The EFL Essay Writing Difficulties of Egyptian Student Teachers of English: Implications for Essay Writing Curriculum and Instruction

The current study is conducted with the aim of investigating the essay writing difficulties of Egyptian student teachers of English. More specifically, it attempts to fulfil the following three aims: explore the focuses of teaching essay writing at one of the pioneering faculties of education in Egypt; investigate the different essay writing practices used by Egyptian essay writing teachers from teachers as well as their students’ perspectives; and identify the essay writing difficulties encountered by Egyptian student teachers of English at the concerned faculty of education from both students and their teachers’ perspectives. The current study adopts an interpretive methodology that uses a sequential mixed methods approach to data collection and analysis. Therefore, I administered a questionnaire to 165 student teachers of English and 7 essay writing teachers, conducted semi-structured in-depth interviews with 14 student teachers of English and 7 essay writing teachers, and observed nine essay writing sessions of different teachers. Data is analysed quantitatively using SPSS descriptive statistics and qualitatively using exploratory content analysis. Findings of the current study reveal that there are eleven focuses of teaching essay writing at the concerned faculty of education. These focuses have been classified into four main categories: Mechanics/Language, Content, Structure/Layout and Practising Writing. Findings also shed light on the essay writing teachers’ practices in relation to planning, teaching, feedback and assessment. Finally, findings show that student teachers of English encounter the following difficulties in their essay writing: planning difficulties, organisational difficulties including coherence, cohesion, and stylistic difficulties, lexical problems, and technical difficulties including grammar, punctuation, spelling and revision and editing. According to the above mentioned findings, a theoretical writing model has been devised and a pedagogical process genre approach to teaching EFL essay writing in Egypt has been proposed. Implications for essay writing curriculum planning and instruction are also included. Finally, suggestions for further research are provided.The Egyptian Ministry of Higher Educatio

On the connection between two quasilinear elliptic problems with source terms of order 0 or 1

We establish a precise connection between two elliptic quasilinear problems with Dirichlet data in a bounded domain of $\mathbb{R}^{N}.$ The first one, of the form $$-\Delta_{p}u=\beta(u)| \nabla u| ^{p}+\lambda f(x)+\alpha,$$ involves a source gradient term with natural growth, where $\beta$ is nonnegative, $\lambda>0,f(x)\geqq0$, and $\alpha$ is a nonnegative measure. The second one, of the form $$-\Delta_{p}v=\lambda f(x)(1+g(v))^{p-1}+\mu,$$ presents a source term of order $0,$where $g$ is nondecreasing, and $\mu$ is a nonnegative measure. Here $\beta$ and $g$ can present an asymptote. The correlation gives new results of existence, nonexistence, regularity and multiplicity of the solutions for the two problems, without or with measures. New informations on the extremal solutions are given when $g$ is superlinear

Simulation of turbocharged diesel engines under transient conditions

Imperial Users onl

T2D2: A Time Series Tester, Transformer, and Decomposer Framework for Outlier Detection

The automatic detection of outliers in time series datasets has captured much amount of attention in the data science community. It is not a simple task as the data may have several perspectives, such as sessional, trendy, or a combination of the two. Furthermore, to obtain a reliable and untrustworthy knowledge from the data, the data itself should be understandable. To cope with these challenges, in this paper, we introduce a new framework that can first test the stationarity and seasonality of dataset, then apply a set of Fourier transforms to get the Fourier sample frequencies, which can be used as a support of a decomposer component. The proposed framework, namely TTDD (Test, Transform, Decompose, and Detection), implements the decomposer component that split the dataset into three parts: trend, seasonal, and residual. Finally, the frequency difference detector compares the frequency of the test set to the frequency of the training set determining the periods of discrepancy in the frequency considering them as outlier periods

CHROMO-STEREOSCOPIC VISUALISATION FOR DYNAMIC MARINE OPERATIONS

Chromo stereoscopy (CS) is a simple and cost effective 3D system that can easily deliver geospatial information. CS has been used in several scientific data presentations, including remote sensing, physical modelling and hydrographic applications. In some of these applications the 3D effect was solely CS-related, while others integrated CS with other methods of implementing 3D. CS was mainly used in static visualisation, but no dynamic applications were found. Also, the restricted use of colour was acknowledged as a limitation for CS suggesting its unsuitability for applications where colour conventions are significant. This research focuses on CS for the marine applications and aims to (i) investigate users’ perception to CS effect and its interaction with other depth cues, (ii) assess the acceptance of the potential users to the changes in conventional colouring systems, (iii) and evaluate the usability and practicality of CS as an additional visualisation system in dynamic marine applications. To address these, visual scenarios were developed and expert human participants were recruited and interview for the evaluation. CS was well perceived among the participants. The interaction between different depth cues has advantages of increasing the depth perception and comprehending the 3D nature of the surrounding environment. For instance, from a certain view angle where two objects block each other, CS enhances the interposition effect, that indicates which object is in the front and gives a qualitative estimation of the spatial separation between them. Shading increases the realism of surface objects, and provides information for their undulation. It also dilutes the colours used in CS and increases the range of colours perceived and enhances the effect perceived from CS. The advantage of using the colour coding system to indicate distance is a valuable and original outcome of this thesis. This coding improved the participants understanding of the behaviour of moving objects (whether vessels coming closer or drifting apart) and enabled users to locate them in reference to the surrounding topography. Such knowledge is important to attain safer operations in a 3D environment. Accepting changes in colours in a visual presentation is linked to experience gained during interaction with the system, and the changes would be tolerated by the users in favour of improvements in situation awareness. Blind navigation and underwater operations are examples of where CS can be beneficial

Financing for Development, the Monterrey Consensus: Achievements and Prospects

The International Conference on Financing for Development, held in Monterrey, Mexico, in March 2002, marked the beginning of a new international approach to dealing with issues of development finance. It resulted from a unique process that broke new ground in bringing together all relevant stakeholders in a manner that was unprecedented in inclusiveness. Under the umbrella of the United Nations, all parties involved in the financing for development process contributed to creating a policy framework, the Monterrey Consensus of the International Conference on Financing for Development, to guide their respective future efforts to deal with issues of financing development at the national, regional, international, and systemic levels. This paper presents a summary of the major recommendations of the Monterrey Conference

Improved Spectrum Mobility using Virtual Reservation in Collaborative Cognitive Radio Networks

Cognitive radio technology would enable a set of secondary users (SU) to opportunistically use the spectrum licensed to a primary user (PU). On the appearance of this PU on a specific frequency band, any SU occupying this band should free it for PUs. Typically, SUs may collaborate to reduce the impact of cognitive users on the primary network and to improve the performance of the SUs. In this paper, we propose and analyze the performance of virtual reservation in collaborative cognitive networks. Virtual reservation is a novel link maintenance strategy that aims to maximize the throughput of the cognitive network through full spectrum utilization. Our performance evaluation shows significant improvements not only in the SUs blocking and forced termination probabilities but also in the throughput of cognitive users.Comment: 7 pages, 10 figures, IEEE ISCC 201

PHYSIOLOGICAL AND MOLECULAR MARKERS FOR SALT TOLERANCE IN FOUR BARLEY CULTIVARS

The present investigation was carried out to detect physiological and molecular markers for salt tolerance in barley. Four cultivars of barley were screened for their tolerance against salt stress (9000 ppm). with respect to the performance of some physiological parameters such as germination percentage and abscisic acid (ABA) content and develop RAPD-PCR markers in barley linked to salt tolerance. The results of physiological analysis revealed a depression in germination percentages and an accumulation of abscisic acid (ABA) content in the stressed plants than those of the controls. The content of abscisic acid was much greater in the tolerant cultivars than in the sensitive ones. RAPD analysis was done utilizing six 10-mer random primers. The results showed the occurrence of some molecular genetic markers associated with salt tolerance. In conclusion, the physiological and molecular markers would be useful in screening different cultivars for their tolerance against salt stress during breeding programs of barley