Localised, student-centred curriculum construction : a case study of making Chinese learnable for Australian primary school students

With the turn to ‘zhōng wén rè - 中文热’ (Chinese fever), Chinese is now the most commonly spoken second language in Australia. There has been a concomitant growth in interest in the learning of the Chinese language in local schools. However, it has been reported that there exist huge difficulties and challenges in making Chinese learnable for the predominantly Englishspeaking learners in Australia. The high dropout rate from Chinese language courses presents evidence of this. Consequently, this case study has been conducted in a local public school of New South Wales through the Australia-China educational partnership program entitled ROSETE. Specifically, the purpose of this case study is to draw on the local students’ social practices, undertaken in English, for establishing what to teach in the Chinese language classroom. The aim is to construct an appropriately learnable curriculum which will assist to enrich students’ learning of Chinese. In doing so, this study focuses on local students’ daily recurring sociolinguistic activities and their funds of knowledge in the school-based community through addressing and answering the overarching research question: how can the use of students’ sociolinguistic activities and funds of knowledge contribute to curriculum construction to enrich the learning of the Chinese language? Guided by this question, the study initially investigates particular forms of local students’ daily sociolinguistic activities, performed in English at school, then utilises them as the learning content sources. In effect, it gives priority to mobilising students’ knowledge base in order to adapt their preferred instruction strategies to make them suitable for the local educational milieu. Furthermore, it is suggested that this process of generating Chinese learning materials can and should be adjusted, and then applied to more broadly to emergent second language learners of Chinese around the world, in accordance with their diversified cultural and educational environments. The case study suggests that local students’ potential translanguaging capabilities between English and Chinese are evolving and becoming powerful due in part to the effort exerted by their engagement in this form of situated learning practice. Thus, not only can Chinese be made learnable, but a specific localised vocabulary can become the base for more extensive language learning

The Role of Significant Others on International Students’ Agency in Chinese Learning: Translanguaging Lens

This paper is based on a case study conducted on the international students’ agentic choices and actions in response to such significant others’ impact on their competency, confidence and achievements towards Chinese learning through being engaged in translanguaging pedagogical practices. In the study, the data was collected from a photo-elicitation interview in the form of a focus group among the student participants. The data analysis revealed that the participants tended to display peer-directed, teacher-facilitated and community member-reinforced agency towards speeding up their self-understanding competency in class, improving self-learning efficacy after class, and enhancing self-awareness of tones, as a result of interacting with diverse significant others in translanguaging space. Correspondingly, this study illustrated three categories of significant others, including class peers, native Chinese teachers and members of Chinese-speaking communities who can exert the influences on enacting international students’ agency towards Chinese learning in a flexible, efficient and critical way. These findings offer an insight into shaping an overseas learners’ agency-oriented approach to make Chinese as a learnable language from a translanguaging perspective. Furthermore, the concept of significant others is linked to the field of international Chinese language education. Thus, it is expected to provide some contributory implications to native and non-native Chinese teachers, educators and researchers, particularly on paying more attention to such emergent interactions between significant others and international students’ agentic emotions, feelings and attitudes towards learning of Chinese language in different circumstances

An Investigation of the Beliefs and Classroom Performances of the Overseas Students in Chinese Learning at DUT

This research intends to discover the beliefs of the overseas students in Chinese learning at DUT (Dalian University of Technology) and how their beliefs influence their classroom performances. Furthermore, it will figure out the relationship between the overseas Chinese learners’ beliefs and their corresponding classroom performances concerning Chinese learning. With reference to research method, qualitative and quantitative methods are used to collect data. Firstly, two kinds of questionnaire are designed to collect the data regarding overseas Chinese learners’ beliefs and their classroom performances. What is more, classroom observation is used to record the genuine classroom performances of the overseas students in Chinese classes to supplement data collected from questionnaires. And also, SPSS 17.0 is adopted to calculate the relationship between the learners’ beliefs and their classroom performances. Finally, this paper concludes that the overseas Chinese learners’ beliefs and their classroom performances have influences on their learning outcomes

T-SaS: Toward Shift-aware Dynamic Adaptation for Streaming Data

In many real-world scenarios, distribution shifts exist in the streaming data across time steps. Many complex sequential data can be effectively divided into distinct regimes that exhibit persistent dynamics. Discovering the shifted behaviors and the evolving patterns underlying the streaming data are important to understand the dynamic system. Existing methods typically train one robust model to work for the evolving data of distinct distributions or sequentially adapt the model utilizing explicitly given regime boundaries. However, there are two challenges: (1) shifts in data streams could happen drastically and abruptly without precursors. Boundaries of distribution shifts are usually unavailable, and (2) training a shared model for all domains could fail to capture varying patterns. This paper aims to solve the problem of sequential data modeling in the presence of sudden distribution shifts that occur without any precursors. Specifically, we design a Bayesian framework, dubbed as T-SaS, with a discrete distribution-modeling variable to capture abrupt shifts of data. Then, we design a model that enable adaptation with dynamic network selection conditioned on that discrete variable. The proposed method learns specific model parameters for each distribution by learning which neurons should be activated in the full network. A dynamic masking strategy is adopted here to support inter-distribution transfer through the overlapping of a set of sparse networks. Extensive experiments show that our proposed method is superior in both accurately detecting shift boundaries to get segments of varying distributions and effectively adapting to downstream forecast or classification tasks.Comment: CIKM 202

Mechanical Properties of Steel Fiber-Reinforced Magnesium Phosphate Cement Mortar

A new cement-based mortar with high early strength and toughness was developed by adding micro steel fibers (MSF) in magnesium phosphate cement (MPC) mortar. The compressive and flexural tests were carried out to investigate the effect of curing time, MSF volume fraction, sand-cement mass ratio, and water-cement mass ratio on the strength and flexural toughness of MSF-reinforced MPC mortar (MSFRMM). Also, the flexural toughness and ductility of MSFRMM were evaluated according to ASTM C1609. The results of this study showed that the addition of MSF from 0% to 1.6% by volume significantly improved the compressive strength of MSFRMM. The MSFRMM showed high early strength, especially during the first 3 days. The addition of MSFs changed the flexural failure mode of MPC-based mortar from brittleness to ductility, and the flexural toughness of MSFRMM remarkably increased with the increase of MSF volume fraction from 0% to 1.6%. The toughness and ductility of MSFRMM slightly increased with the increase of the dosage of cement. The toughness and ductility of MSFRMM increased with the decrease of the water-cement mass ratio due to the improved density of the mortar caused by the reduction of water