Yabancı dil olarak İngilizce öğretilen sınıflarda yetişkinlerin bilinçli çalışmayı algılamaları

Language education for adults has traditionally proceeded from the assumption that the student is linguistically and communicatively aware, and furthermore, knows how to learn a language. Language teaching methodology and materials therefore concentrate upon the subject matter without even a passing glance at language, language learning, culture or communication awareness, and include no information about or suggestions for learning. This became apparent in the analysis of data collected in classroom-based research undertaken with adults studying English as a foreign language at the university level in Mexico. The ‘medium’ for the research was an introductory course written specifically for the learners, and was designed with a general-to-specific (or top-down) process which began with awareness training and included suggestions throughout for learning-to-learn strategies. Results from the research as to the adult learners’ perceptions of these aspects of the course are discussed in this article, and clearly indicate that such teaching practice helps to fulfill genuine and pressing adult learner needs.Yetişkinler için dil eğitimi, öğrencinin dilsel ve iletişimsel bilinci  olması ile birlikte bir dili nasıl öğrenmesini bilmesi varsayımdan  geleneksel olarak ileri gelmiştir. Bu yüzden dil öğretim yöntemi ve araçları ne öğrenmede ne de iletişimde rol oynayan bilincin  önemine dayanmaksızın asıl konu üzerinde yoğunlaşır. Bunun eksikliğini yabancı bir dil öğrenmek için üniversiteye döndüğümde ilk defa fark ettim.İngilizceyi  Meksika'da yabancı bir dil olarak öğretmeye başladığımda bu konu benim için daha  baskılayıcı bir hal aldı ki diğer yabancı dilleri öğrenen yetişkinlerin sınıf  içindeki  bilinçli çalışma algılayışları hakkında araştırma yapmaya karar verdim ve bunun yabancı dil öğrenme sürecinde faydalı olabileceğini düşündüm. Bu araştırma, Meksika da iki üniversitenin yabancı dil olarak İngilizce eğitim verdiği on bir sınıfta, birlikte çalıştığım  öğrenenler için bizzat kendim hazırladığım bir giriş dersi ile uygulanmıştır. Bu ders, ayrımsama eğitimiyle başlayan ve öğrenmeyi-öğrenme stratejileri sürecinde tavsiyeler barından genelden özele sıralanmış bir dil öğretim yöntemiyle tasarlanmıştır. Bu makalede, yetişkin öğrenenlerin dersin bu yönlerini algılayışıyla ilgili nitelikli araştırmanın sonuçları  ele alınmıştır. Ayrıca, ayrımsama eğitimi ve yukarıda bahsedilen  öğretim yöntemi yabancı dil öğrenen yetişkinlerin ihtiyaçlarını tamamlamakta yardımcı olduğu  belirtilmiştir

Adult Learners’ Perceptions of the Significance of Culture in Foreign Language Teaching and Learning

Is learning about culture important when learning a foreign language? One would think that after its long history in the field of foreign language teaching this question had been answered with a resounding ‘yes’. However, I saw little evidence of this in the classroom when I returned to the university to learn a foreign language or when I began teaching English as a Foreign Language (EFL). I decided to investigate, and found that while much has been published about the theory of the need for inclusion of culture in foreign language teaching, I was struck by the absence of reports on the study of learners’ opinions on the issue and resolved to do such a study. Since I had encountered no teaching materials that I felt encompassed the teaching of culture sufficiently, I designed an introductory EFL course specifically for the adult learners I was working. The course centered on intercultural communication and awareness, and I employed it as the ‘medium’ for qualitative action research to learn about the learners’ perceptions of the experience. In this paper I report on their responses to the focus on culture. The research reveals that while the inclusion of culture and the concept of ‘learner centering’ in foreign language education are recognized in theory, these considerations have not been effectively incorporated into practice. It is hoped that the definitive insights from learners’ assessments of the significance of explicitly learning about culture when learning a foreign language will instigate its further inclusion and promote conscious learner centering

How Do Students Feel about Graded Readers?

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The James Webb Space Telescope Mission

Twenty-six years ago a small committee report, building on earlier studies, expounded a compelling and poetic vision for the future of astronomy, calling for an infrared-optimized space telescope with an aperture of at least $4m$. With the support of their governments in the US, Europe, and Canada, 20,000 people realized that vision as the $6.5m$ James Webb Space Telescope. A generation of astronomers will celebrate their accomplishments for the life of the mission, potentially as long as 20 years, and beyond. This report and the scientific discoveries that follow are extended thank-you notes to the 20,000 team members. The telescope is working perfectly, with much better image quality than expected. In this and accompanying papers, we give a brief history, describe the observatory, outline its objectives and current observing program, and discuss the inventions and people who made it possible. We cite detailed reports on the design and the measured performance on orbit.Comment: Accepted by PASP for the special issue on The James Webb Space Telescope Overview, 29 pages, 4 figure

Dissecting the Shared Genetic Architecture of Suicide Attempt, Psychiatric Disorders, and Known Risk Factors

Background Suicide is a leading cause of death worldwide, and nonfatal suicide attempts, which occur far more frequently, are a major source of disability and social and economic burden. Both have substantial genetic etiology, which is partially shared and partially distinct from that of related psychiatric disorders. Methods We conducted a genome-wide association study (GWAS) of 29,782 suicide attempt (SA) cases and 519,961 controls in the International Suicide Genetics Consortium (ISGC). The GWAS of SA was conditioned on psychiatric disorders using GWAS summary statistics via multitrait-based conditional and joint analysis, to remove genetic effects on SA mediated by psychiatric disorders. We investigated the shared and divergent genetic architectures of SA, psychiatric disorders, and other known risk factors. Results Two loci reached genome-wide significance for SA: the major histocompatibility complex and an intergenic locus on chromosome 7, the latter of which remained associated with SA after conditioning on psychiatric disorders and replicated in an independent cohort from the Million Veteran Program. This locus has been implicated in risk-taking behavior, smoking, and insomnia. SA showed strong genetic correlation with psychiatric disorders, particularly major depression, and also with smoking, pain, risk-taking behavior, sleep disturbances, lower educational attainment, reproductive traits, lower socioeconomic status, and poorer general health. After conditioning on psychiatric disorders, the genetic correlations between SA and psychiatric disorders decreased, whereas those with nonpsychiatric traits remained largely unchanged. Conclusions Our results identify a risk locus that contributes more strongly to SA than other phenotypes and suggest a shared underlying biology between SA and known risk factors that is not mediated by psychiatric disorders.Peer reviewe

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

31st Annual Meeting and Associated Programs of the Society for Immunotherapy of Cancer (SITC 2016) : part two

Background The immunological escape of tumors represents one of the main ob- stacles to the treatment of malignancies. The blockade of PD-1 or CTLA-4 receptors represented a milestone in the history of immunotherapy. However, immune checkpoint inhibitors seem to be effective in specific cohorts of patients. It has been proposed that their efficacy relies on the presence of an immunological response. Thus, we hypothesized that disruption of the PD-L1/PD-1 axis would synergize with our oncolytic vaccine platform PeptiCRAd. Methods We used murine B16OVA in vivo tumor models and flow cytometry analysis to investigate the immunological background. Results First, we found that high-burden B16OVA tumors were refractory to combination immunotherapy. However, with a more aggressive schedule, tumors with a lower burden were more susceptible to the combination of PeptiCRAd and PD-L1 blockade. The therapy signifi- cantly increased the median survival of mice (Fig. 7). Interestingly, the reduced growth of contralaterally injected B16F10 cells sug- gested the presence of a long lasting immunological memory also against non-targeted antigens. Concerning the functional state of tumor infiltrating lymphocytes (TILs), we found that all the immune therapies would enhance the percentage of activated (PD-1pos TIM- 3neg) T lymphocytes and reduce the amount of exhausted (PD-1pos TIM-3pos) cells compared to placebo. As expected, we found that PeptiCRAd monotherapy could increase the number of antigen spe- cific CD8+ T cells compared to other treatments. However, only the combination with PD-L1 blockade could significantly increase the ra- tio between activated and exhausted pentamer positive cells (p= 0.0058), suggesting that by disrupting the PD-1/PD-L1 axis we could decrease the amount of dysfunctional antigen specific T cells. We ob- served that the anatomical location deeply influenced the state of CD4+ and CD8+ T lymphocytes. In fact, TIM-3 expression was in- creased by 2 fold on TILs compared to splenic and lymphoid T cells. In the CD8+ compartment, the expression of PD-1 on the surface seemed to be restricted to the tumor micro-environment, while CD4 + T cells had a high expression of PD-1 also in lymphoid organs. Interestingly, we found that the levels of PD-1 were significantly higher on CD8+ T cells than on CD4+ T cells into the tumor micro- environment (p < 0.0001). Conclusions In conclusion, we demonstrated that the efficacy of immune check- point inhibitors might be strongly enhanced by their combination with cancer vaccines. PeptiCRAd was able to increase the number of antigen-specific T cells and PD-L1 blockade prevented their exhaus- tion, resulting in long-lasting immunological memory and increased median survival