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Stricter Welfare Rules Are Not The Solution To Poverty
Get PDFOver the past three decades, American welfare policy has moved towards ever more restrictive eligibility criteria, reflecting a growing belief that generous benefits encourage dependence. In this essay, I argue that harsher welfare rules actually make it more difficult for low income families to support their children, transition to work and maintain long term financial independence. In some cases such as drug testing, these rules represent an unconstitional intrusion into the lives of citizens and are ultimately a waste of government resources. Moving towards a model of support rather than punishment for families in need would be an ultimately more effective method of poverty alleviation
Types of Social Support Associated with Depression in the UK Adult Population
Get PDFMany well-established sociological studies pertaining to the salubrious link between social relations and mental health have been published. In particular, numerous researchers address the issue of how social isolation and lack of family support and social ties can adversely affect one’s mental well-being. In this paper, we seek to identify and explore the relationships between people who were clinically diagnosed with depression and the aspects of their social environment, namely their social and family circumstances in the UK adult population. One hundred and ten blogs mentioning depression as their main condition were selected from a mental health support website, Time to Change, for analysis. As not many studies have analyzed such narratives, we expected the analysis to provide a fresher and deeper understanding of the experiences of those afflicted with depression. We observed that there is a consistent discourse emphasizing the importance of social support from close loved ones, in particular friends and family members. There is evidence that social circumstances can be mediating factors in depression
The development of Chinese university students’ intercultural competence in a short-term study-abroad program
Get PDFWith increasing internationalization in higher education, more and more Chinese universities are providing students with exchange programs in cooperation with foreign universities. Hitherto, however, research about Chinese university students’ intercultural competence in a study-abroad context has been relatively rare. The present study, adopting a mixed-method research design, examines the development of Chinese students’ intercultural competence in a short-term study-abroad program, as well as the factors that might have a role to play in the process. It is found that the students made significant progress in intercultural competence after participating in the program and factors such as attitudes towards intercultural communication, cultural knowledge storage, English language proficiency and engagement in intercultural communication are important contributors to the development of intercultural competence in a short-term study-abroad context
The effect of content retelling on incidental vocabulary acquisition for Chinese EFL learners
Get PDFAs the foundation of English learning, the acquisition of vocabulary has always been a hot topic in the fields of second language acquisition and foreign language teaching. Contrasted with intentional vocabulary acquisition, incidental vocabulary acquisition (IVA) relates to lexical gains as a by-product of main cognitive activities. In the field of teaching English as a foreign language (TEFL) in Chinese high schools, the incidental acquisition of English vocabulary has increasingly attracted the academic attention in recent years. However, few empirical studies have focused on the incidental acquisition of English vocabulary engendered by doing content retelling tasks. In light of the inadequacy, this study adopted the quality audio-visual material as input and content retelling as output (forming an input-output-input circle), aiming at exploring the effect of retelling on Chinese high school EFL learners’ IVA. Results indicated that learners who retold the content of the audio-visual material between two viewings can pick up more words. In this process, the attempted use of new words in oral reproduction plays a positive role in strengthening the immediate acquisition and long-term retention of the target words
The developmental trajectory of mandarin Chinese-speaking children’s pure metonymy comprehension ability
Get PDFThis empirical study investigates Chinese children’s developmental trajectory of pure metonymy comprehension. In the light of the experiment design in Jiang’s (2019) and Köder and Falkum’s (2020) studies, the present study, adopting a quantitative approach, employed a modified behavioral experiment and an eye-tracking experiment. Drawing on the experimental data, the study finds that: a) children’s metonymy comprehension performance showed a tendency towards the U-shape in the behavioral experiment tasks; b) children’s target (metonymy) fixation proportion, however, developed with age in the eye-tracking tasks; c) children’s metonymy comprehension not only developed with age but also showed different features in different difficulty levels of metonymies. Thus, this study explains the U-shape by arguing that age-4 and -5 children’s pure metonymy comprehension ability can be masked not only by a literal preference reported in Köder and Falkum’s (2020) study but also by the high randomness of task results of the age-3 participants and the high level of difficulty of culture-related metonymies. Moreover, the study also argues that year six is a crucial stage for children’s metonymy comprehension development, which provides implications for children’s early figurative language education
A semantic contrastive study of Chinese and English verb “跑/run” from the perspective of cognitive semantics
Get PDFBased on corpus data, this paper finds that the semantics of “跑/run” have similarities, which lie in the consistency of the central meanings and common usages. The differences are: 1) the meanings of “run” are significantly more than those of “跑”, resulting in a great divergence in the numbers of meanings; 2) compared with “跑”, the implications of “run” display a higher level of specificity. On the basis of cognitive theories, the paper has yielded the following findings. The semantic overlaps of “跑/run” root in their identical prototypical meanings. The semantic differences are generated by the following factors: 1) the image-schema distribution of “run” is wider with more abstract representations than that of “跑”, due to which many unique semantic items come into being; 2) semantic systems of “跑/run” adopt different metaphorical methods, contributing to more comprehensive cognitive domains of the semantic mapping and closer semantic interrelations of “run” than those of “跑”
Inmate Perceptions: The Impact of a Prison Animal Training Program Background
Get PDFThe purpose of this qualitative study was to explore the perceptions of jail inmates participating in the Paws and Stripes College program. The Paws and Stripes College program involves incarcerated inmates training local humane shelter canines’ obedience training techniques using the canine good citizen model as well as teaching the canines skills in which to participate as comfort/emotional support dogs. Using secondary data from self-report questionnaires completed by the inmates, this study sought to explore how the inmates felt before and after their exposure to the Paws and Stripes College program. Specifically, if the inmates felt that participation in the program was beneficial to them or not, and if so, how
Research on Optimizing National Mental Health Literacy from the Perspective of Health in China: Significance and Approach
Get PDFImproving the level of national mental health and strengthening the construction of social psychological service system are the necessary and important ways to promote the implementation of the Healthy China strategy. However, the gap between the requirements of Healthy China strategy for social mental health service system and the current situation of mental health service in China is still widespread. Promoting the public to form an effective demand for psychological help and establishing a new mental health service model is the key to bridge this gap. Optimizing mental health literacy is an important starting point and breakthrough to solve this problem. At present, the research on mental health literacy is undergoing a transformation from the paradigm of psycho-epidemiology to the paradigm of psychology and sociology. Taking contemporary China as the background, the reconceptualization of mental health literacy and the exploration of the current situation of Chinese mental health literacy in the new era is one of the core task of current psychological path research. The significance of this study is mainly reflected in: (1) promote the formation of effective demand for help and improve the level of public mental health; (2) enhance cultural selfconfidence and construct the theory of mental health literacy of contemporary Chinese people; (3) guide the supply side structural reform of mental health services and promote mental health equity; (4) reduce the burden of mental illness and help build a well-off society in an all-round way; (5) help build a social and psychological service system
Is Cognitive Linguistics deadly sinful? On the pros and cons of Cognitive Linguistics and its development
Get PDFCognitive Linguistics started from the 1980s, and it has become a mainstream since the end of the last century and the beginning of this century, which has got widespread attention, with a nickname as the third revolution in linguistic circles after the Saussurean Revolution and the Chomskyean Revolution. According to the dialectical principle of “negation of negation”, theoretical research is always advancing, thus the linguists are beginning to think of the shortcomings of Cognitive Linguistics and new developments in the future. For instance, Dabrowska (2016) pointed out the seven deadly sins of Cognitive Linguistics, which, we think, are overstated and too radical. Cognitive Linguistics has its own historical significance and makes great contributions to the criticism of Saussurean “Linguistic Apriorism” and Chomskyean “Linguistic Nativism”, but Cognitive Linguistics also has its own weaknesses, which are to be exposed in brief in this paper. We have also tried to propose “Embodied-Cognitive Linguistics as a revision in order to emphasize the philosophical views of “materialism” and “humanism” as a basic start in linguistic research
“Fu” and “Zhou”—A preliminary study on “language worship” and its symbolization
Get PDFThe article aims to, based on the study of “Spells” (or “Fuzhou”, 符咒, including the magic figures and incantations), find out the relationship of “Fu” (符, talisman1), “Zhou” (咒, incantations)” and “language worship” (including written language and oral language). There is an in-depth probe into “language worship”, and the clarification of the term “Fu” and “Fushu” (the use of Fu), “Zhou” and “Zhoushu” (the use of Zhou), no matter in a narrow sense or a broad one. In addition, the differentiation of language, “language worship” and “Spells” has been achieved via symbols and their symbolization. The final conclusion of such study shows that language worship is the process of language symbolization, and spells, in essence, is the symbol of language