434 research outputs found
Anatomy of a context: English Language Teaching in Italy
No full textL’insegnamento delle lingue straniere in Italia attraversa una fase di transizione: infatti sono in atto processi di trasformazione sia a livello scolastico, con il progetto “Lingue 2000”, sia a livello universitario, con la riforma dei programmi.
Le suddette scelte curricolari rappresenteranno, per le strutture scolastiche ed universitarie, un’aumentata richiesta di prestazioni in un’area disciplinare che è relativamente debole rispetto ad altri paesi europei, malgrado gli investimenti stanziati a varie riprese.
Questa situazione di ipotrofia viene rilevata dall’analisi dei risultati delle prove di certificazione internazionale. Viene evidenziata la necessità di una coerenza didattica che tenga realisticamente conto della situazione in cui si opera.
Le difficoltà incontrate dovrebbero essere utilmente interpretate come sintomi che ci possono aiutare a fare una diagnosi delle esigenze dell’insegnamento linguistico nella scuola e nell’università italiana, favorendo la creazione delle condizioni essenziali per un apprendimento più efficace.
Per garantire queste condizioni, qualsiasi struttura dovrà fare delle accurate scelte di gestione delle proprie risorse.
Il libro dunque si pone come una sorta di visita specialistica dello stato di salute dell’insegnamento della lingua straniera in Italia davanti ad un’aumentata richiesta di prestazioni rappresentata dalle recenti innovazioni.
E’ necessario partire dalla conoscenza delle condizioni dell’ambiente esterno, con particolare riferimento al reale bisogno della lingua inglese in Italia. Tali riflessioni non trascurano il problema del rischio d’imperialismo linguistico né il ruolo giocato dai mezzi di comunicazione di massa.
In quest’ottica viene raccolta un’anamnesi che elabora dati provenienti dall’analisi dei programmi scolastici, dal pre-progetto “Lingue 2000” e dall’osservazione dell’attuale ecosistema universitario.
Da ultimo, suggerendo aggiustamenti sulla gestione delle risorse e sul consolidamento degli aspetti che appaiono più fragili, si esprime una prognosi relativa alle prove cui l’università italiana si troverà sottoposta nell’ambito delle prossime riforme.
Infine vengono date alcune indicazioni terapeutiche per potenziare il campo della ricerca e della didattica, cosa che produrrebbe effetti positivi sulla qualità dell’insegnamento linguistico.
ENGLISH ABSTRACT
The outcomes of learning are profoundly affected by context. This book surveys the context of English language teaching in Italy through the analysis of a series of factors which affect both learning and teaching. The essential conditions for language teaching are identified and ways of evaluating programme design and description. The role of English in Italy is scanned and the teaching of English in schools comes under the microscope; and the university context, both in terms of programmes and the basic assumptions behind the provision of resources. The book examines particular innovations in both contexts: the Progetto Lingue 2000 and the recent university reforms and recounts the impact of certification on one Italian context. The author provides criteria for making the context more language friendly and for the best use of resources. This is a revealing case study for all involved in English Language Teaching in a European context and will be of use to the local teachers’ resource centres,university programme managers, practising teachers, trainees and their trainers, as well as to those working in ELT publishing. It puts together key elements of research so that theory can feed fruitfully into practic
The social life of information - Acknowledgments
No full textFor years pundits have predicted that information technology will obliterate the need for everything from travel to supermarkets to business organizations to social life itself. They have heralded the coming of the virtual office, digital butlers, electronic libraries, and virtual universities. Beaten down by info-glut and exasperated by computer systems with software crashes, viruses, and unintelligible error messages, individual users tend to wax less enthusiastic about technological predictions. Amid the hype and the never-narrowing gap between promise and performance, they find it hard to get a vision of the true potential of the digital revolution. John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid in their book The Social Life of Information (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2000) help us see through frenetic visions of the future to the real forces for change in society. Arguing elegantly for the important role that human sociability plays in the world of bits, this book, and the chapters published here in First Monday, gives us an optimistic look beyond the simplicities of information and individuals. The authors show how a better understanding of the contribution that communities, organizations, and institutions make to learning, knowledge, and judgement can lead to the richest possible use of technology in our work and everyday lives
The social life of information - Table of contents
No full textFor years pundits have predicted that information technology will obliterate the need for everything from travel to supermarkets to business organizations to social life itself. They have heralded the coming of the virtual office, digital butlers, electronic libraries, and virtual universities. Beaten down by info-glut and exasperated by computer systems with software crashes, viruses, and unintelligible error messages, individual users tend to wax less enthusiastic about technological predictions. Amid the hype and the never-narrowing gap between promise and performance, they find it hard to get a vision of the true potential of the digital revolution. John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid in their book The Social Life of Information (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2000) help us see through frenetic visions of the future to the real forces for change in society. Arguing elegantly for the important role that human sociability plays in the world of bits, this book, and the chapters published here in First Monday, gives us an optimistic look beyond the simplicities of information and individuals. The authors show how a better understanding of the contribution that communities, organizations, and institutions make to learning, knowledge, and judgement can lead to the richest possible use of technology in our work and everyday lives
Patterns and Meanings in Discourse
No full textThe present volume mixes theoretical discussions with practical demonstrations. It begins with introductory chapters defining terms and outlining the rationale and aims of the volume, the theoretical linguistic stance underpinning it and the overall methodologies to be used. After this introduction, each chapter begins by outlining a topic or an area in discourse studies, followed by descriptions of case studies which attempt both to shed light on particular themes or issues in this area and also and especially to demonstrate the methodologies which might be fruitfully employed to investigate such issues. Each chapter concludes with suggestions on activities which the readers may wish to undertake themselves. Finally, Appendix 1 contains a list of currently available resources for corpus linguistics research.
The topics for case study include studies in lexis, phraseology, syntax, text grammar, evaluative meaning, metaphor and “unusuality” (defined as the creative upsetting and exploitation of readers and hearers expectations of regularity in language). All of these concerns are present in the current work and are augmented by studies into author style, irony, spoken interaction, including face and politeness and diachronic studies of both linguistic and social, cultural and political changes over recent time
The Social Life of Information [Review]
No full textReview of The Social Life of Information / by John Brown Seely & Paul Duguid. Harvard Business School, 2000. ISBN 0875847625
Improving resource management for unattended observation of the marginal ice zone using autonomous underwater gliders
No full text© The Author(s), 2020. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License. The definitive version was published in Duguid, Z., & Camilli, R. Improving resource management for unattended observation of the marginal ice zone using autonomous underwater gliders. Frontiers in Robotics and AI, 7, (2020): 579256, https://doi.org/10.3389/frobt.2020.579256.We present control policies for use with a modified autonomous underwater glider that are intended to enable remote launch/recovery and long-range unattended survey of the Arctic's marginal ice zone (MIZ). This region of the Arctic is poorly characterized but critical to the dynamics of ice advance and retreat. Due to the high cost of operating support vessels in the Arctic, the proposed glider architecture minimizes external infrastructure requirements for navigation and mission updates to brief and infrequent satellite updates on the order of once per day. This is possible through intelligent power management in combination with hybrid propulsion, adaptive velocity control, and dynamic depth band selection based on real-time environmental state estimation. We examine the energy savings, range improvements, decreased communication requirements, and temporal consistency that can be attained with the proposed glider architecture and control policies based on preliminary field data, and we discuss a future MIZ survey mission concept in the Arctic. Although the sensing and control policies presented here focus on under ice missions with an unattended underwater glider, they are hardware independent and are transferable to other robotic vehicle classes, including in aerial and space domains.Support for this research was provided through NASA PSTAR Grant #NNX16AL08G and the National Science Foundation Navigating the New Arctic grant #1839063
Two centuries of 'security': Semantic variation in the State of the Union address (1790-2014)
No full textThis chapter makes a diachronic study of the word 'security' as used in State of Union addresses from 1790 to 2014, through a corpus assisted discourse analysis of meaning-making. It illustrates variations in relative frequencies over time and identifies four semantic categories of security: financial, national, international and social. Moreover it oberves the increase in the construal of hybrid categories of securit
The Copyright Wars: Three Centuries of Trans-Atlantic Battle. By Peter Baldwin . Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2014. 535 pp. Notes, index. Paper, $24.95. ISBN: 978-0-691-16909-5.
No full textThe Copyright Wars—the first major trans-Atlantic history of copyright from its origins to today—tells this important story. Peter Baldwin explains why the copyright wars have always been driven by a fundamental tension
Libraries and the Lure of the Local
No full textIm neuesten First Monday schreibt Paul Duguid ("The Social Life of Information") über die wechselnde Rolle von Rechtsbibliotheken unter dem Titel The Social Life of Legal Information : First Impressions
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