Interpersonal Meaning in Textbooks for Teaching English as a Foreign Language in China: A Multimodal Approach

There is increasing awareness among linguists that discourse analysis inevitably involves analyses of meanings arising from the combination of multiple modes of communication. The evolving multimodal pedagogic environment for teaching English as a foreign language (henceforth EFL), among other communicative contexts, calls for a social, semiotic, and linguistic explanation. Situated within the theoretical landscape of social semiotics and in the pedagogic context of EFL education, the present study aims to elucidate how linguistic and visual semiotic resources are co-deployed to construe interpersonal meaning in multimodal textbooks. The data drawn upon are eighteen EFL textbooks for primary and secondary schooling, published by People’s Education Press between 2002 and 2006. The research design consists of three complementary sub-studies. First, it investigates the ways in which the semantic regions of ENGAGEMENT and GRADUATION can be modelled in multimodal texts, with special reference to the interplay of voices in textbook discourse. The second sub-study analyzes how verbal and visual semiotic resources are co-deployed to construe the ‘emotion and attitude’ goal highlighted in curriculum standards, with a particular focus on verbiage-image relations. Third, it extends the linguistic concept ‘modality’ to multimodal discourse, exploring coding orientation in texts for different educational contexts and between different constituent genres. The main findings of this thesis are as follows: (1) A range of multimodal resources (i.e. labelling, dialogue balloon, jointly-constructed text, illustration and highlighting) are identified as enabling editor voice to negotiate meanings with reader voice and character voice. It is found that the way in which an ENGAGEMENT value can be scaled is strongly associated with the intrinsic property of the given multimodal resource. The interaction between multiple voices is closely related to contact, social distance, and point of view. (2) It is shown that images play an essential role in realizing attitudinal meanings. Together with verbal APPRAISAL resources, visual semiotic features work to position the readers in ways that align them to set pedagogic goals, guiding them in completing jointly-constructed texts. Moreover, an attitudinal shift from an emotional release to a more institutionalized type of evaluation can be identified as students advance through the school years. (3) It is argued that what counts as real in multimodal texts is socially defined and specific to a given communicative context. The nature of pedagogic discourse should be taken into account when visual displays are produced for pedagogic materials. The implications of this study include both theoretical and pedagogic aspects。Theoretically it adapts and extends APPRAISAL analysis to multimodal discourse, exploring the intersemiotic complementarity and co-instantiation in construing global evaluative stance. This semiotic exploration, in return, suggests ways in which discourse analysis may help textbook users better understand and interpret the multimodal features. With the affordances as well as limitations of semiotic resources made explicit, we may have one step further towards a comprehensive and critical understanding of multimodal construal of interpersonal meaning in pedagogic materials

Sparse representation for pose invariant face recognition

Face recognition is easily affected by pose angle. In order to improve the obustness to pose angle, we need to solve the pose estimation, face synthesis and recognition problem. Sparse representation can represent a face image with linear combination of atom faces. In this paper, we construct different pose dictionaries using face images captured under the same pose angle to estimate pose angle and synthesize front face images for recognition. Experimental results show that sparse representation can estimate pose angle accurately, synthesize near frontal faces very well and significantly improve the recognition rate for large pose angles

Using Granule to Search Privacy Preserving Voice in Home IoT Systems

The Home IoT Voice System (HIVS) such as Amazon Alexa or Apple Siri can provide voice-based interfaces for people to conduct the search tasks using their voice. However, how to protect privacy is a big challenge. This paper proposes a novel personalized search scheme of encrypting voice with privacy-preserving by the granule computing technique. Firstly, Mel-Frequency Cepstrum Coefficients (MFCC) are used to extract voice features. These features are obfuscated by obfuscation function to protect them from being disclosed the server. Secondly, a series of definitions are presented, including fuzzy granule, fuzzy granule vector, ciphertext granule, operators and metrics. Thirdly, the AES method is used to encrypt voices. A scheme of searchable encrypted voice is designed by creating the fuzzy granule of obfuscation features of voices and the ciphertext granule of the voice. The experiments are conducted on corpus including English, Chinese and Arabic. The results show the feasibility and good performance of the proposed scheme

Research on the reaction of furil with ammonium acetate

The direct reaction of furil with ammonium acetate in refluxing glacial acetic acid under the absence of appropriate aldehydes was systematically studied. The principal product with furan rings and imidazole ring 2,4,5-tri(furan-2-yl)-1H-imidazole (I) was obtained in moderate yield, and two new byproducts containing furan rings were successfully purified by C18 reversed phase column. All compounds were characterized by elemental analysis, MS, IR, 1H and 13C NMR spectroscopy. The structure of I was further confirmed by the 13C-1H COSY spectroscopy. The putative reaction mechanism via stable 1,2-di(furan-2-yl)ethane-1,2-diimine, furan-2-yl-(2,4,5-tri-furan-2-yl-2H-imidazol-2-yl)-methanone and intermediate 5 traced by GC-MS was proposed

中国語母語学習者の日本語の漢字語習得研究のための新たな枠組みの提案 : 意味使用の一般性と意味推測可能性を考慮して

お茶の水女子大学大学院University of Ochanomizuこれまで中国語母語の日本語学習者の日本語の漢語習得研究に主に文化庁(1978)の枠組みが応用されてきた。この枠組みでは,日本語と中国語の意味関係がどのように対応しているのかによって,意味関係が同じ(Same),一部重なっている(Overlap),著しく異なっている(Different),同じ漢語が存在しない(Nothing)に分類されている。この枠組みのOverlapは日中で共通する意味が一般的に使用されているものと,ほとんど使用されていないものが混在している。また,Nothingには中国語の漢字知識を使って推測が可能なものと不可能なものがある。このため,中国語母語の日本語学習者の漢語習得の難易度の検証に適さない。本研究はこの点を解決するため,共通する意味の母語話者による使用一般性と意味推測可能性を考慮した新たな枠組みを提案し,その枠組みの分類に必要とされる意味使用の一般性と意味推測可能性の調査方法及び,試行例を紹介する。This study proposes a new framework which can be applied to Japanese kanji compound acquisition for Chinese learners of Japanese. To date, there have been four categories according to semantic and orthographic similarities between Japanese and Chinese: same form and meaning in Chinese (Same); same form with divergent meaning (Overlap); same form but unrelated meanings in Japanese and Chinese (Different); and compounds only in Japanese (Nothing). Seminal works and the latest published works do not explore in depth the difficulties of two-word kanji compound acquisition. In addition, it is not simple or sufficient to apply standard acquisition research techniques to this subject. The new framework addresses the complexity of kanji acquisition by introducing the concept of general semantic usage and semantic inferability. Two-word kanji can be more effectively classified for acquisition purposes. In research presented here classifications are recommended by general semantic usage, degree of difficulty and semantic inferability. This work is suitable for word acquisition study and contribution to multisense word research

Transcriptome analysis of the gene expression of M. iliotibialis lateralis affected by dietary methionine restriction

Introduction: Methionine (Met) is an important amino acid related to the development of skeletal muscle. This study investigated the effects of dietary Met restriction on the gene expression of M. iliotibialis lateralis.Methods: A total of 84 day-old broiler chicks (Zhuanghe Dagu) with a similar initial body weight (207.62 ± 8.54 g) were used in this study. All birds were divided into two groups (CON; L-Met) based on the initial body weight. Each group consisted of six replicates with seven birds per replicate. The experimental period was 63 days (phase 1, days 1-21; phase 2, days 22-63). According to the nutritional requirements of Zhuanghe Dagu chickens, we provided a basal diet (0.39% Met levels during phase 1 and 0.35% Met levels during phase 2, as-fed basis) to the birds in the CON group, while we provided a Met-restricted diet (0.31% Met levels during phase 1 and 0.28% Met levels during phase 2, as-fed basis) to the birds in the L-Met group. The growth performance of broiler chicks and their M. iliotibialis lateralis development parameters were measured on days 21 and 63.Results and Discussion: In this study, dietary Met restriction did not affect the growth performance of broiler chicks but hindered the development of M. iliotibialis lateralis at both sampling timepoints. On the final day, three birds selected from each group (three from CON and three from L-Met) were used to obtain M. iliotibialis lateralis samples from leg muscle for further transcriptome analysis. Transcriptome analysis revealed that dietary Met restriction significantly upregulated 247 differentially expressed genes (DEGs) and downregulated 173 DEGs. Additionally, DEGs were mainly enriched in 10 pathways. Among DEGs, we observed that dietary Met restriction downregulated the expression of CSRP3, KY, FHL1, LMCD1, and MYOZ2 in M. iliotibialis lateralis. Therefore, we considered that dietary Met restriction had negative effects on the development of M. iliotibialis lateralis, and CSRP3, KY, FHL1, LMCD1, and MYOZ2 may serve as potential functional genes involved in this process

Inducing and Manipulating Heteroelectronic States in a Single MoS2 Thin Flake

By dual gating a few-layer MoS2 flake, we induce spatially separated electronic states showing superconductivity and Shubnikov–de Haas (SdH) oscillations. While the highly confined superconductivity forms at the K/K′ valleys of the topmost layer, the SdH oscillations are contributed by the electrons residing in the Q/Q′ valleys of the rest of the bottom layers, which is confirmed by the extracted Landau level degeneracy of 3, electron effective mass of 0.6me, and carrier density of 5×10^12  cm^−2. Mimicking conventional heterostructures, the interaction between the heteroelectronic states can be electrically manipulated, which enables “bipolarlike” superconducting transistor operation. The off-on-off switching pattern can be continuously accessed at low temperatures by a field effect depletion of carriers with a negative back gate bias and the proximity effect between the top superconducting layer and the bottom metallic layers that quenches the superconductivity at a positive back gate bias