3D ISM-Shock Spectral Emission: X-ray models for Radio Galaxy SED Modeling

Galaxies form out of small fluctuations in a smoothly expanding Universe. However, the initial gravitational collapse phase is accompanied by the formation of supermassive black holes and clusters of massive stars. Black holes and star clusters generate powerful outflows in the form of jets and superwinds that interact with still infalling gas, possibly regulating the galaxy formation process, initiating new sites of star formation, and carrying chemically enriched gas to the intergalactic medium. Unfortunately, beyond this qualitative description our detailed theoretical understanding is poor. New results from 3D simulations of a GPS/CSS galaxy, with gravitational potentials included, shed some new light on the jet driven outflow process in particular. New code capabilites to predict detailed X-ray spectra from multi-dimensional time-dependent dynamics simulations of Galaxy Feedback, and will be useful for future interpretation of X-ray and radio SEDs of forming galaxies.Comment: 10 pages, 5 figures, Invited Conference Talk, The Spectral Energy Distribution of Gas Rich Galaxies: Confronting Models with Data, Heidelberg, Germany,October 4-8, 200

Team teaching: four barriers to native English speaking assistant teachers' ability to model native English in Japanese classrooms

In Japan and other countries around Asia and the world, local English teachers sometimes instruct their students by sharing teaching duties with native English speaking assistant teachers. This team teaching, as it is known, has grown in popularity in Japan since its introduction in the 1980s. According to most literature, the assistants’ primary role in the classroom should be to provide students with a model of native English (Brumby & Wada, 1990). Previous research has shown that team teaching motivates Japanese students to learn English as the assistant teacher may be one of the few people they know who speaks English as a native language. Less research has been done on the assistants’ classroom practices, especially with regards to whether or not they are used effectively as models of native English. For this research 19 Japanese teachers of English were interviewed. Using a discourse analytic approach, the interviews revealed that there were in practice four barriers to the assistants’ ability to model native English in the classroom: an over-reliance on in-class translation, the assistants’ use of simplified English and foreigner talk, the use of scripted talk, and the assistants’ use of their limited Japanese language skills

Native and non-native English teachers in the classroom: a re-examination

Native English speakers are often claimed to be better language teachers than non-native English speakers, both by those who have not reflected critically on the inherent differences between knowing how to use a language and knowing how to teach a language, and by those who assume that non-native English speakers are by definition not fluent. Nativeness is thus equated with pedagogical superiority. This claim, whether it is made by students, parents, hiring boards, or other interested parties, is detrimental to non-native English teachers as educators and to the students who learn from them. Non-native English speaking teachers may be demoralised or discriminated against in hiring practices. Students lose when they are taught by teachers with nativeness as their defining characteristic, rather than by the best teachers. In this article the native speakers model, itself a problematic concept, is analysed to show how supposed nativeness is difficult to define accurately. Then the benefits of being taught by native English speakers and non-native English speakers are outlined, with a view to promoting more just hiring practices and sounder educational results for students of English worldwide

Being Negative to be Popular: Style in Online Comments at the Mail Online

Language users may make stylistic choices to signal group membership (Rampton 2002). The use of an aggregate of common linguistic features that are distinct from those of other groups of language users can be a sign of shared values in a linguistic ‘community of practice’ (Eckert and McConnell-Ginet 1992). New members of such a community display their knowledge of the group’s practices, and thus their desire to be accepted as members of the community, by mimicking the language of more established members. The purpose of this research is to uncover stylistic features of a relatively new genre of text, online newspaper comments. This research argues that comments posted by readers of online newspapers provide us with the opportunity to both identify some shared stylistic features of a community of practice and to see how other readers evaluate the use of those features by deciding whether or not to approve or disapprove of the comments made. The top-rated comments from Mail Online newspaper articles with more than one thousand comments were collected over a period of one week, leading to a dataset of 65 comments that were analysed qualitatively using discourse analytic tools. The high number of approving votes for these comments suggests that other readers approve of their content and stylistic delivery. Previous studies (Anderson et al. 2014; Blom et al. 2014; Reagle 2015; Santana 2011) have suggested that online comments tend to be negative, but have said little about how the comments are realised or why there is a tendency to be negative. Based on the results of this analysis I argue that, through the use of common language choices (similar grammatical structures, little or no epistemic modality, implicature), commentators aim to accrue upvotes to validate themselves as core members of the Mail Online commentator community of practice