The Effect of Content Instruction in L2 on L1 Pragmatics

This study investigates whether content instruction in English has an impact on L1 pragmatics. In this study a discourse completion test with eight request situations in Turkish was given to three groups of Turkish students enrolled in undergraduate programs in a faculty of education in Turkey. One group of students received most of their education in English. The other two groups received their education in Turkish. An interesting finding is that the differences in the make-up of the situations were only observed in situations with high imposition. This shows that instruction in the foreign language has an impact on sociopragmatic interpretation in L1. Overall, the results reveal that instruction in foreign language has an impact on first language pragmatic use

Learning, monetary policy and housing prices

This paper evaluates different types of simple monetary policy rules according to the determinacy and learnability of rational expectations equilibrium criteria within a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium framework. Incorporating housing prices and collateralized borrowing into the standard model allow us to answer important policy questions. One objective is to investigate whether responding to housing prices affects determinacy and learnability of rational expectations equilibrium. For this purpose, we work with a New Keynesian model in which housing plays an accelerator role in business cycles as a collateralized asset. The results show that for current data rule, responding to asset prices does not improve learnable outcomes but for a monetary policy with lagged data and forward-looking rules we see improved learnable outcome if current housing prices are available to monetary authority. Moreover, we examine the effects of interest rate inertia and price stickiness on E-stability of REE.monetary policy rules, determinacy, learning, housing prices

STUDENTS’ PERCEPTION OF AND ENGAGEMENT IN REACTIVE ONLINE EDUCATION PROVIDED DURING THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC

One of the consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic was school closures, which was also the case in North Cyprus. As a response to school closures, universities switched to online education. This study aims to investigate students' perception of and engagement in this reactive online education provided during the pandemic. To investigate the issue, an online survey was used. Forty-six college students responded to the survey and the results indicate that students had an overall negative perception of their experience in online education. However, they demonstrated high engagement with online education and had higher academic achievement in the semester when education moved online than the previous semester. Results have implications for future online course offerings during moments of crisis in considering possible factors that contribute to positive attitude, motivation, engagement, and academic achievement.COVID-19 salgınının sonuçlarından biri Kuzey Kıbrıs'ta da olduğu gibi okulların kapanması olmuştur. Okulların kapanmasına bir çözüm olarak, üniversiteler çevirimiçi eğitime geçmişlerdir. Bu çalışma, öğrencilerin pandemi süresince sunulan bu çevirimiçi eğitime karşı algılarını ve bu eğitime katılımlarını araştırmayı amaçlamaktadır.  Araştırma ölçeği olarak, çevirimiçi bir anket kullanılmıştır. Bu ankete 46 üniversite öğrencisi katılmıştır. Sonuçlar, öğrencilerin çevirimiçi eğitimdeki tecrübeleri hakkında olumsuz bir algıya sahip olduklarını göstermiştir. Buna karşın, öğrenciler yüksek katılım seviyesi göstemiş ve bir önceki döneme göre daha fazla akademik başarı yakalamışlardır.  Sonuçlar, gelecekte olabilecek kriz durumlarında sunulacak çevirimiçi dersler ve bu derslere yönelik olumlu tutum, motivasyon, katılım ve akademik başarıya katkı yapan etkenler açısından önemlidir.  &nbsp

A digital microarray using interferometric detection of plasmonic nanorod labels

DNA and protein microarrays are a high-throughput technology that allow the simultaneous quantification of tens of thousands of different biomolecular species. The mediocre sensitivity and dynamic range of traditional fluorescence microarrays compared to other techniques have been the technology's Achilles' Heel, and prevented their adoption for many biomedical and clinical diagnostic applications. Previous work to enhance the sensitivity of microarray readout to the single-molecule ('digital') regime have either required signal amplifying chemistry or sacrificed throughput, nixing the platform's primary advantages. Here, we report the development of a digital microarray which extends both the sensitivity and dynamic range of microarrays by about three orders of magnitude. This technique uses functionalized gold nanorods as single-molecule labels and an interferometric scanner which can rapidly enumerate individual nanorods by imaging them with a 10x objective lens. This approach does not require any chemical enhancement such as silver deposition, and scans arrays with a throughput similar to commercial fluorescence devices. By combining single-nanoparticle enumeration and ensemble measurements of spots when the particles are very dense, this system achieves a dynamic range of about one million directly from a single scan

Absolute surface topography measurement with polarisation sensitive coherence scanning interferometry

Traditionally, surface topography measurement was in the domain of quality control of engineering parts. With the advancement of manufacturing technology and affordable computational costs, different types of surfaces are produced with varied shapes and surface textures. These pose significant measurement problems, therefore, surface topography research is gaining momentum to achieve a better control of the surface. Coherence scanning interferometry (CSI) is one of the most common techniques used for measurement of surface topography. It is preferred over tactile and other non-contact techniques since it provides fast and accurate measurement with high vertical (~ 1 nm) and lateral (~1 μm) resolutions over larger areas without any damage to the surface. Essentially, CSI is treated as one dimensional (1D) superposition of the light waves from an object and a reference that generates a three dimensional (3D) interferogram. Secondly, despite the advantages, there is no standard configuration of CSI that can provide absolute surface topography measurement of an engineering part with multiple materials. An effective solution to this problem will be particularly useful in the field of semiconductor and bio-related industries where chips and instruments are made of many materials. In this Thesis, first, the CSI technique is analysed in terms of a wider theoretical framework of 3D linear filtering technique which shows the similarities among other seemingly disparate techniques such as confocal and optical coherence tomography. Due consideration to the spectral characteristic of the source and the effect of numerical aperture are given and important parameters such as vertical and lateral resolutions are computed to compare this theory with standard analysis methods. Additionally, it is shown that the 3D fringe pattern can be considered to be a superposition of a reference field and the scattered field from the top foil-like layer on the top the object. The scattered field from this foil object is dependent on the normal Fresnel reflection coefficients. Therefore, it explains the phase offset and the proportional height offset introduced by different materials, especially, metals. In an object, where multiple materials are present, each material introduces different phase to the fringe pattern and therefore, the surface topography of the entire object is altered. To overcome this problem, the optical polarising properties of the material are exploited. A novel configuration of polarisation sensitive CSI is presented where interferograms with orthogonal circular polarisations are recorded and analysed. The configuration, initially, needs to be calibrated with a material and after that at each point on the object, the refractive index and height offset can be calculated. Therefore, it can be dually used to identify unknown materials present on the object and also to compensate for the height offset introduced by each material to produce absolute surface topography of the entire object. The configuration provides good agreement with ellipsometric results for metals. Additionally, it retains the advantages of high vertical and lateral resolution same as other standard coherence scanning interferometers

A digital microarray using interferometric detection of plasmonic nanorod labels

DNA and protein microarrays are a high-throughput technology that allow the simultaneous quantification of tens of thousands of different biomolecular species. The mediocre sensitivity and dynamic range of traditional fluorescence microarrays compared to other techniques have been the technology's Achilles' Heel, and prevented their adoption for many biomedical and clinical diagnostic applications. Previous work to enhance the sensitivity of microarray readout to the single-molecule ('digital') regime have either required signal amplifying chemistry or sacrificed throughput, nixing the platform's primary advantages. Here, we report the development of a digital microarray which extends both the sensitivity and dynamic range of microarrays by about three orders of magnitude. This technique uses functionalized gold nanorods as single-molecule labels and an interferometric scanner which can rapidly enumerate individual nanorods by imaging them with a 10x objective lens. This approach does not require any chemical enhancement such as silver deposition, and scans arrays with a throughput similar to commercial fluorescence devices. By combining single-nanoparticle enumeration and ensemble measurements of spots when the particles are very dense, this system achieves a dynamic range of about one million directly from a single scan.First author draf