The Error in Trial and Error: Exercises on Phrasal Verbs

An analysis of 44 commercially available EFL textbooks found that it is common for textbooks to present learners with exercises on phrasal verbs without first providing relevant input to help them. In these cases, the learners are likely to resort to trial-and-error and are then expected to learn from feedback. We report an experiment conducted with Japanese EFL students (N=140) in which we compare the effectiveness of such a trial-and-error method with a retrieval procedure in which students first study a set of phrasal verbs and then complete an exercise. Scores on both an immediate and a one-week delayed post-test suggest superiority of retrieval over the trial-and-error procedure, where, despite the provision of feedback, 25% of the wrong exercise responses were reproduced in the delayed post-test

Weighing up Exercises on Phrasal Verbs: Retrieval Versus Trial-And-Error Practices

EFL textbooks and internet resources exhibit various formats and implementations of exercises on phrasal verbs. The experimental study reported here examines whether some of these might be more effective than others. EFL learners at a university in Japan were randomly assigned to four treatment groups. Two groups were presented first with phrasal verbs and their meaning before they were prompted to retrieve the particles from memory. The difference between these two retrieval groups was that one group studied and then retrieved items one at a time, while the other group studied and retrieved them in sets. The two other groups received the exercises as trial-and-error events, where participants were prompted to guess the particles and were subsequently provided with the correct response. One group was given immediate feedback on each item, while the other group tackled sets of 14 items before receiving feedback. The effectiveness of these exercise implementations was compared through an immediate and a 1-week delayed post-test. The best test scores were obtained when the exercises had served the purpose of retrieval, although this advantage shrank in the delayed test (where scores were poor regardless of treatment condition). On average 70% of the post-test errors produced by the learners who had tackled the exercises by trial-and-error were duplicates of incorrect responses they had supplied at the exercise stage, which indicates that corrective feedback was often ineffective

Replication of the herpes simplex virus type 1 RL1 mutant 1716 in primary neuronal cell cultures — possible relevance to use as a viral vector

The herpes simplex virus type 1 (HSV-1) RL1 deletion mutant 1716 has properties that make it a promising candidate as a viral vector for gene therapy in the human nervous system. These properties include its ability to spread along neural pathways and establish a latent infection in post-mitotic neurons, while retaining a non-virulent phenotype in vivo and an inability to cause a lytic infection in stationary or fully differentiated cells. In this study, we used viral replication assays and indirect immunofluorescence to investigate the ability of 1716 to bind to, enter, express genes and produce progeny virus in dissociated neuronal cell cultures prepared from rat hippocampal, medial septal and dorsal root ganglion (DRG) tissues and in primary rat astrocyte cultures. Both heterogeneous cultures and those that had been enriched for neurons were employed. Following both low and high multiplicities of virus infection, the behaviour of 1716 was compared with its wild-type parent HSV-1 strain 17 in these cultures. It was found that the growth of 1716 was significantly impaired compared to wild type HSV-1, with these differences being magnified at lower multiplicities of viral infection as well as in neuron-enriched cultures: this impairment is likely to be due to decreased replication, as immunofluorescence assays showed that 1716 bound to, entered and expressed genes in all neuronal cell types and astrocytes with similar efficiency to the wild type virus. This ability of 1716 to enter and express genes in different neuronal populations demonstrates its potential suitability as a viral vector

Major histocompatibility complex (MHC) antigen expression in HIV encephalitis

In order to study possible immunopathogenic mechanisms in Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) encephalitis, immunocytochemical localization of Class I and Class II major histocompatibility complex (MHC) antigens was studied in formalin-fixed tissue sections from the brains of 10 individuals who had died with this disorder. Using the avidin biotin peroxidase technique and monoclonal antibodies to these antigens, increased expression of Class I antigens was found in five out of 10 and of Class II antigens in six out of 10 cases of HIV encephalitis. This contrasted with results obtained with the HIV-specific anti-P24 antibody which reacted with only a small number of cells in four cases. Class I and II antigens were detected mainly in perivascular monocytes/macrophages and also in multinucleated giant cells. In two cases, slight labelling was also detected in these cells more diffusely in the brain parenchyma. Immune and viral antigens were not detected in gill cells or neurons. Neither normal control cases nor brain sections from patients who had died from other neurological diseases were labelled with any of the antibodies apart from two cases of varicella-zoster virus-associated encephalitis in which increased expression of Class II antigens occurred. These findings support the notion that indirect immune-mediated mechanisms may be important in the pathogenesis of HIV encephalitis

Attempted modulation of HSV infection of neurons in culture by fibroblast growth factor

No abstract available

A experiência na extensão popular e a formação acadêmica em fisioterapia

As atividades de extensão universitária vêm ganhando espaço crescente no meio acadêmico. Entretanto, existem concepções e ideologias diversas norteando estas práticas. Nos cursos de graduação em Fisioterapia, em geral, as atividades de extensão são bastante pontuais; mesmo as que funcionam de forma mais regular têm, predominantemente, um caráter assistencialista. Este trabalho se propõe a relatar uma experiência de extensão em fisioterapia, que é realizada em uma comunidade periférica de João Pessoa e se orienta pelos princípios da educação popular. Registra-se a importância dessa experiência para a formação dos acadêmicos de fisioterapia, no sentido de lhes possibilitar uma aproximação com a realidade social da população, vivenciando a atuação na atenção básica, estabelecendo vínculos com as pessoas e organizações da comunidade, pautados no diálogo e na responsabilidade social