Investigating Written Reflection and Its Relation to Language Teaching Strategy Change: A Self-study

Reflection has received wide encouragement and adoption in the teacher education, and the teachers engaging in reflection are believed to be able to gain new insights into their teaching. As one of the prominent ways of reflection, written reflection is widely promoted in the teacher education of English Language Teaching. However, the relationship between reflection and improved teaching is still largely unclear and under-researched. This study focuses on teacher's written reflection and its relation to teaching practice change. It adopts a self-study lens to examine the Chinese researcher-participant's written reflections produced in the two microteaching sessions for an English teaching practicum course at a Canadian university, to investigate the role of written reflections in the researcher-participant's self-perceived teaching strategy change across the two microteaching sessions. The study identifies the researcher-participant's teaching strategy change: from teacher-centered method to student-centered method. It also finds that written reflection increases the researcher-participant's awareness of addressing the teaching issues and helps identify the core reason behind these issues, which motivates the researcher-participant to enact the teaching change and also provides the direction for the teaching change. This study provides practical implications for the encouragement of student-centered method in the teacher education of English language teaching

The Use of Dynamic Assessment for Group Learners in the Language Classroom: A Literature Review

The paper reviews the research on the use of Dynamic Assessment (DA) in the language classroom instruction for group learners. DA assesses learners’ abilities in a comprehensive scope of Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) from one continuum of actual independent performance to the other continuum of potential performance with external support, and DA also sees the external support offered as a driving force of advancing learners’ development within ZPD. With its unique view, DA sheds the new light to the ESL and EFL language teaching and learning, and most DA studies focus on its effectiveness in promoting the development of EFL and ESL learners’ language skills. However, most studies adopt DA in a one-on-one teacher-student model and address DA’s interplay with individuals’ ZPD, which discourages the implementation of DA in the language classrooms with group learners. This paper reviews the existing research on how DA mediates group learners in the language classroom. The review indicates that among the limited research, most studies follow from Group Dynamic Assessment (GDA) and few studies propose alternative DA approaches. All the studies reviewed confirm DA’s effectiveness of promoting group learners’ learning. However, given the dearth of research, it is insufficient to conclude on DA’s mediation of group learners in the language classroom, and more studies are needed

Mediation through Computerized Dynamic Assessment (C-DA) for Second and Foreign Language Learning: A Literature Review

This paper examines research on the effects and roles of computerized dynamic assessment (C-DA) in mediating second language (L2) learning and development. The review synthesizes studies on C-DA interventions for developing language skills including reading comprehension, vocabulary and grammar skills. C-DA studies indicate the promotion of language development, but the effectiveness is not all attributed to C-DA mediations. Effectiveness seems dependent on both C-DA and additional factors like noticing skills or teacher mediation. In these studies, most C-DA prompts are pre-constructed and not fully attuned to learners’ zone of proximal development, and some C-DA studies address this by complementing C-DA with human mediator interaction. Given the limited number of C-DA studies, the findings of this review are limited. More research is needed, especially on integrating human and computer mediation. However, this review offers implications for designing responsive C-DA platforms to better attune to learners’ needs

Egocentric Planning for Scalable Embodied Task Achievement

Embodied agents face significant challenges when tasked with performing actions in diverse environments, particularly in generalizing across object types and executing suitable actions to accomplish tasks. Furthermore, agents should exhibit robustness, minimizing the execution of illegal actions. In this work, we present Egocentric Planning, an innovative approach that combines symbolic planning and Object-oriented POMDPs to solve tasks in complex environments, harnessing existing models for visual perception and natural language processing. We evaluated our approach in ALFRED, a simulated environment designed for domestic tasks, and demonstrated its high scalability, achieving an impressive 36.07% unseen success rate in the ALFRED benchmark and winning the ALFRED challenge at CVPR Embodied AI workshop. Our method requires reliable perception and the specification or learning of a symbolic description of the preconditions and effects of the agent's actions, as well as what object types reveal information about others. It is capable of naturally scaling to solve new tasks beyond ALFRED, as long as they can be solved using the available skills. This work offers a solid baseline for studying end-to-end and hybrid methods that aim to generalize to new tasks, including recent approaches relying on LLMs, but often struggle to scale to long sequences of actions or produce robust plans for novel tasks

Modularity-Guided Graph Topology Optimization And Self-Boosting Clustering

Existing modularity-based community detection methods attempt to find community memberships which can lead to the maximum of modularity in a fixed graph topology. In this work, we propose to optimize the graph topology through the modularity maximization process. We introduce a modularity-guided graph optimization approach for learning sparse high modularity graph from algorithmically generated clustering results by iterative pruning edges between two distant clusters. To the best of our knowledge, this represents a first attempt for using modularity to guide graph topology learning. Extensive experiments conducted on various real-world data sets show that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art graph construction methods by a large margin. Our experiments show that with increasing modularity, the accuracy of graph-based clustering algorithm is simultaneously increased, demonstrating the validity of modularity theory through numerical experimental results of real-world data sets. From clustering perspective, our method can also be seen as a self-boosting clustering method

Novel clinical presentation and PAX6 mutation in families with congenital aniridia

PurposeTo explore the clinical phenotype and genetic defects of families with congenital aniridia.MethodsFour Chinese families with aniridia were enrolled in this study. The detailed ocular presentations of the patients were recorded. Whole exome sequencing (BGI MGIEasy V4 chip) was used to detect the gene mutation. Sanger sequencing was performed to validate the potential pathogenic variants, and segregation analysis was performed on all available family members.ResultsBy whole exome sequencing and Sanger sequencing, three recurrent mutations (c.112del, p.Arg38Glyfs*16; c.299G > A, p.Trp100* and c.718C > T, p.Arg240*) and one novel mutation (c.278_281del, p.Glu93Alafs*30) of PAX6 were identified. All the mutations were co-segregated with the phenotype in the families. We also observed spontaneous anterior lens capsule rupture in aniridia for the first time.ConclusionWe report spontaneous anterior lens capsule rupture as a novel phenotype of aniridia and three recurrent mutations and one novel mutation of PAX6 in families with aniridia. Our results expanded the phenotype and genotype spectra of aniridia and can help us better understand the disease