New parameters for the teaching (and testing) of English Pronunciation

The recent (2018) Companion Volume to the Common European Framework offers an overhaul of many of the scales of descriptors, including, notably, phonology. A single, skeletal, scale for 'phonological control' is replaced by three scales, describing overall control, sound articulation, and prosodic features. In each of these, the focus has become intelligibility, rather than proximity to a native speaker accent. In this article I examine the development of pronunciation teaching since the communicative revolution, and the rise of English as a lingua franca (ELF) in which intelligibility is crucial. The article concludes with a reflection on how (if at all) the revised framework could inform an 'ELF' aware assessment of pronunciation

Shifting perspectives on native speaker teachers: and new roles for collaboratori linguistici?

In this paper I examine the profile of the collaboratori ed esperti linguistici (formerly lettori) in the light of a thirty year old and ongoing debate contrasting the role of native English speaking teachers (NESTs) with that of non-native colleagues (NNESTs), and against a background of rapid change in English language requirements in Italian and European universities. The picture which emerges from the PRIN survey of 75 CEL is of a professional category which is largely a product of the ‘communicative revolution’ in language teaching, and which is less wedded to native speaker norms than its NNEST colleagues. I conclude that the traditional distinction between native and non-native teacher is increasingly problematic, and potentially misleading, while there are many possible future roles for collaboratori linguistici which transcend the basic requirement of ‘nativespeakerism’

Conscious Anxiety, Conscious Repression and Ego-strength as Related to Dream Recall, Content and Vividness

Subjects\u27 reported dream recall frequency, dream content and vividness or recall were discussed and examined in relation to sex of the subject and MMPI Conscious Anxiety, Conscious Repression and Ego-strength scores. Fifty-three Utah State University students, who volunteered to participate in a study of dreaming behavior, were administered the MMPI and asked to complete a dream log diary. The dream log required a daily recording of total number of dreams recalled, the number of vividly and vaguely recalled dreams and a rating of each dream in one of four dream content-process categories. Content-process categories included pleasurable, working, conflict and disorganized/frightening dreams. Relationships and possible interaction effects for the variables measured were tested for significance. No significant relationship was found between Conscious Anxiety, Conscious Repression or Ego-strength and dream recall frequency, sex of the subject, percentage of vivid dreams recalled, or percent of dreams recalled in the positive (pleasurable and working dreams) versus negative (conflict and disorganized/frightening) categories. Several significant differences were found, however, between the percentage of dreams reported in dream content-process categories for male subjects when analyzed according to higher-lower MMPI scale score categories and higher-lower dream recall level. Results of subcategory analysis tended to support an interaction between anxiety, repression and dream process consistent with the continuity and adaptive theories of dreaming. Male subjects with higher Conscious Anxiety reported a significantly greater percent of disorganized/frightening dreams. Higher anxiety tended to produce a higher percentage of working dreams as long as repression of threatening material was low enough to permit the recall of more emotion-laden dream processes. There was also a significant interaction between reported precent of pleasurable dreams, recall level and repression, which was explained as possibly indicating that pleasurable dreams may serve as an escape of integrating process for high repression male subjects. Results of analysis for female subjects indicated that higher recall subjects reported a significantly higher percent of disorganized dreams, which is consistent with the salience theory of recall. Recalled dream processes seemed to be not as strongly tied to personality variables for female subjects. Contentless dreams have been proposed in previous research to reflect repression by the subject. Results showed no significant difference between higher and lower repression subjects on the number of contentless dreams reported

Framing the Framework: Four Decades of Change in Language Teaching (and the Long March of ELF)

In this paper I reflect on changes in language use over more than four decades, which have prompted a revised (2018) version of the Common European Framework, the ‘Companion Volume’. The appearance of the Council of Europe’s ‘threshold level’ in 1976, later to take its place as B1 in the six-level CEFR, heralded a new attention to communication for language teaching professionals. The age of audio-lingualism was past, giving way to the communicative revolution, and its attention to ‘real language’, and ‘authentic materials’. In the revised Framework this approach has shifted to reflect changes in lifestyles and technological progress in the new millennium. No longer is the focus on preparing learners to communicate with native speakers, but on plurilingualism and inclusion; the single scale of descriptors for phonology has been replaced by three scales, none of which refer to proximity to a native speaker accent; and, perhaps most significantly, there are completely new scales for online interaction. I shall take a critical look at these changes and their implications for teachers: four decades of change which have provided the backdrop to Carmel’s career at the forefront of language teaching research

A Validity Study: Relationship Between the Self Inventory Scale, the California Psychological Inventory, and the Adjective Check List

The specific objective of this research was to begin assessment of construct validity of the Self Inventory Scale. Subjects were 100 Utah State University students, living in university dormitories, chosen at random. Subjects were administered the Self Inventory Scale and the California Psychological Inventory. Subjects submitted names of peers, one of whom was asked to complete an Adjective Check List describing the subject. CPI subscale scores were correlated with Self Inventory Scale subscale scores, to determine the relationship between underlying constructs. Sixty-four of the 126 correlations computed were significant at the .01 significance level. Similarity of construct and configurational analysis of significant correlations suggest construct validity exists for Self Inventory Scale subscales

The thermal stability of the tryptic fragment of bovine microsomal cytochrome b5 and a variant containing six additional residues

AbstractThermally induced denaturation has been measured for both oxidised and reduced forms of the tryptic fragment or bovine microsomal cytochrome b5 using spectrophotometric methods. In the oxidised state, the tryptic fragment of cytochrome b5 (Ala7-Lys90) denatures in a single cooperative transition with a midpoint temperature (Tm) of ∼ 67°C (pH 7.0). The reduced form of the tryptic fragment of cytochrome b5 shows a higher transition temperature of ∼ 73°C at pH 7.0 and this is reflected in the values of ΔHm, ΔSm, and Δ(ΔG) of ∼ 310kJ · mol−1, 900J · mol−1 · K−1 and 5 kJ · mol−1. Increased thermal stability is demonstrated for a variant protein that contains the first 90 amino acid residues of cytochrome b5. These novel increases in stability are observed in both redox states and result from the presence of six additional residues at the amino-terminus. The two forms of cytochrome b5 do not differ significantly in structure with the results suggesting that the reorganisation energy (λ) of the variant protein, as measured indirectly from redox-linked differences in conformational stability, is small. Consequently the reported subtle differences in reactivity between variants of cytochrome b5 may result from the presence of additional N-terminal residues on the surface of the protein

Properties of macroeconomic forecast errors

This paper investigates the distributional properties of individual and consensus time series macroeconomic forecast errors, using data from the Survey of Professional Forecasters. The degree of autocorrelation and the presence of ARCH in the consensus errors is also determined. We find strong evidence of leptokurtic forecast errors and some evidence of skewness, suggesting that an assumption of error normality is inappropriate; many of the forecast error series are found to have non-zero mean, and we find sporadic evidence of consensus error ARCH. Properties of the distribution of cross-sectional forecast errors are also examined

Profiles of cash flow components

Includes bibliographical references (p. 20-22)

Forefronting Welsh through English: translating and translanguaging in Alys Conran's 'Pigeon'

Alys Conran’s first novel, Pigeon, (2016), relates the misadventure of a disaffected young Welsh boy, partly through the eyes of his friend and accomplice Iola, who, like Pigeon, comes from a broken family. Both are growing up in a bleak post industrial village in North Wales, never named, possibly Bethesda, the setting for one of the finest novels ever written in Welsh, Caradog Prichard’s Un nos ola leuad, which also charts the psychological undercurrents of a pre-adolescent boy trying to make sense of the world in which he finds himself, as he wanders innocently along a path of self-destruction. Prichard’s novel, written half a century ago, is in Welsh. Conran, a native speaker of Welsh, writes in English. In choosing to do so she offers insights into the way in which the two languages of Wales have been brought together through the media, through a bilingual educational system, and through changed attitudes towards both English and Welsh in the wake of devolution, more functional and less emotively charged. Pigeon and Iola are Welsh speakers, but they resort to English not just to interact with Pigeon’s monolingual step-sister, brought to the village by a violent Englishman who moves in with Pigeon’s mother, but also to play out their own fantasies, fuelled by the language of films and social media. In short, Pigeon, with its continual reference to the language use of its protagonists, can be seen as an exploration of ‘translanguaging’, a term which first appeared in Welsh as trawsieithu (Williams 1994) and has been defined by Canagarajah (2011) as ‘the ability of multilingual speakers to shuttle between languages, treating the diverse languages that form their repertoire as an integrated system’