124 research outputs found
Attributes of effective EFL teachers in Vietnamese context as perceived by students and teachers
Identifying characteristics of effective teachers has always been a topic of paramount importance. Accordingly, an extensive volume of theoretical endeavours and empirical research has been devoted to the investigation of typical attributes that effective teachers possess in diverse contexts. Yet, current understanding of the issue in Vietnamese setting remains limited. Given that perceptions about effective teachers’ qualities have been typically found to be highly context-bounded, gaining an insight into these attributes in this under-researched context is expected to provide a solid foundation for further attempts to improve the quality of teaching and learning. The present study responds to this pressing need by exploring the perceptions held by 200 learners and 22 teachers in a language school in Vietnam, employing questionnaires for collecting both quantitative and qualitative data. A theoretical framework adapted from Shulman’s (1986, 1987) model of teachers’ knowledge base was employed. Findings from the study revealed both convergence and mismatches in the perceptions held by the teacher and learner groups. As a whole, teachers, and learners convergently prioritised teachers’ subject matter content knowledge as most important, compared to pedagogical content knowledge and teachers’ identity and interactions with learners. Both groups also voted teachers’ ability to provide clear instructions and explanations as the most important pedagogical feature of effective teachers and uniformly downplayed the role of sociocultural knowledge and the ability to effectively use technology. More in-depth analyses, however, showed that teachers placed more importance over the pedagogical aspects of subject matter knowledge, language proficiency, and teaching methodology, whereas learners more appreciated the psychological and motivational aspects. In particular, the teacher participants highly valued the teachers’ ability of classroom management, material adaptation, and facilitating students’ engagement in learning activities. In contrast, qualities most desired by learners included a positive attitude towards the teaching career and teachers’ willingness to care, understand learners’ problems, encourage, and treat all students on a fair basis
Study on methylene blue adsorption using cashew nut shell-based activated carbon
Adsorption is a widely used technique for the treatment of wastewater containing dyes, which are pollutants that can have serious impacts on the aquatic ecosystems. In this work, activated carbon (AC) was prepared from cashew nut shell (CNS) and used to adsorb methylene blue (MB) from solution. The CNS AC was characterized by scanning electron microscopy, Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy, and nitrogen adsorption-desorption isotherms. The adsorption behavior of MB on CNS AC was investigated by varying the initial solution pH, adsorbent dosage, and initial MB concentration. The results showed that the CNS AC was effective for MB removal, with an adsorption capacity of 24.8 mg/g. The adsorption nature of MB onto the CNS AC surface was explored by analyzing the experimental data using isotherm and kinetic models. The Freundlich and Dubinin-Radushkevich (D-R) isotherm models showed good agreement with the experimental adsorption equilibrium results. The mean adsorption energy was found to be 22.4 kJ/mol, indicating chemical adsorption. The adsorption of MB on the CNS AC followed pseudo-second-order kinetics. This study demonstrates the potential application of CNS AC for MB removal
VIETNAMESE ENGLISH-MAJORED STUDENTS’ USE OF LISTENING STRATEGIES
The crucial role of listening skill in language learning has been well acknowledged, yet attention to this skill remains modest. Numerous studies investigating learners’ listening performance have identified listening strategies as a key factor contributing to the success of effective listeners. This study, using a Likert-scale questionnaire, examined the listening strategies employed by 81 Vietnamese English-majored students, who were divided into two groups - effective and less effective listeners based on an IELTS proficiency test. Findings showed that listening strategies were used at a relatively high level with the metacognitive group employed most frequently compared to cognitive and socio-affective strategies. Lowering anxiety, predicting and planning, resourcing, repetition, and cooperation were found most commonly employed individual strategies. Although no significant differences were found between the groups’ use of the three overarching strategy categories, several discrepancies were identified concerning their use of individual strategies, which provides important implications for listening pedagogical adjustments in this particular context.
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EFL TEACHERS' PERCEPTIONS AND REPORTED TECHNIQUES IN TEACHING LISTENING INFERENCING SKILLS
This research aims were to examine teachers’ perceptions of listening inferencing skills (LIS) and their significance for listening comprehension. In addition, the pedagogical techniques that teachers report to have employed in teaching LIS were also investigated. In order to achieve these goals, a questionnaire consisting of 48 five-point Likert scale items and one open-ended question was utilized as the research instrument. Seventy-two EFL teachers working at different universities, colleges and private language centres in a province in the Mekong Delta, Vietnam gave their responses to the questionnaires. The results revealed that a significant number of teachers appeared to hold a limited understanding of what LIS actually refer to. However, when they were introduced to what LIS involve, they noticeably reached the agreement that these skills are beneficial for listening comprehension in particular and language learning in general. Besides, a large number of the participants also reported that they applied LIS in their own English language learning and teaching. In terms of pedagogical techniques used to teach LIS, the teachers mainly concentrated on pre-listening tactics with the hope of equipping their students well for the listening process regarding linguistic and background knowledge while techniques for the while-, post- and extension stages in listening instruction seemed to be overlooked. Article visualizations
EFL teachers’ perceptions of professional development activities and their effects in a non-anglosphere context
Providing teachers with adequate professional development (PD) is a central tenet to enhance education quality. In Vietnam, despite the blossoming of PD activities promoted over the past decade, the central question of how effectively these existing activities facilitate changes in teachers’ practice has been under-researched. This mixed-method study responded to the scarcity in understanding the effectiveness of PD activities in the Vietnamese setting by employing a questionnaire administered to 80 high school teachers and six semi-structured interviews. Evidence from the questionnaire and interviews revealed that EFL teachers participated in PD activities on an occasional basis. Institution-internal or in-house professional activities were most common, while joining a professional affiliation such as a TESOL association was the rarest. Also, PD activities have positively reinforced the teachers’ language proficiency, teaching practice, and planning practical lessons to meet students’ learning needs. The discussions and recommendations are made for enhancing the quality of PD activities
Constructing a Knowledge Graph for Vietnamese Legal Cases with Heterogeneous Graphs
This paper presents a knowledge graph construction method for legal case
documents and related laws, aiming to organize legal information efficiently
and enhance various downstream tasks. Our approach consists of three main
steps: data crawling, information extraction, and knowledge graph deployment.
First, the data crawler collects a large corpus of legal case documents and
related laws from various sources, providing a rich database for further
processing. Next, the information extraction step employs natural language
processing techniques to extract entities such as courts, cases, domains, and
laws, as well as their relationships from the unstructured text. Finally, the
knowledge graph is deployed, connecting these entities based on their extracted
relationships, creating a heterogeneous graph that effectively represents legal
information and caters to users such as lawyers, judges, and scholars. The
established baseline model leverages unsupervised learning methods, and by
incorporating the knowledge graph, it demonstrates the ability to identify
relevant laws for a given legal case. This approach opens up opportunities for
various applications in the legal domain, such as legal case analysis, legal
recommendation, and decision support.Comment: ISAILD@KSE 202
Potential to mitigate ammonia emission from slurry by increasing dietary fermentable fiber through inclusion of tropical byproducts in practical diets for growing pigs
Objective: Research was conducted to test the effect of including fiber-rich feedstuffs in practical pig diets on nutrient digestibility, nitrogen balance and ammonia emissions from slurry.
Methods: Three Vietnamese fiber sources were screened, namely cassava leaf meal (CL), cassava root residue (CR), and tofu by-product (TF). Accordingly, a control diet (Con) with 10% of dietary non-starch polysaccharides (NSP) and three test diets including one of the three fiber-rich feedstuffs to reach 15% of NSP were formulated. All formulated diets had the same level of crude protein (CP), in vitro ileal protein digestible and metabolisable energy, whereas the in vitro hindgut volatile fatty acid (VFA) production of the test diets was 12% to 20% higher than the control diet. Forty growing barrows with initial body weight at 28.6 +/- 1.93 kg (mean +/- standard deviation) were allocated to the four treatments. When pigs reached about 50 kg of body weight, four pigs from each treatment were used for a nitrogen balance trial and ammonia emission assessment, the remaining six pigs continued the second period of the feeding trial.
Results: The TF treatment increased fecal VFA by 33% as compared with the control treatment (p = 0.07), suggesting stimulation of the hindgut fermentation. However, urinary N was not significantly reduced or shifted to fecal N, nor was slurry pH decreased. Accordingly, ammonia emissions were not mitigated. CR and CL treatments failed to enhance in vivo hindgut fermentation, as assessed by fecal VFA and purine bases. On the contrary, the reduction of CP digestibility in the CL treatment enhanced ammonia emissions from slurry.
Conclusion: Dietary inclusion of cassava and tofu byproducts through an increase of dietary NSP from 10% to 15% might stimulate fecal VFA excretion but this does not guarantee a reduction in ammonia emissions from slurry, while its interaction with protein digestibility even might enhance enhanced ammonia emission
NOWJ1@ALQAC 2023: Enhancing Legal Task Performance with Classic Statistical Models and Pre-trained Language Models
This paper describes the NOWJ1 Team's approach for the Automated Legal
Question Answering Competition (ALQAC) 2023, which focuses on enhancing legal
task performance by integrating classical statistical models and Pre-trained
Language Models (PLMs). For the document retrieval task, we implement a
pre-processing step to overcome input limitations and apply learning-to-rank
methods to consolidate features from various models. The question-answering
task is split into two sub-tasks: sentence classification and answer
extraction. We incorporate state-of-the-art models to develop distinct systems
for each sub-task, utilizing both classic statistical models and pre-trained
Language Models. Experimental results demonstrate the promising potential of
our proposed methodology in the competition.Comment: ISAILD@KSE 202
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