Reliability of MUAP properties in multi-channel array EMG recordings of trapezius and SCM

Muscle activity can be assessed non-invasively by means of surface electrodes places at the skin overlyin a muscle. When multiy-channel array electrodes are used, it is possible to extract motor unit action potentials (MUAP's) from the EMG signals with a segmentation approach based on the Continuous Wavelet Transform... The objective of the present study was to determine the test-retest reliability of the mentioned parameters during different tasks of the shoulder and neck muscles

An identity transformation? Social class, language prejudice and the erasure of multilingual capital in higher education

This chapter examines what happens to the identities of working-class linguistic minority students when their linguistic practices come into contact with those of the 'academic tribes' (Becher and Trowler 2001) that they seek to join. I argue that learning the language and literacy practices of the academic community involves power and identity. In the case under discussion, institutional discourses framed linguistic diversity as a problem to be fixed rathe than a resource to be used thus erasing the multilingual capital in their midst and positioning the bi/multilingual students on the academic writing programme as in need of English language remediation. This ascribed identity troubled the participants' identities as a person worthy of a place in higher education, by stigmatising their linguistic repertoires and categorising them as in danger of failure. The identities that the students inhabited to resist their institutional positioning were not always conducive to the scholarly enterprise

Identity work in the academic writing classroom: where gender meets social class

This article examines how non traditional male undergraduate students from linguistic minorities perform gender on an academic writing programme and what this tells us about the significance of gender for the teaching of academic writing in the contemporary academy. I focus on how gender is performed in talk about academic discourse and reveal the attraction of ‘laddish’ identities. I aim to deepen understanding in EAP of the importance of the social world on classroom relations and contribute to research that has considered identity in relation to the written outputs of students and scholars. To gain a more nuanced understanding of gender, an intersectional approach is adopted, in which gender is viewed in intersection with social class. I argue that the gender-class nexus is of significance for teaching academic writing in that it reveals how the social world orients students to language learning and their positioning in deficit discourses. I demonstrate how understanding of these issues can be developed through fine-grained analysis of spoken interaction and contend that language-as-resource approaches to linguistic diversity offer a productive way forward for EAP and for teaching in contexts of linguistic diversity in higher education

Postgraduate students as plurilingual social actors in UK higher education

This paper sets out to develop a finer-grained understanding of the ‘plurilingual social actor’ within an Anglophone higher educational setting. Drawing on data collected as part of The Multilingual University project, I examine how a group of plurilingual postgraduate students taking modules in applied linguistics at a university in London viewed their linguistic repertoires as a resource for the taught curriculum and what their experiences can tell us about the plurilingual social actor. The study opened an institutional space for making linguistic diversity visible and for considering how it was a resource for the curriculum. The findings indicate that multilingual resources play an important role in supporting learning at postgraduate level and reveal ways in which familiarity with English medium education shapes how postgraduate students mobilise their multilingual resources in relation to the taught curriculum. Importantly, the study shows how the plurilingual social actor offers a dynamic, powerful and affirmative identity position that is well aligned with the teaching and learning agenda in higher education. It is my contention that a better understanding of this alignment will allow us to raise awareness of language-as-resource and advance plurilingual pedagogies in the sector

Multilingual gendered identities: female undergraduate students in London talk about heritage languages

In this paper I explore how a group of female university students, mostly British Asian and in their late teens and early twenties, perform femininities in talk about heritage languages. I argue that analysis of this talk reveals ways in which the participants enact ‘culturally intelligible’ gendered subject positions. This frequently involves negotiating the norms of ‘heteronormativity’, constituting femininity in terms of marriage, motherhood and maintenance of heritage culture and language, and ‘girl power’, constituting femininity in terms of youth, sassiness, glamour and individualism. For these young women, I ask whether higher education can become a site in which they have the opportunities to explore these identifications and examine other ways of imagining the self and what their stories suggest about ‘doing being’ a young British Asian woman in London