of traumatic and sensitive issues

This study investigates the response of a class of 35 seven and eight year old children to ten picture books with difficult, traumatic subject matter. Two of the stories deal with areas of emotional loss, including the death of a grandfather; five stories take the area of the Holocaust as their central theme, and three are stories of earthquakes, with the consequent loss of life and destruction. My research findings contribute to the study of children’s literature in education by uniquely analysing and giving insight into especially young children’s responses to this particular genre of children’s literature. In this research programme, the children are invited to engage in reading and four designed activities emerged for response: the central importance of spoken language, the place of writing to capture meaning and significance, the value of drawing to enhance understanding and the place of imaginative role play as children worked on their impressions of events in the stories. My central research questions are: What is young children’s understanding of and response to texts and pictures in selected children’s picture books of trauma? In what ways might young children’s responses to these issues and their accompanying activities reshape their critical thinking? What have I, as the researcher, learnt about my role as a teacher through teaching traumatic issues? The study was conducted in Taiwan using participatory action research methods. My evidence shows that these children are capable of understanding complex and disturbing situations that underpin the picture book narratives. They used their social, interactive, verbal, emotional and imaginative skills to respond to the texts in powerful ways. The significance of the teacher’s role as a listener, questioner and learner was crucial in helping to motive and engage the children. The study’s findings are that picture books that deal with disturbing human issues can be introduced as part of a planned programme of Arts and Life education in Grades 1 to 6 of the primary school curriculum and that children as young as seven are capable of responding to them with maturity and sophistication.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

Matrix Theory in a Constant C Field Background

D0-branes moving in a constant antisymmetric C field are found to be described by quantum mechanics of the supersymmetric matrix model with a similarity transformation. Sometimes this similarity transformation is singular or ill-defined and cannot be ignored. As an example, when there are non-vanishing C_{-ij} components, we obtain the theory for Dp-branes which is effectively the noncommutative super Yang-Mills theory. We also briefly discuss the effects of other non-vanishing components such as C_{+ij} and C_{ijk}.Comment: harvmac, 17 pages, references adde

BakedAvatar: Baking Neural Fields for Real-Time Head Avatar Synthesis

Synthesizing photorealistic 4D human head avatars from videos is essential for VR/AR, telepresence, and video game applications. Although existing Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF)-based methods achieve high-fidelity results, the computational expense limits their use in real-time applications. To overcome this limitation, we introduce BakedAvatar, a novel representation for real-time neural head avatar synthesis, deployable in a standard polygon rasterization pipeline. Our approach extracts deformable multi-layer meshes from learned isosurfaces of the head and computes expression-, pose-, and view-dependent appearances that can be baked into static textures for efficient rasterization. We thus propose a three-stage pipeline for neural head avatar synthesis, which includes learning continuous deformation, manifold, and radiance fields, extracting layered meshes and textures, and fine-tuning texture details with differential rasterization. Experimental results demonstrate that our representation generates synthesis results of comparable quality to other state-of-the-art methods while significantly reducing the inference time required. We further showcase various head avatar synthesis results from monocular videos, including view synthesis, face reenactment, expression editing, and pose editing, all at interactive frame rates.Comment: ACM Transactions on Graphics (SIGGRAPH Asia 2023). Project Page: https://buaavrcg.github.io/BakedAvata