1,720,990 research outputs found
Medium of instruction in Asia: context, processes and outcomes
No full textOne major impact of globalisation on education is denoted by the growing trend to use English, the global language, as a medium of instruction (MOI) in emerging polities that are trying to enhance their English-speaking capacities. This article emphasises developing an understanding of MOI from a language policy and planning as well as an educational perspective. It explores the policy and practice of MOI in 10 polities in Asia including Bangladesh, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, the Maldives, Nepal, Timor-Leste and Vietnam, using a broad-based framework that aims to explicate the context, motivation, goals, actors, implementation process and outcomes of MOI. The article points out the dominance of English as MOI which is used in eight of the polity studies included in our analysis. We conclude that while the Asian region as a whole reflects the globalisation of English as medium of instruction policies, individual polities may have specific motivations and goals and that they may develop specific strategies to protect their own interests and identities. More crucially, at the macro-policy level, there seems to be a simplistic understanding of MOI as a cheap solution to complex language problems for achieving overly ambitious politico-economic goals and that this leads to less than ideal MOI implementation illustrated by teachers' and students' struggles as policy actors at the micro level
‘English-only’, but not a medium-of-instruction policy: the Japanese way of internationalising education for both domestic and overseas students
No full textWhile the medium-of-instruction (MOI) has been seen as one of the most crucial decision-making areas in language policies, it is curious that the equivalent Japanese expression to MOI is absent from educational policy documents. In a nation where the Japanese language is called the national language and enjoys the status of an official language, the absence of the MOI in policy documents is closely related to the fact that the so-called English education in Japan has been removed from bilingual education. In the new millennium, the Japanese government has continuously sought to increase the profile of English in two ways: by improving the overall English proficiency of Japanese students, and by attracting overseas students to Japanese universities in the name of internationalisation. The new senior-highschool English curriculum that aims to ‘conduct English classes in English’ was fully implemented in 2013, and the so-called Global 30 Project is expected to attract some 300,000 overseas students by 2020 to ‘English-only’ degree programmes established at core universities. This article argues that rather than equating with the MOI, the ‘English-only’ initiative can be seen as a tactic for facilitating the co-existence of the national language and English without formalising the status of English as a MOI. By examining government education policies and relevant documents using critical discourse analysis, it also argues that Japan’s dualism (Japanese and the Other) or the mechanism of Othering is behind these initiatives
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
The Rise of English and the Space for Modern Languages
Get PDFThis article examines the space for modern languages in Inner Circle
English countries including Australia, UK, and USA against the
continued rise of English as a global lingua franca. It is reasonable
to surmise that the global popularity of English – demanded by the
Outer and Expanding Circle and mainly supplied by the Inner Circle
countries will leave limited instrumental value for learning other
languages. As reported in this article, the global linguistic market is
dominated by English which has also attracted new market players
alongside the old, Anglophone market leaders. Indeed, the “English is
enough” ideology is dominant in the Inner Circles of English, affecting
the quantity and quality of the study of other languages in these
societies. Despite all sociolinguistic, attitudinal, and instrumental
factors in favor of an English-only monolingual social psyche, the
article concludes that the space of other languages has not fully dried
out. There are still many reasons from multiple perspectives that point
to the value of other languages in a global regime of English
Fieldwork for language education research in rural Bangladesh: ethical issues and dilemmas
No full textAppropriate 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
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