THE EFFECT OF TEACHER ERROR FEEDBACK ON THE ACCURACY OF EFL STUDENT WRITING

This study investigated the effect of teacher error feedback on students' ability to write accurately. Three male first-year Physics graduate students at a university in Taiwan participated in this study. They were asked to write a 100-word passage about the greatest invention in human history. Within days of the teacher’s grammatical feedback, the students were required to revise their work again based on the teacher's suggested revisions. In addition, oral conferencing was conducted in order to help the students obtain a better comprehension of certain grammar points. Four weeks after the oral conferencing, the students were asked, without prior notice, to revise their original passages again. The findings reveal that the students made progress in the revised versions of their passages, but the success was not repeated in their later test versions. In other words, no positive relationship between teacher error feedback and students’ improvement in linguistic accuracy over time was observed. This suggests that teacher error feedback alone may not facilitate the learning of linguistic information. A combination of sufficient exposure to English in reading and writing, plus opportunities to practice the language, for example, may lead to better grammar

Teaching Vocabulary to Improve Reading Comprehension

Vocabulary is vital for comprehending reading texts. Readers must possess a certain number of words, the so-called threshold level, in order to be able to read in L2. This paper provides direct vocabulary instruction techniques, aimed at helping students with a small lexicon to acquire core vocabulary, more important and high-frequency words, at rates that will improve their reading comprehension

Finding and Optimising the Key Factors for the Multiple-Response Manufacturing Process

With the advent of modern technology, manufacturing processes became so sophisticated that a single quality characteristic cannot reflect the true product quality. Thus, it is essential to perform the key factor analysis for the manufacturing process with multiple-input (factors) and multiple-output (responses). In this paper, an integrated approach of using the desirability function in conjunction with the Mahalanobis-Taguchi-Gram Schmit (MTGS) system is proposed in order to find and optimise the key factors for a multiple-response manufacturing process. The aim of using the MTGS method is to standardise and orthogonalise the multiple responses so that the Mahalanobis distance for each run can be calculated and the multi-normal assumption for the correlated responses can be relaxed. A realistic example of the solder paste stencil printing process is then used to demonstrate the usefulness of our proposed approach in a practical application

El uso de la lengua materna en el salón de inglés como lengua extranjera

L1 use is a common occurrence in foreign language teaching contexts despite the fact that it often receives criticism for its interference with target language (TL) acquisition. While foreign language teachers should maximize their use of the TL, there is indeed a place for the teacher to use the students’ L1 in their pedagogy. In this paper, an argument derived from theoretical perspectives and empirical research within existing literature supporting the appropriate use of L1 in foreign language classrooms is presented. The argument addresses three key issues—rationales for L1 use, positive effects L1 has on both foreign language learning and instruction, and ways that L1 assists instructors on foreign languages.El uso de la lengua materna es una ocurrencia común en los contextos de la enseñanza de la lengua extranjera, a pesar de que a veces reciba críticas por su interferencia en la adquisición de la Lengua meta. Mientras que los docentes deben maximizar el uso de la Lengua meta, sin duda, hay espacios para que el profesor utilice la lengua materna de los estudiantes en su pedagogía. En este trabajo se presenta un argumento basado en las perspectivas teóricas y la investigación empírica dentro de la literatura existente, apoyando el uso apropiado de la Lengua materna en el salón de inglés como lengua extranjera. El argumento se centra en tres cuestiones fundamentales-racionales para el uso de la lengua materna: Los efectos positivos que la lengua materna tiene tanto en el aprendizaje y la instrucción de una lengua extranjera, como en las formas en las que la lengua materna ayuda a los docentes de idiomas extranjeros

A Closer Examination of Communicative Language Teaching

This paper offers an in-depth discussion of communicative language teaching (CLT). It elaborates upon the construct and characteristics of CLT, and then documents research findings on CLT’s effectiveness. This paper then addresses components of a communicative curriculum, including the selection of materials, the design of activities, and the development of assessment formats

Hospital treatment, mortality and healthcare costs in relation to socioeconomic status among people with bipolar affective disorder

BACKGROUND: Evidence regarding the relationships between the socioeconomic status and long-term outcomes of individuals with bipolar affective disorder (BPD) is lacking. AIMS: We aimed to estimate the effects of baseline socioeconomic status on longitudinal outcomes. METHOD: A national cohort of adult participants with newly diagnosed BPD was identified in 2008. The effects of personal and household socioeconomic status were explored on outcomes of hospital treatment, mortality and healthcare costs, over a 3-year follow-up period (2008–2011). RESULTS: A total of 7987 participants were recruited. The relative risks of hospital treatment and mortality were found elevated for the ones from low-income households who also had higher healthcare costs. Low premium levels did not correlate with future healthcare costs. CONCLUSIONS: Socioeconomic deprivation is associated with poorer outcome and higher healthcare costs in BPD patients. Special care should be given to those with lower socioeconomic status to improve outcomes with potential benefits of cost savings in the following years. DECLARATION OF INTEREST: None. COPYRIGHT AND USAGE: © 2016 The Royal College of Psychiatrists. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Non-Commercial, No Derivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) licence

Development of a deep learning-based tool to assist wound classification

This paper presents a deep learning-based wound classification tool that can assist medical personnel in non-wound care specialization to classify five key wound conditions, namely deep wound, infected wound, arterial wound, venous wound, and pressure wound, given color images captured using readily available cameras. The accuracy of the classification is vital for appropriate wound management. The proposed wound classification method adopts a multi-task deep learning framework that leverages the relationships among the five key wound conditions for a unified wound classification architecture. With differences in Cohen's kappa coefficients as the metrics to compare our proposed model with humans, the performance of our model was better or non-inferior to those of all human medical personnel. Our convolutional neural network-based model is the first to classify five tasks of deep, infected, arterial, venous, and pressure wounds simultaneously with good accuracy. The proposed model is compact and matches or exceeds the performance of human doctors and nurses. Medical personnel who do not specialize in wound care can potentially benefit from an app equipped with the proposed deep learning model