Expressions of Attitudes in Students' Narrative Writing: an Appraisal Analysis

This article investigated attitude, one of subsystem appraisal, in the English as a Foreign Language (EFL) university students' narrative writings. Five narrative writing was selected purposefully from undergraduate students of the English Department at a local private university in Central Java. The findings demonstrate that the affect is the most dominant subsystem of attitude used in the students' narrative writing to convey feelings and emotion of characters and events in the stories in order to make the readers involved in the stories. The prominent finding of this research implies that most students used expressions of attitudes which belong to basic English words and repetition of same words. This present research suggests English language teachers and lecturers pay more attention to the explicit teaching of attitudinal words USAge in writing, especially narrative writing

Gender-specific medicine and the ethics of women’s involvement in research

The awareness of the need of studying the influence of sex and gender on diseases started to spread in the ’90s but, almost 30 years later, progress in this area is not sufficient to rule out concerns about a possible inequality in medicine. In order to understand the difficulties behind the persisting gap in knowledge, it is important to be aware of the reasons that led to the regular exclusion of women from clinical research. This paper presents a historical reconstruction of the ethical debate about the involvement of women in research: from the protectionist approach of the ’70s to the demands for inclusion of the ’80s and the ’90s. Such reconstruction shows that the main ethical arguments in favour of inclusion, i.e. the principles of beneficence and justice, also justify the need for a gender-specific medicine. The paper discusses some elements that could have hampered the efforts to reduce the male bias, such as the emphasis on the issue of women inclusion in research, instead of the focus on women’s health needs. Moreover, it is argued that a participatory approach to research – i.e. an approach that considers women as partners who can offer a contribution at all levels of biomedical research – is the most effective in order to achieve the goal of including attention to women’s health into the research agenda

Rethinking the role of Research Ethics Committees in the light of Regulation (EU) No 536/2014 on clinical trials and the COVID-19 pandemic

Research Ethics Committees (RECs)—or Institutional Review Boards (IRBs), as they are known in the US—were created about 50 years ago to independently assess the ethical acceptability of research projects involving human subjects, their fundamental role being the protection of the dignity and rights of research participants. In this paper we develop some critical reflections about the current situation of RECs. Our starting point is the definition of the role they should ideally play, a role that should necessarily include a collaborative approach and the focus on the ethics component of the review. This ideal is unfortunately quite far from reality: inadequacies in the functioning of RECs have been discussed for decades, along with reform proposals. Both in the US and in the European Union (EU), reforms that aim at the centralization of the review process were recently approved. Even though these reforms were needed, they nonetheless raise concerns. We focus on two such concerns, related in particular to Regulation (EU) No 536/2014: the risk of narrowing the scope of the ethics review and that of disregarding the local context. We argue that the COVID-19 pandemic paved the way for the transition towards the centralized model and that an analysis of its impact on the research review process could provide some interesting insights into possible shortcomings of this new model. We conclude by identifying three objectives that define the role of a REC, objectives that any reform should preserve