What lies beneath teacher beliefs? A study on metaphoric perceptions

The purpose of this qualitative study is to examine the metaphors a foreign language teacher used to describe her teaching experience and the role she adopted.  The study tries to follow the conceptualizations of an experienced EFL teacher in regard to her teaching experience and the role she adopted.  The data for the present study were collected by means of metaphor elicitation sheet, interview, and diary. The data were collected every month over a period of 24 months. The results revealed that during the first period of data collection (12 months), the participant teacher developed 10 different metaphors with regard to the concept of “teacher”. The number of new metaphors developed in the second period of data collection (the second 12 months) was 7, most of which implied the democratic teacher. Even though the same metaphor was used at different times, the rationale behind using the same metaphor always yielded differences

Surface and buildup region dose measurements with Markus parallel-plate ionization chamber, Gafchromic EBT3 film and MOSFET detector for high energy photon beams

The aim of the study was to investigate surface and buildup region doses for 6MV and 15MV photon beams using a Markus parallel-plate ionization chamber, GafChromic EBT3 film, and MOSFET detector for different field sizes and beam angles. The measurements were made in a water equivalent solid phantom at the surface and in the buildup region of the 6MV and 15MV photon beams at 100 cm source-detector distance for 5 x 5, 10 x 10, and 20 x 20 cm2 field sizes and 0, 30, 60, and 80 beam angles. The surface doses using 6MVphoton beams for 10 x 10 cm2 field size were found to be 20.3%, 18.8%, and 25.5% for Markus chamber, EBT3 film, and MOSFET detector, respectively. The surface doses using 15MV photon beams for 10 x 10 cm2 field size were found to be 14.9%, 13.4%, and 16.4% for Markus chamber, EBT3 film, and MOSFET detector, respectively. The surface dose increased with field size for all dosimeters. As the angle of the incident radiation beam became more oblique, the surface dose increased. The effective measurement depths of dosimeters vary; thus, the results of the measurements could be different. This issue can lead to mistakes at surface and buildup dosimetry and must be taken into account

Intercultural communicative competence through the eyes of Turkish university students

With increased globalization over the last few decades, the status of English has been recognized as an international language; and thus, the need for an intercultural focus in foreign language teaching has become crucial. Many researchers, concerned with intercultural awareness, intercultural competence, intercultural communicative competence and the integration of intercultural competence into English language teaching, conducted studies in various parts of the world. However, the number of Turkish studies on intercultural competence needs to be increased and the scope of the studies should be broadened as most of the studies focus on teacher perceptions on intercultural competence. This mixed-method study examines the perceptions of intercultural communicative competence by 93 English language learners enrolled in the English Language Teaching Department of three universities in Turkey. The study specifically searches into learners’ perceptions of efficiency of English language courses about intercultural awareness and competence. For data collection purposes, a questionnaire, a semi-structured interview and focus-group interviews were conducted. The quantitative data were analyzed using the SPSS (Statistical Package for the Social Science) program and the qualitative data were analyzed using content analysis. Findings of the study indicate that English language learners are aware of the importance of intercultural competence; however, they expect to be exposed more to intercultural aspects of English in their English courses. The study reveals that in designing the curriculum and choosing the activities, intercultural aspects should be emphasized more and the teacher should have an active role in helping the learners become aware of intercultural competence. The study also implies that teachers should be involved in in-service teaching programs which aim to (1) provide necessary background on intercultural competence and (2) help teachers integrate their theoretical and practical knowledge on intercultural competence into in-class activities

ELT MENTORS’ AND MENTEES’ AWARENESS LEVELS OF SOCIAL SKILLS IN THEIR PROFESSION

The debate over the qualifications that a teacher should have has long been going on and the discussions among scholars have gone far beyond academic skills of teachers as a result of emerging concepts, one of which is the social skills. In the field of English language teaching, these skills seem crucial as the learning environment additionally causes difficulty for the learners since they both try to learn a language and try to overcome their fears and anxiety at the same time. It becomes more crucial for the language teachers to provide a fruitful and most importantly relaxing environment in which social and lifelong learning can take place. Similarly, for the English teacher mentors and mentees who continuously hold conversations and are in the process of planning and decision making about building self- esteem and boosting motivation; setting goals and finding the best ways to achieve goals; coping with every possible situation in the language classroom, having social skills seem to be of great importance. The purpose of this study is to deal with the first step of a social skills training program for English mentors and mentees; and specifically search into the level of awareness of English teacher mentors and mentees towards social skills in teaching. The study aims to shed light on how to integrate social skills development training into teacher training curriculum in the field of English Language Teaching  Article visualizations

El tratamiento del espacio urbano en <i>La Celestina</i>

Este trabajo surge en el marco de un proyecto de investigación en curso titulado: La construcción del espacio urbano en textos españoles de la Baja Edad Media. En esta comunicación se abordarán algunos aspectos relacionados con dicha temática en La Celestina de Fernando de Rojas. A partir de consideraciones generales sobre la presentación que este texto ofrece de una ciudad imaginaria, se retomarán algunos aportes del prestigioso medievalista Paul Zumthor, particularmente la perspectiva de que los espacios en los textos medievales nunca se presentan objetivamente, con existencia independiente de los personajes que los habitan. A partir de estas premisas, se establecerán vínculos con algunas categorías provenientes de teóricos de la geografía humanística, en particular la distinción entre espacios y lugares, y se ilustrarán las aserciones con algunos pasajes del texto en cuestión.Centro de Estudios de Teoría y Crítica Literari

Characterization of Volatile Compounds of Bulgur (Antep Type) Produced from Durum Wheat

Bulgur is enjoyed and rediscovered by many people as a stable food because of its color, flavor, aroma, texture, and nutritional and economical values. There is more than one type of bulgur overall the world according to production techniques and raw materials. The volatile compounds of bulgur have not been explored yet. In this study, Headspace Solid Phase Microextraction (HS-SPME) and Gas Chromatography–Mass Spectroscopy (GS-MS) methods were used to determine the volatile flavor compounds of bulgur (Antep type, produced from Durum wheat). Approaching studies were used and the results were optimized to determine the ideal conditions for the extraction and distinguish the compounds responsible for the flavor of bulgur. Approximately, 47 and 37 important volatile compounds were determined for Durum wheat and bulgur, respectively. The study showed that there was a great diversity of volatiles in bulgur produced using Durum wheat and Antep type production method. These can lead to a better understanding of the combination of compounds that give a unique flavor with more researches

BiLingUNet: Image Segmentation by Modulating Top-Down and Bottom-Up Visual Processing with Referring Expressions

We present BiLingUNet, a state-of-the-art model for image segmentation using referring expressions. BiLingUNet uses language to customize visual filters and outperforms approaches that concatenate a linguistic representation to the visual input. We find that using language to modulate both bottom-up and top-down visual processing works better than just making the top-down processing language-conditional. We argue that common 1x1 language-conditional filters cannot represent relational concepts and experimentally demonstrate that wider filters work better. Our model achieves state-of-the-art performance on four referring expression datasets.Comment: 18 pages, 3 figures, submitted to ECCV 202

Detecting Euphemisms with Literal Descriptions and Visual Imagery

This paper describes our two-stage system for the Euphemism Detection shared task hosted by the 3rd Workshop on Figurative Language Processing in conjunction with EMNLP 2022. Euphemisms tone down expressions about sensitive or unpleasant issues like addiction and death. The ambiguous nature of euphemistic words or expressions makes it challenging to detect their actual meaning within a context. In the first stage, we seek to mitigate this ambiguity by incorporating literal descriptions into input text prompts to our baseline model. It turns out that this kind of direct supervision yields remarkable performance improvement. In the second stage, we integrate visual supervision into our system using visual imageries, two sets of images generated by a text-to-image model by taking terms and descriptions as input. Our experiments demonstrate that visual supervision also gives a statistically significant performance boost. Our system achieved the second place with an F1 score of 87.2%, only about 0.9% worse than the best submission.Comment: 7 pages, 1 table, 1 figure. Accepted to the 3rd Workshop on Figurative Language Processing at EMNLP 2022. https://github.com/ilkerkesen/euphemis

El tratamiento del espacio urbano en <i>La Celestina</i>

Este trabajo surge en el marco de un proyecto de investigación en curso titulado: La construcción del espacio urbano en textos españoles de la Baja Edad Media. En esta comunicación se abordarán algunos aspectos relacionados con dicha temática en La Celestina de Fernando de Rojas. A partir de consideraciones generales sobre la presentación que este texto ofrece de una ciudad imaginaria, se retomarán algunos aportes del prestigioso medievalista Paul Zumthor, particularmente la perspectiva de que los espacios en los textos medievales nunca se presentan objetivamente, con existencia independiente de los personajes que los habitan. A partir de estas premisas, se establecerán vínculos con algunas categorías provenientes de teóricos de la geografía humanística, en particular la distinción entre espacios y lugares, y se ilustrarán las aserciones con algunos pasajes del texto en cuestión.Centro de Estudios de Teoría y Crítica Literari

Characterization of acetohydroxyacid synthase from the hyperthermophilic bacterium Thermotoga maritima

AbstractAcetohydroxyacid synthase (AHAS) is the key enzyme in branched chain amino acid biosynthesis pathway. The enzyme activity and properties of a highly thermostable AHAS from the hyperthermophilic bacterium Thermotoga maritima is being reported. The catalytic and regulatory subunits of AHAS from T. maritima were over-expressed in Escherichia coli. The recombinant subunits were purified using a simplified procedure including a heat-treatment step followed by chromatography. A discontinuous colorimetric assay method was optimized and used to determine the kinetic parameters. AHAS activity was determined to be present in several Thermotogales including T. maritima. The catalytic subunit of T. maritima AHAS was purified approximately 30-fold, with an AHAS activity of approximately 160±27U/mg and native molecular mass of 156±6kDa. The regulatory subunit was purified to homogeneity and showed no catalytic activity as expected. The optimum pH and temperature for AHAS activity were 7.0 and 85°C, respectively. The apparent Km and Vmax for pyruvate were 16.4±2mM and 246±7U/mg, respectively. Reconstitution of the catalytic and regulatory subunits led to increased AHAS activity. This is the first report on characterization of an isoleucine, leucine, and valine operon (ilv operon) enzyme from a hyperthermophilic microorganism and may contribute to our understanding of the physiological pathways in Thermotogales. The enzyme represents the most active and thermostable AHAS reported so far