Understanding insertion and integration in a study abroad context: the case of English-speaking sojourners in France

This paper draws on a recent study of British students of languages undertaking a year abroad in France, in a variety of placements (as language teaching assistants, as exchange students, and as workplace interns). The data were gathered in the context of the 2011-2013 LANGSNAP project, a larger study undertaken which investigated both the language learning and social integration of British students spending an academic year abroad in France, Spain or Mexico Having made a positive choice to specialise in languages at university, and having already reached a relatively advanced level in French during their secondary school education, it could be assumed that these students were positively motivated to further develop their language skills, to deepen their intercultural understanding, and to integrate socially within the local society. Indeed, in pre-departure interviews (in French), the participating students unanimously expressed the wish to integrate and in particular to make French same-aged friends. The paper first of all presents an overview of the range of tools used to gather both quantitative and qualitative data on participants’ social integration. The paper then goes on to evaluate the degree of success of even such highly motivated participants in achieving this declared goal, and to consider social, sociolinguistic and personal factors which appear to influence the degree of social integration achieved by individual participants

How special are early birds?

This volume honours the academic achievements and scholarship of Professor Florence Myles as a world-leading scholar in the fields of Second Language Acquisition (SLA) and French Linguistics, in particular for her work in corpus-based SLA and language policy in primary school education. In addition to reviews of the field (e.g., primary languages policy in the UK), the volume presents new research studies reflective of key theoretical and methodological issues in current SLA research, including theory-building, corpus-based investigations, studies of language development, as well as informing teacher professional development through research. Taken together, this edited book provides a wide-ranging and balanced account of Myles’s work and speaks to her influence on SLA research and primary languages policy. We invite readers to learn more about the fascinating research presented here as inspired by Florence’s dedication to field

A strategy for mapping unstructured mesh computational mechanics programs onto distributed memory parallel architectures

The motivation of this thesis was to develop strategies that would enable unstructured mesh based computational mechanics codes to exploit the computational advantages offered by distributed memory parallel processors. Strategies that successfully map structured mesh codes onto parallel machines have been developed over the previous decade and used to build a toolkit for automation of the parallelisation process. Extension of the capabilities of this toolkit to include unstructured mesh codes requires new strategies to be developed. This thesis examines the method of parallelisation by geometric domain decomposition using the single program multi data programming paradigm with explicit message passing. This technique involves splitting (decomposing) the problem definition into P parts that may be distributed over P processors in a parallel machine. Each processor runs the same program and operates only on its part of the problem. Messages passed between the processors allow data exchange to maintain consistency with the original algorithm. The strategies developed to parallelise unstructured mesh codes should meet a number of requirements: The algorithms are faithfully reproduced in parallel. The code is largely unaltered in the parallel version. The parallel efficiency is maximised. The techniques should scale to highly parallel systems. The parallelisation process should become automated. Techniques and strategies that meet these requirements are developed and tested in this dissertation using a state of the art integrated computational fluid dynamics and solid mechanics code. The results presented demonstrate the importance of the problem partition in the definition of inter-processor communication and hence parallel performance. The classical measure of partition quality based on the number of cut edges in the mesh partition can be inadequate for real parallel machines. Consideration of the topology of the parallel machine in the mesh partition is demonstrated to be a more significant factor than the number of cut edges in the achieved parallel efficiency. It is shown to be advantageous to allow an increase in the volume of communication in order to achieve an efficient mapping dominated by localised communications. The limitation to parallel performance resulting from communication startup latency is clearly revealed together with strategies to minimise the effect. The generic application of the techniques to other unstructured mesh codes is discussed in the context of automation of the parallelisation process. Automation of parallelisation based on the developed strategies is presented as possible through the use of run time inspector loops to accurately determine the dependencies that define the necessary inter-processor communication

How special are early birds?

This volume honours the academic achievements and scholarship of Professor Florence Myles as a world-leading scholar in the fields of Second Language Acquisition (SLA) and French Linguistics, in particular for her work in corpus-based SLA and language policy in primary school education. In addition to reviews of the field (e.g., primary languages policy in the UK), the volume presents new research studies reflective of key theoretical and methodological issues in current SLA research, including theory-building, corpus-based investigations, studies of language development, as well as informing teacher professional development through research. Taken together, this edited book provides a wide-ranging and balanced account of Myles’s work and speaks to her influence on SLA research and primary languages policy. We invite readers to learn more about the fascinating research presented here as inspired by Florence’s dedication to field

L1 explicit instruction can improve L2 online and offline performance

This study investigated the effectiveness of providing L1 explicit information (EI) with practice for making more accurate and faster interpretations of L2 French Imparfait (IMP). Two treatments were investigated: (a) “L2-only,” providing EI about the L2 with L2 interpretation practice, and (b) “L2+L1,” providing the exact same L2-only treatment and including EI about the L1 (English) with practice interpreting L1 features that are equivalent to the IMP. Fifty L2 French learners were randomly assigned to either L2-only, L2+L1, or a control group. Online (self-paced reading) and offline (context-sentence matching) measures from pretest, posttest, and delayed posttests showed that providing additional L1 EI and practice improved not only offline L2 accuracy, but also the speed of online L2 processing. To our knowledge, this makes original and significant contributions about the nature of EI with practice and the role of the L1 (Tolentino & Tokowicz, 2014), and it extends a recent line of research examining EI effects in online sentence processing (Andringa & Curcic, 2015)

Online and offline effects of L1 practice in L2 grammar learning : a partial replication

This study partially replicates McManus and Marsden (2016), who found that providing L1 explicit information (EI) plus task-essential practice led L2 learners to make more accurate and faster interpretations of French morphosyntax. The current study removed the original study’s L1 EI component to examine the extent and nature of its role and that of the remaining L1 practice. This design tested whether providing L1 task-essential practice only (alongside a core treatment of L2 EI plus practice) resulted in similar online and offline learning gains compared to the original study’s L1 EI plus L1 practice. We used the same online and offline tests, with a similar population of English-speaking learners of L2 French (n=19). Compared to L2 EI plus L2 practice, the findings suggest that L1 practice did not generally benefit accurate interpretation or speed of online processing, indicating that the original study’s L1 EI contribute

Placement type and language learning during residence abroad

The “year abroad” is a longstanding component of British university degree programmes in languages. As noted by other commentators (Coleman, 1997 and this volume; Collentine, 2009), the British “year abroad” is typically undertaken by language majors with several years’ prior language study and a relatively advanced proficiency level in their target language(s). It is a common requirement for programme completion, to spend two academic semesters abroad. However students can have considerable latitude in how the time abroad is spent, and assessment by the home institution is relatively “light touch”, typically involving e.g. a substantial project or long essay. Today, languages students typically undertake one of three placement types: as English language teaching assistants, on other forms of work placement, or as Erasmus exchange students following relevant academic programmes at a partner university. Numbers of U.K. languages students undertaking the classic university student exchange version of the year abroad are relatively stable at around 7,500 per year, a much smaller number than incoming international students at U.K. universities, though numbers undertaking teaching assistantships and other work placements have risen (British Academy & University Council for Modern Languages, 2012; King, Findlay, & Ahrens, 2010). The linguistic benefits of the year abroad have been tracked in various research studies (Coleman, 1996, 1997; Ife, 2000; Klapper & Rees, 2012; Meara, 1994; Willis, Doble, Sankarayya, & Smithers, 1977). In general, this research indicates that while learners make considerable progress in their target L2, the variability which is characteristic of residence abroad programmes more widely (Kinginger, 2008) affects this group as well (on this see especially Klapper & Rees, 2012). The research project “Social Networks, Target Language Interaction and Second Language Acquisition During the Year Abroad: A longitudinal study“ (the LANGSNAP project: http://langsnap.soton.ac.uk) was planned to provide fuller evidence on L2 acquisition during the year abroad, including documenting development on a range of language domains, and connecting progress in L2 to a range of individual, social and contextual variables. (See Mitchell, 2014 for an overview.)The project tracked a cohort of 56 students majoring in French or Spanish, before, during and after spending their year abroad in France, Spain or Mexico during the academic year 2011-12.This chapter reports one aspect of the findings of this project: the experience of the French L2 participants (N=29) of different placement types in France, and how placement type related to aspects of their target language developmen

How and why can explicit instruction about L1 reduce the negative effects of crosslinguistic influence? Evidence from accuracy and reaction time signatures in L1 comprehension

This study revisits and extends McManus and Marsden (2019a) to better understand how and why providing additional explicit information (EI) about learners’ first language (L1) alongside EI and comprehension practice in the second language (L2) improved the accuracy, speed, and stability of L2 comprehension of the French Imparfait, a functionally complex and late-acquired target feature. Building on previous L2 research that has provided instruction about L1 without analyzing L1 knowledge/use, the current study examines learners’ item-by-item comprehension of L1 sentences that was completed during the L2 instruction to better understand the learning mechanisms at play in McManus and Marsden’s (2019a) findings. Two groups of English-speaking learners (L2+L1, L2+L1prac; N = 36) received the same EI about aspect in French, followed by comprehension practice of French and English sentences. The L2+L1 group received additional EI about aspect in English. Results showed no impact of the instruction on L1 accuracy in either group, but the speed of L1 comprehension changed over time in the L2+L1 group. It is argued that the L2+L1 instruction directed attention to and clarified crosslinguistic differences in how L2 and L1 express the same meanings, which rendered the L2 practice more effective for noticing Imparfait and developing appropriate strategies for processing L2 forms. Implications for theory-building and instructional design are discussed

Transcriptional Regulation of Cardiac Remodeling in a Porcine Model with Validation in Human Subjects

Introduction: The majority of new atrial fibrillation (AF) cases occur in elderly patients with cardiac remodeling (CR) in the setting of structural heart disease and heart failure (HF). We leveraged a unique animal model to identify cardiac microRNAs (miRNAs) and gene regulatory mechanisms that drive this process. Methods: We prospectively quantified atrial expression of 48 miRNAs by high-throughput qRT-PCR in 15 pigs with right-atrial pacing-induced heart disease (5 pigs with AF/severe HF, 5 pigs with AF/mild HF, and 5 control pigs) as well as in 21 patients (11 with AF and CR and 10 controls) undergoing cardiac surgery. CR and HF were defined through a metric of left atrial volume index, BNP and ejection fraction. MiRNA levels were normalized to global mean and expression compared across pig subtypes and between the two human groups. Results: In the porcine model, miR-208b was upregulated at week 1 (ΔCT= -3.9, pT = -5.5, pT = -1.5, pT = -1.5, pT = -1.5, pT = -1.5, p\u3c0.05). Conclusions: Dysregulation of miR-208b is confirmed in our porcine model and is validated in humans. Prior studies have identified miR-208b in both myosin isoform switching and conduction disease. We theorize that dysregulation of miR-208b may play a critical role in atrial structural remodeling and vulnerability to AF