Supporting learning beyond the classroom: developing the Northumbria Learner Support Model

Academic Libraries traditionally offered support for a variety of information related queries. As the storage and delivery of information changed, libraries increasingly became involved in supporting students to use the new technologies and the widening focus of Higher Education to encompass the development of skills for life, added another new dimension. It was no longer enough simply to provide students with an answer but rather to support them to develop the skills to enable them to find answers themselves. The impact of the widening participation agenda meant that different levels and methods of support were required as standard and often over a 24x7 period. The deficit support model began to give way to a more holistic, collaborative view of student support within libraries and learning styles/ help seeking behaviours began to be taken into account (Weaver 2008). The ‘Learner Support Model’ was introduced by Library and Learning Services in 2004/5 as part of an overall strategy to enhance student learning, retention, performance and achievement. All students do not automatically have effective research, IT or study skills but those who do develop those skills will make increased use of high quality information sources, are liable to return better academic performances and are therefore more likely to complete their programmes. The generic nature of the support model ensures that students can access support wherever they are; in whatever discipline area they are working and at whatever time they need it. In the four years since the model was implemented it has moved from a theoretical ideal to a well subscribed support service handling around 90,000 enquiries per year. The Learner Support Model has been showcased at conferences, evaluated through feedback and now developed to a position where it can be extended to other services and student facing academic support areas of Northumbria University and beyond

Research essentials: An introduction to qualitative research for the novice children’s nurse

QUALITATIVE RESEARCH is ‘a form of social inquiry that focuses on the way people make sense of their experiences and the world in which they live’ (Holloway 2013). Qualitative methods can explore complex issues where little is known, gaining new insights and a deep understanding of the individual perspective, and are invaluable when exploring the complexities of nursing and care delivery. Read More: http://journals.rcni.com/doi/abs/10.7748/ncyp.27.2.14.s1

Ejectives in Scottish English: a social perspective

This paper presents the results of an analysis of the realization of word-final /k/ in a sample of read and casual speech by 28 female pupils from a single-sex Glaswegian high school. Girls differed in age, socioeconomic background, and ethnicity. Ejectives were the most usual variant for /k/ in both speech styles, occurring in the speech of every pupil in our sample. Our narrow auditory analysis revealed a continuum of ejective production, from weak to intense stops. Results from multinomial logistic regression show that ejective production is promoted by phonetic, linguistic and interactional factors: ejectives were used more in read speech, when /k/ occurred in the /-ŋk/ cluster (e.g. tank), and when the relevant word was either at the end of a clause or sentence, or in turn-final position. At the same time, significant interactions between style, and position in turn, and the social factors of age and ethnicity, show that the use of ejectives by these girls is subject to a fine degree of sociolinguistic control, alongside interactional factors. Finally, cautious comparison of these data with recordings made in 1997 suggests that these results may also reflect a sound change in progress, given the very substantial real-time increase in ejective realizations of /k/ in Glasgow over the past fourteen years

Methodological Issues in a Real-Time Study of Glaswegian Vowels: Automation and Comparability

No abstract available

Utilising Hidden Markov Modelling for the Assessment of Accommodation in Conversational Speech

The work presented here suggests a method for assessing speech accommodation in a holistic acoustic manner by utilising Hidden Markov Models (HMMs). The rationale for implementation of this method is presented along with an explanation of how HMMs work. Here, a heavily simplified HMM is used (single state; mixture of gaussians) in order to assess the applicability of more sophisticated HMMs. Results are presented from a small-scale study of six pairs of female Scottish-English speakers, showing measurement of significant trends and changes in holistic acoustic features of speakers during conversational interaction. Our findings suggest that methods integrating HMMs with current holistic acoustic measures of speech may be a useful tool in accounting for acoustic change due to speaker interaction

Measuring Mimicry in Task-Oriented Conversations: The More the Task is Difficult, The More we Mimick our Interlocutors

The tendency to unconsciously imitate others in conversations is referred to as mimicry, accommodation, interpersonal adap- tation, etc. During the last years, the computing community has made significant efforts towards the automatic detection of the phenomenon, but a widely accepted approach is still miss- ing. Given that mimicry is the unconscious tendency to imitate others, this article proposes the adoption of speaker verification methodologies that were originally conceived to spot people trying to forge the voice of others. Preliminary experiments suggest that mimicry can be detected by measuring how much speakers converge or diverge with respect to one another in terms of acoustic evidence. As a validation of the approach, the experiments show that convergence (the speakers become more similar in terms of acoustic properties) tends to appear more frequently when a task is difficult and, therefore, requires more time to be addressed

The Role of Tapping in Improving Connected Speech Comprehension of a Non-Native Variety of English

No abstract available