1,721,802 research outputs found
Attitudes towards the teaching and learning of English at tertiary level in the State of Qatar in light of the spread of English as a Global Language
Full text linkABSTRACT A significant number of studies investigated attitudes towards the teaching and learning of English in different contexts around the world and from different stances. Some explored the issue from the stance of the curriculum and pedagogy; others from the perspective of English as an international language (EIL). This study, to my knowledge, is the first endeavour to combine the investigation of attitudes from the perspectives of EIL with attitudes to the curriculum and teaching methods. The spread of English and the concept of English as an International Language (EIL) are inextricably linked. EIL has emerged as a viable response to the global use of different types of English for communication (Selvi & Yazan, 2013) and does not refer to any particular variety of English, and its ownership is now shared by all people who speak it (Brutt-Griffler, 2002). Therefore, in light of these developments, it has become important to explore the impact of EIL on the teaching and learning of English, as elsewhere, in the context of Qatar. The study was based on an interpretive paradigm to investigate attitudes of students and teachers at a tertiary education college in the State of Qatar. The impetus for this is to explore low English proficiency from a broad perspective of the spread of English. The surveys were conducted in the English Learning Centre (ELC) at the Pearl College (PC) in Qatar. A questionnaire for students (n=155) and interviews for teachers (n=8) were used for the investigation. The questionnaire was analysed in the form of numbers and percentages and the interviews were coded and categorised. High level themes emerged from the surveys and were used for analysis and discussion of the findings. The major findings of this study are grouped under three themes based on the three RQs: 1) learning English in general; 2) the curriculum; and 3) the teaching methods. Students’ attitudes towards learning English in general (which entails the use of EIL) were highly positive in that the students recognized the importance and usefulness of English for local and international communication, for boosting their country’s economy and for their own career advancement. Likewise, teachers unanimously stressed the importance and usefulness of English for both local and international communication, but they underscored the importance of learning the standard norms for academic purposes. Generally, the questionnaire results revealed positive attitudes towards the course content and the teaching methods. The interview results also revealed that teachers held the same positive attitude as the students to the course content and methodology though with some reservations concerning some issues such as the assessment methods and the teaching time. All in all, the findings revealed that the participants’ attitudes towards the global spread of English and the use of EIL were highly positive. This is likely to add an increment of knowledge to knowledge already existing in this field. Finally, based on the findings, some implications of the study, especially in terms of the curriculum and teaching methods, which I think might benefit the English Department at my college in the future, have been discussed. Among these are the consideration of the pedagogy of English for international communication, the teaching of some form of ESP, the use of the mother tongue in teaching English, and the need to specify clearly in the curriculum how language levels would align with course objectives and assessment criteria as raised by some teachers in the interviews
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe 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 linkWe 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 linkWe 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
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