1,720,958 research outputs found
Designing an instrument to profile informal experience with English: Rationale and methodology
No full textWithin the thriving area of research on informal access to English, the present paper focuses on
the methodology and design of valid, reliable and effective instruments for data collection. Studies on
informal language learning have addressed different target populations, with a preference for teenagers and young adults, and have mainly used questionnaires and users’ reports to gather large amounts of information. Methodological reflections on questionnaire design, however, are not always in the foreground – while sharing methodology choices is crucial for the comparability and replicability of findings. Moving from these premises, the current study describes a new instrument to investigate the experiencing and learning of English outside the classroom through multiple media. It includes a newly-developed questionnaire (the Informal English Contact and Learning questionnaire, IECoL; see Appendix) and a receptive vocabulary test adapted from Nation (1990). The tool was designed as part of an ongoing large-scale national (PRIN) project on the informalisation of English language learning among university students in Italy. Both components are described in detail, focusing on the rationale, the innovative aspects, the development and piloting phases, and the final structure and layout. Cronbach’s Alpha coefficient was calculated on the 4,000 valid questionnaires, showing the reliability and internal consistency of the instrument as a whole. We conclude by outlining the innovativeness of the instrument and by underlining the paramount importance of data collection methods and tools in a field where users’ reports and recall are the main sources of information about respondents’ behaviour and private worlds
Captions and subtitles in EFL learning: an investigative study in a comprehensive computer environment
No full textThis study is a broad-range investigation into short- and long-term effects of captioning and subtitling in beginner, intermediate, and advanced Italian adult learners of English. Several issues are taken into consideration including content comprehension, vocabulary acquisition, language-in-use, and semantic match between audio and video inputs. All the variables involved were controlled in a single computerised setting. The current experiment partially supports the findings described in the relevant literature. A few discrepancies emerged with some previous studies, but they are probably explained by the different type of material and testing procedure adopted
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Get PDFWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Get PDFWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
Correlated spin dynamics in 2-D quantum Heisenberg antiferromagnets from NMR relaxation in copper formiate tetradeuterate
No full textSpin dynamics and magnetic correlation length in two-dimensional quantum Heisenberg antiferromagnets
No full text- …
