1,720,955 research outputs found
Effects of group work on reading comprehension and reading motivation of tertiary level ESL learners
Full text linkThe present study investigated the effects of group work on English as a Second Language (ESL) undergraduates’ reading comprehension and motivation to read. Four research questions which guided this study were as follows: 1) Is there any significant difference in ESL students’ reading comprehension performance between those who are in the teacher-fronted instruction compared to those working in groups? 2) Is group work more effective than teacher-fronted instruction in improving different levels of
comprehension? 3) Is there any significant difference in ESL students’ reading motivation between those in the control and experimental groups? 4) What are the students’ attitude towards group work in the reading classroom? A non-randomised control group pretest-posttest design was employed. Fifty eight students were divided into two groups; one worked in groups while the other experienced
teacher-fronted technique.
Four research instruments were used for data collection. A reading comprehension test from the Malaysian University English Test (MUET) Paper 3 was administered to the
participants before and after the treatment ends. Also, all of the participants completed an L2 reading motivation questionnaire in another session after the post-test. An Attitude Towards Group Work questionnaire was administered only to the participants in the experimental group. Six students from the experimental group were interviewed. The
participants in the experimental group were assigned reading tasks and they had to work in groups during the while-reading and post-reading stages while participants in the control group deal with the same reading tasks and work it out individually.
Results showed that the post-test mean score and the overall mean score of the experimental group was significantly higher than that of the control group for both reading comprehension test and reading motivation questionnaire. A statistically significant difference between the Experimental and Control group was reported on the inferential comprehension in Barrett Taxonomy. There were significant differences in three factors of reading motivation between both groups. Findings from the questionnaire and the semi-structured interview indicate overall positive attitudes towards group work in reading classroom.
The study concluded that group work is seen as a more effective method over teacherfronted technique, to increase students’ comprehension of L2 texts, and to increase their
motivation to read. A number of implications have been drawn regarding the inclusion of group work in the ESL reading classroom
Conversational linguistic analysis of spoken discourse in ESL professional communication / Syamimi Turiman
Full text linkAt the university level, various job interview training have been carried out to prepare future graduates for employment. However, the graduates' poor communication skills remain as one of the reasons for unemployment in Malaysia. Since job interviews are placed heavily on verbal exchanges between the interviewer and job candidate, the role that language plays in interaction is worth exploring. This study investigates the use of spoken metadiscourse in the Malaysian ESL job interviews to identify the types and frequencies of spoken metadiscourse employed; to examine the similarities and differences of metadiscourse across disciplines; and to explore how the metadiscourse features function in the said context. The data come from sixteen actual first-stage job interviews, whereby ten job interviews are from the technical discipline (i.e. science based profession) for the post of Plant Operation Engineer in a multinational company based in Malaysia; and six non-technical job interviews (i.e. social science and humanities job) for the post of English language lecturers in a public university in Malaysia. Corpus Linguistics and Corpus Analysis (CL/CA) methods were employed to analyse the textual and interpersonal metadiscourse in the corpus, both quantitatively and qualitatively. The quantitative findings revealed that the textual and interpersonal metadiscourse were used in the Malaysian ESL job interviews, but there were variations in the distribution and composition of metadiscourse in the two categories across disciplines. A notable finding was that the more detailed categories in the tentative metadiscourse framework proposed in the present study did prove useful in identifying similarities and differences in the use of metadiscourse across disciplines, and in explicating the metadiscourse subtypes which reflect power differences in job interview discourse. The qualitative analyses of metadiscourse which employed the CL/CA methods have revealed the specific functions and types of metadiscourse items occurring in the specific context throughout the job interview. CL/CA methods were found effective in investigating the use of metadiscourse in the Malaysian ESL job interviews. The study suggests that students at the tertiary level may benefit from explicit teaching of metadiscourse to enhance their communication skills. Training in the verbal aspects, specifically on metadiscourse in job interviews can be enhanced when learners are given the opportunity to reflect on their speech productions, so that they are better trained to gain control over their own language performance
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
koamabayili/VECTRON-author-checklist: VECTRON author checklist
No full textWe 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
Author-wise bibliometric analysis based on entropy.
No full textAuthor-wise bibliometric analysis based on entropy.</p
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