Achieving mutual engagement in ELT classroom interaction : a study of participation in the opening and closing practices of circle time

IPhD ThesisMost studies investigating classroom participation seek an answer for enquiries to such issues as whether students receive adequate opportunities to access interaction and, if so, in what capacity and in what roles. Recently, Conversation Analytic (CA) studies have contributed to the existing body of knowledge on classroom participation by addressing the question of how teachers and students organise such participation in L2 classrooms. However, most of these studies have approached participation in contexts where participation rights are established by the teacher and met by students. In contrast, this study is concerned more with the organisation of participation in EFL classrooms where such conditions do not apply. That is, in the context of this study, teachers need to perform additional interactional practices to encourage participation. The analyses in this study focus on the opening and closing practices of one recurring teacher-led activity in the data—Circle Time (CT). The data come from audiovisual recordings of teacher-student cohort interaction occurring in ‘Fundamental English Listening-Speaking’ (FELS) classes at a Thai university. To examine the organisation of participation, a collection of 30 examples of CT openings and 24 examples of CT closings were made and CA methodology was used in the analysis. CA procedures, including the organisation of sequence, of multimodalities, and of topic, were employed as analytic tools to explicate the classroom participation that participants jointly construct through their verbal behaviour and embodied actions. The findings demonstrate that dedicated openings are the norm for CT openings, and are formed from two action sequences: 1) locating topic for participation, and 2) establishing topic-as-action. The former manifests a clear framework of participation while the latter enhances the participants’ readiness to participate more actively. Regarding CT closings, a typical form of CT closing, termed here dedicated closings, comprise three sequences of action: 1) disengaging from interaction with individual students, 2) gradually bonding contributions and simultaneously connecting participants into one association, and 3) moving out of CT talk. Furthermore, a microanalysis of opening and closing actions illustrates that teachers employ a variety of extra interactional resources, including embodied conducts, turn-design and various techniques of topic development. ii These various types of interactional work are used to establish and maintain multiparty interaction and generate dynamic participation roles among the participants. By participating in CT dedicated opening and closing, students are observed to have more and more opportunities to establish mutual attention, negotiate mutual understanding, and, above all, develop interpersonal relations, or so-called rapport. These three components are evidently oriented to by experienced EFL teachers to achieve mutual engagement of students involved in teacher-led classroom interaction. The main contribution of the study is an enhanced understanding of how participation ‘gets done’ in a CT context where bidding for turns is normally not present. In addition, by using a micro-analytic approach, the study demonstrates how embodied mutual engagement is accomplished in ELT classroom interaction.Department of Foreign Languages, Faculty of Humanities, Kasetsart University, for granting me a partial scholarshi

Time preferences, conservation and the role of groups: Experiments in Thailand

The thesis consists of three studies on intertemporal decisions of Thai coastal villagers and Thai university students. The research methods are lab-in-the-field experiment, field experiment as well as lab experiment. I investigate the relationship between time preferences and conservation decisions in a Thai coastal village. I also examine how time preferences of group members and communication influence decisions on behalf of a group

Development of a face mask detection pipeline for mask-wearing monitoring in the era of the COVID-19 pandemic: A modular approach

During the SARS-Cov-2 pandemic, mask-wearing became an effective tool to prevent spreading and contracting the virus. The ability to monitor the mask-wearing rate in the population would be useful for determining public health strategies against the virus. However, artificial intelligence technologies for detecting face masks have not been deployed at a large scale in real-life to measure the mask-wearing rate in public. In this paper, we present a two-step face mask detection approach consisting of two separate modules: 1) face detection and alignment and 2) face mask classification. This approach allowed us to experiment with different combinations of face detection and face mask classification modules. More specifically, we experimented with PyramidKey and RetinaFace as face detectors while maintaining a lightweight backbone for the face mask classification module. Moreover, we also provide a relabeled annotation of the test set of the AIZOO dataset, where we rectified the incorrect labels for some face images. The evaluation results on the AIZOO and Moxa 3K datasets showed that the proposed face mask detection pipeline surpassed the state-of-the-art methods. The proposed pipeline also yielded a higher mAP on the relabeled test set of the AIZOO dataset than the original test set. Since we trained the proposed model using in-the-wild face images, we can successfully deploy our model to monitor the mask-wearing rate using public CCTV images.Comment: Accepted at the 19th International Joint Conference on Computer Science and Software Engineering (JCSSE 2022

Assessing Coastal Vulnerability to Climate Change: A Case Study of Nakhon Si Thammarat and Krabi

Climate change is increasingly impacting both environments and human communities. Coastal regions in Thailand are experiencing more severe impacts, which vary based on the unique physical and socio-economic characteristics of each area. To assess the vulnerability of coastal regions in Thailand, this study focused on two provinces, Nakhon Si Thammarat (NST) and Krabi, each representing distinct coastal environments. NST, situated on the Gulf of Thailand’s east coast, has an agriculture-based economy, while Krabi, on the Andaman Sea’s west coast, relies heavily on tourism. The study utilized a multi-criteria decision analysis approach (MCDA) and GIS to analyze the Coastal Vulnerability Index at the sub-district level. The results revealed that, although NST was more vulnerable than Krabi to socio-economic factors such as the poverty rate and the number of fishery households, Krabi was much more vulnerable in the physical environment, including wave height, tidal level, coastal erosion, and slope. However, overall, Krabi exhibited high to the highest levels of coastal vulnerability, while NST displayed moderate to high levels. These findings provide valuable insights for policymakers and government agencies, aiding in the development of strategies to mitigate vulnerability and enhance the quality of life for local residents in both province

Coastal Erosion and Flood Coping Mechanisms in Southern Thailand: A Qualitative Study

Communities in coastal regions are affected by the impacts of extreme climatic events causing flooding and erosion. Reducing the impacts of flood and erosion in these areas by adopting coping strategies that fortify the resilience of individuals and their localities is desirable. This study used summative content analysis to explore the coping mechanisms of coastal communities before, during, and after various dangers relating to flooding and erosion. The findings from the study show that effective surveillance systems, disaster preparedness, risk mapping, early warning systems, availability of databases and functional command systems, as well as reliable funding are essential to efficiently cope with hazards of coastal flooding and erosion. As flooding and erosion have been predicted to be more severe due to climate change in the coming years, the adoption of effective natural and artificial mechanisms with modern technologies could help coastal regions to be more resilient in coping with the dangers associated with flooding and erosion. Pragmatic policies and programs to this end by actors are critical to averting crises induced by flooding and erosion in coastal areas

Evaluation of the effectiveness of behavioural economic incentive programmes for the promotion of a healthy diet and physical activity: a protocol for a systematic review and network meta-analysis

Introduction Obesity and being overweight are major risk factors for metabolic syndrome and non-communicable diseases. Despite the recommendation that a healthy diet and physical activity can reduce the severity of these diseases, many fail to adhere to these measures. From a behavioural economic perspective, adherence to such measures can be encouraged through financial incentives. However, additional related behavioural economic approaches may improve the effectiveness of an incentive programme. As such, we have developed a protocol for a systematic review and network meta-analysis to summarise the current evidence from financial incentive programmes with and without behavioural economic insights for promoting healthy diet and physical activity.Methods and analysis Previous systematic reviews, meta-analyses and individual studies were identified from Medline and Scopus in June 2020 and will be updated until December 2020. Individual studies will be selected and data extracted by two reviewers. Disagreement will be resolved by consensus or adjudicated by a third reviewer. A descriptive analysis will summarise the effectiveness of behavioural economic incentive programmes for promoting healthy diet and physical activity. Moreover, individual studies will be pooled using network meta-analyses where possible. I2 statistics and Cochran’s Q test will be used to assess heterogeneity. Risk of bias and publication bias, if appropriate, will be evaluated, as well as the overall strength of the evidence.Ethics and dissemination Ethics approval for a systematic review and meta-analysis is not required. The findings will be published in a peer-reviewed journal.PROSPERO registration number CRD42020198024

Field evidence on the role of time preferences in conservation behavior

Planting mangroves is a conservation activity pursuing the long-term goal of sustaining the basis for fishing activities. The decision to engage in mangrove planting requires trading off the short-run costs of planting with its long-run benefits. We report a lab-in the-field experiment with Thai coastal villagers in which we elicit shortand long-run time preferences prior to mangrove-seed planting. We show that less present-biased participants plant more seeds, while planting is unrelated to individuals' future discounting. Our results contribute to the debate on whether present bias is positively or negatively related to conservation behavior by showing a positive relation in a replenishment act. (c) 2020 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved

Evaluation of the effectiveness of behavioral economic incentive programs for goal achievement on healthy diet, weight control and physical activity: a systematic review and network meta-analysis

Background: Healthy diet, weight control and physical activity to reduce obesity can be motivated by financial incentives (FI). Behavioral-economic approaches may improve the incentivization effectiveness. This study compares and ranks the effectiveness of standard and behavioral incentivization for healthy diet, weight control, and physical activity promotion. Purpose: To investigate whether behavioral-economic insights improve incentivization effectiveness. Methods: A systematic search of Medline and Scopus was performed from database inception to December 2020. Study characteristics, program designs, and risk ratio (RR) were extracted. A two-stage network meta-analysis pooled and ranked intervention effects. Results: There were 35 eligible RCTs. For diet-weight control, standard FI, deposit contract (deposit), lottery-based incentive (lottery), and standard-FI + lottery increased goal achievement compared to no-FI but only deposit was statistically significant with pooled RRs and 95% confidence intervals (CI) of 1.21 (0.94, 1.56), 1.79 (1.04, 3.05), 1.45 (0.99, 2.13), and 1.73 (0.83, 3.63). For physical activity, standard-FI, deposit, and lottery significantly increased goal achievement compared to no-FI, with pooled RRs of 1.38 (1.13, 1.68), 1.63 (1.24, 2.14) and 1.43 (1.14, 1.80), respectively. In a follow-up period for physical activity, only deposit significantly increased goal achievement compared to no-FI, with pooled RRs of 1.39 (1.11, 1.73). Conclusion: Deposit, followed by lottery, were best for motivating healthy diet, weight control and physical activity at program end. Post-intervention, deposit then standard-FI were best for motivating physical activity. Behavioral insights can improve incentivization effectiveness, although lottery-based approaches may offer only short-term benefit regarding physical activity. However, the imprecise intervention effects were major concerns