Bilingual education and L3 learning: metalinguistic advantage or not?

Metalinguistic skills are highlighted in the literature as providing bilinguals with an advantage in additional language (L3) learning. The extent to which this may apply to bilingual education and content-and-language-integrated-learning settings, however, is as yet little understood. This article reports on a study exploring and comparing the metalinguistic skills of Dutch secondary school pupils enrolled in a Dutch–English bilingual and a regular programme as captured in think-aloud protocols and retrospective interviews related to an individual picture-description task in German. The findings indicate that clear metalinguistic advantages for the pupils in the bilingual stream could not be established. However, the study found evidence of changes in pupils’ L3 processing related to the functioning of the multilingual mental lexicon, a more functional awareness of language, and the pupils’ attitudes towards language learning. These findings were able to shed light on the nature of metalinguistic skills – highlighting the need for a more precise definition in particular – while simultaneously revealing the limitations of the concept for understanding multilingual language processes in bilingual education settings.The research presented in this work was supported by a scholarship of the Economic and Social Research Council, UK

Fixing All Moduli in a Simple F-Theory Compactification

We discuss a simple example of an F-theory compactification on a Calabi-Yau fourfold where background fluxes, together with nonperturbative effects from Euclidean D3 instantons and gauge dynamics on D7 branes, allow us to fix all closed and open string moduli. We explicitly check that the known higher order corrections to the potential, which we neglect in our leading approximation, only shift the results by a small amount. In our exploration of the model, we encounter interesting new phenomena, including examples of transitions where D7 branes absorb O3 planes, while changing topology to preserve the net D3 charge.Comment: 68 pages, 19 figures; v2: references adde

Why share premises? The organisational development process of the House for Health

While demands for charities to increase collaboration are on the rise, collaboration has no value in itself; it needs to answer to specific organisational or societal needs. This article draws on a case study of the House for Health, a consortium of five charities in the Netherlands that shares a building for joint use. It asks how this particular arrangement can be made instrumental to fostering the charities’ missions. We find that it is best suited to enable collective organisational learning and discuss strengths, weaknesses and options for implementation

Loose packings of frictional spheres

We have produced loose packings of cohesionless, frictional spheres by sequential deposition of highly-spherical, monodisperse particles through a fluid. By varying the properties of the fluid and the particles, we have identified the Stokes number (St) - rather than the buoyancy of the particles in the fluid - as the parameter controlling the approach to the loose packing limit. The loose packing limit is attained at a threshold value of St at which the kinetic energy of a particle impinging on the packing is fully dissipated by the fluid. Thus, for cohesionless particles, the dynamics of the deposition process, rather than the stability of the static packing, defines the random loose packing limit. We have made direct measurements of the interparticle friction in the fluid, and present an experimental measurement of the loose packing volume fraction, \phi_{RLP}, as a function of the friction coefficient \mu_s.Comment: 6 pages, 5 figure

The method of detection of ductal carcinoma in situ has no therapeutic implications: results of a population-based cohort study

Multivariable-adjusted Cox regression analysis of ipsilateral and contralateral invasive breast cancer in women aged 49–75 years at DCIS diagnosis (DCIS diagnostic period 1989–2004). Age was the primary time scale, time since DCIS diagnosis (0–5, 5–10, and ≥10 years) the secondary time scale, and DCIS treatment a time-varying covariable (DOCX 22 kb