1,720,999 research outputs found

    Mandarin Chinese teachers across borders: challenges and needs for professional development

    No full text
    The learning and teaching of Mandarin Chinese as a second or foreign language (CSL/CFL) has been gaining momentum around the world, leading to a shortage of qualified Chinese teachers. Thus more research is needed into the training and professional development of Chinese teachers. This study investigates the challenges and difficulties that native Chinese-speaking teachers of Mandarin have encountered in British schools and the professional development that they desire. A questionnaire survey and semi-structured interviews were used for data collection from native Chinese-speaking teachers of Mandarin in Confucius Institutes (Hanban teachers) in the UK. Results show that participants have encountered linguistic, pedagogical and socio-cultural challenges. Major challenges reported by the Hanban teachers include lack of English proficiency and intercultural competence, lack of knowledge about the local education system, and lack of effective pedagogical methods and classroom management skills to work with disruptive students, students with special educational needs, as well as teaching assistants. The study concludes that training and professional development tailored to the local context seems imperative for this group of teachers to facilitate their effective teaching and localisation

    Motivating and demotivating factors for Chinese as a foreign language learners in a British CLIL program

    No full text
    This study investigates Mandarin Chinese learners’ motivation in a Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) program in a British secondary school from the perspective of learning environment, learner engagement, and learner identities. Fifteen pupils who are learning Chinese as a foreign language (CFL) have been interviewed individually or in a focus group. The results indicate that the context of L2 learning and pupils’ learning experience contribute to their sustained motivation. More specifically, the nature of the CLIL subjects, teachers and their teaching methods, peers, tasks, and examinations all play an important role in motivating or demotivating students. Pedagogical implications have been discussed with suggestions for maintaining students’ motivation in CLIL programs. This article fills the gap in the field of motivational study by bridging the learning of CFL and the CLIL context.</p

    Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis

    Full text link
    The 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

    Full text link
    “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

    Full text link
    We 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

    Full text link
    We 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

    Author Index

    No full text
    Nao informado

    koamabayili/VECTRON-author-checklist: VECTRON author checklist

    No full text
    We have done our best to complete the author checklist relating to the use of animals in the hut study. Note that the objective for the hut study was to evaluate the IRS treatment applications for residual efficacy against Anopheles mosquitoes, including the local An. coluzzii mosquito population. Cows were only used to attract mosquitoes into the huts and no tests were carried out directly on the cows. The author checklist is intended for use with studies where experiments are carried out on animals, which is why we have had such difficulty in completing this for the hut study, as many of the questions do not relate to how the cows were used
    corecore