What is the Level of Investment by International Students in the US in English Language Learning outside the Classroom? What are the Factors that Affect their Investment?

Upon their arrival in the United States, International students\u27 interactions with the target language group outside classroom situation constitute one of their biggest social experiences. Their adjustment to their new environment creates some problems. Their experience of adjustment is manifested differently as some may suffer from differences in cultures in relation to the American cultural values, while some may just feel homesick and become lonely. Other may suffer from the loss of their status back home and may not regarded by their American peers as they should be. The paper seeks to understand the complex nature of international students\u27 exposure to English outside the classroom influenced by some factors such as motivation, acculturation, identity and learning styles as supported by some prominent researchers in the field of second language acquisition such as Gardner, Schumann, Norton and others. While looking into the difficulty of international exposure, the paper will strive to come up with some tentative solutions and suggestions for the success of international students. Their success will not only depend on the overcoming of the limitative factors but also on the effort of host institutions and teachers to help their students adjust to their new life

What is the Level of Investment by International Students in the US in English Language Learning outside the Classroom? What are the Factors that Affect their Investment?

Upon their arrival in the United States, International students\u27 interactions with the target language group outside classroom situation constitute one of their biggest social experiences. Their adjustment to their new environment creates some problems. Their experience of adjustment is manifested differently as some may suffer from differences in cultures in relation to the American cultural values, while some may just feel homesick and become lonely. Other may suffer from the loss of their status back home and may not regarded by their American peers as they should be. The paper seeks to understand the complex nature of international students\u27 exposure to English outside the classroom influenced by some factors such as motivation, acculturation, identity and learning styles as supported by some prominent researchers in the field of second language acquisition such as Gardner, Schumann, Norton and others. While looking into the difficulty of international exposure, the paper will strive to come up with some tentative solutions and suggestions for the success of international students. Their success will not only depend on the overcoming of the limitative factors but also on the effort of host institutions and teachers to help their students adjust to their new life

CrossMap Transformer: A Crossmodal Masked Path Transformer Using Double Back-Translation for Vision-and-Language Navigation

Navigation guided by natural language instructions is particularly suitable for Domestic Service Robots that interacts naturally with users. This task involves the prediction of a sequence of actions that leads to a specified destination given a natural language navigation instruction. The task thus requires the understanding of instructions, such as ``Walk out of the bathroom and wait on the stairs that are on the right''. The Visual and Language Navigation remains challenging, notably because it requires the exploration of the environment and at the accurate following of a path specified by the instructions to model the relationship between language and vision. To address this, we propose the CrossMap Transformer network, which encodes the linguistic and visual features to sequentially generate a path. The CrossMap transformer is tied to a Transformer-based speaker that generates navigation instructions. The two networks share common latent features, for mutual enhancement through a double back translation model: Generated paths are translated into instructions while generated instructions are translated into path The experimental results show the benefits of our approach in terms of instruction understanding and instruction generation.Comment: 8 pages, 5 figures, 5 tables. Submitted to IEEE Robotics and Automation Letter

Kindia (Pavetteae, Rubiaceae), a new cliff-dwelling genus with chemically profiled colleter exudate from Mt Gangan, Republic of Guinea

A new genus Kindia (Pavetteae, Rubiaceae) is described with a single species, Kindia gangan, based on collections made in 2016 during botanical exploration of Mt Gangan, Kindia, Republic of Guinea in West Africa. The Mt Gangan area is known for its many endemic species including the only native non-neotropical Bromeliaceae Pitcairnia feliciana. Kindia is the fourth endemic vascular plant genus to be described from Guinea. Based on chloroplast sequence data, the genus is part of Clade II of tribe Pavetteae. In this clade, it is sister to Leptactina sensu lato (including Coleactina and Dictyandra). K. gangan is distinguished from Leptactina s.l. by the combination of the following characters: its epilithic habit; several-flowered axillary inflorescences; distinct calyx tube as long as the lobes; a infundibular-campanulate corolla tube with narrow proximal section widening abruptly to the broad distal section; presence of a dense hair band near base of the corolla tube; anthers and style deeply included, reaching about mid-height of the corolla tube; anthers lacking connective appendages and with sub-basal insertion; pollen type 1; pollen presenter (style head) winged and glabrous (smooth and usually hairy in Leptactina); orange colleters producing a vivid red exudate, which encircle the hypanthium, and occur inside the calyx and stipules. Kindia is a subshrub that appears restricted to bare, vertical rock faces of sandstone. Fruit dispersal and pollination by bats is postulated. Here, it is assessed as Endangered EN D1 using the 2012 IUCN standard. High resolution LC-MS/MS analysis revealed over 40 triterpenoid compounds in the colleter exudate, including those assigned to the cycloartane class. Triterpenoids are of interest for their diverse chemical structures, varied biological activities, and potential therapeutic value

Applying an index of biotic integrity based on fish assemblages in a west african river

A multivariate measure of river quality, the Index of Biotic Integrity (IBI), was adapted to a West African river, the Konkoure (Republic of Guinea). Fish assemblages were sampled using gill-nets during the dry season to provide data for the IBI. Ten metrics were subsequently defined. The capacity of the modified IBI to assess the impact of a bauxite treatment plant was tested. The IBI decreased as expected at the impacted station. Detailed examination of the data revealed that one family, the #Mormyridae$, was almost eliminated from the impacted station, suggesting that members of this family can be considered as intolerant species in future uses of the IBI in other African rivers. (Résumé d'auteur