Chinese Biology TAs’ Perception of their English Proficiency: An Exploratory Case Study

Many Chinese graduate students are teaching assistants (TAs) in mathematics, science and engineering departments in the U.S. universities. TAs’ English proficiency has been a subject of concern or even criticism for years in the U.S. However, only one research has been found around international TAs’ English proficiency per discipline. No research has been found about Chinese TAs’ English proficiency. None has been done on Chinese TA’s perception of their English proficiency in biology. With this gap noticed, I deployed interviews to explore what the three biology TAs perceived as to their English proficiency. The study found that their perception was more relevant to their content-knowledge preparation for teaching and their previous English-learning experience than cultural influence

Chinese Biology Teaching Assistants\u27 Perception of their English Proficiency: An Exploratory Case Study

Many Chinese graduate students are teaching assistants (TAs) in mathematics, science and engineering departments in the U.S. universities. TAs’ English proficiency has been a subject of concern or even criticism for years in the U.S. However, only one research has been found around international TAs’ English proficiency per discipline. No research has been found about Chinese TAs’ English proficiency. None has been done on Chinese TA’s perception of their English proficiency in biology. With this gap noticed, I deployed interviews to explore what the three biology TAs perceived as to their English proficiency. The study found that their perception was more relevant to their content-knowledge preparation for teaching and their previous English-learning experience than cultural influence. These findings suggest that content knowledge and language competence are both important thus should be combined in TA training programs, in order to improve TAs’ overall English proficiency in teaching

Challenges for College-Level Learners of Academic English Writing in China

English learners in Chinese universities feel it is difficult to write academically. The difficulty lies in but not limited to linguistic differences; it also stems from other factors including cultural origins, educational values, rhetorical strategies, and reader awareness. Recommendations towards overcoming these barriers are put forward in this paper

Exploring Seventh Graders’ Perceptions of the Picture-word Inductive Model to their English Narrative Writing in China

In this exploratory study, the researcher interviewed 30 seventh graders in China about their perceptions of the newly tried method, Picture-word Inductive Model (PWIM), to their English narrative writing. Many student participants listed and exemplified positive influence of PWIM on their narrative writing in and from the PWIM trial

Essays on Labor Economics

Quantum annealing (QA) uses the principles of quantum mechanics for solving unconstrained optimization problems. Since its initial proposal, there has been much interest in the search for practical problems for which QA has advantage over classical algorithms. Although it is believed that quantum computers cannot in general solve NP-complete problems effciently, there has been evidence suggesting that effects such as quantum tunneling can bring quantum speedup over classical computation for some problems in NP. In this dissertation, we consider two problems that have both theoretical and practical importance. One is the Set Cover with Pairs problem. The other is the Factorization problem. The Set Cover with Pairs (SCP) problem is a generalization of the Set Cover problem. It requires each element in a set to be covered by at least two objects instead of one as in the Set Cover problem. The SCP problem is believed to be not only NP-hard, but also hard to approximate. In this dissertation, we explicitly construct the Ising Hamiltonians whose ground states encode the solutions of SCP instances. The resulting Ising Hamiltonian has the appealing property that the control precision required for encoding an SCP instance scales only linearly with the number of objects in the covering set. The Integer Factorization problem is of great interest in the quantum community because it is diffcult to solve using classical methods and its importance in cryptography. In this dissertation, we propose a general framework for solving factorization problems using quantum annealing, by mapping the framework to an Ising Hamiltonian. We develop several methods to consider the specifc requirements such as control precision, spin-spin connection in the current Ising machines. We test the methods on the latest D-Wave 2000Q machine