Search results for " communication"

Secondary school students’ collaboration during dyadic debates face-to-face and through computer chat

2009

Communicative competence needed in today's constructive learning environments both in virtual and physical classrooms requires most of all critical and argumentative thinking skills as well as abilities to use reciprocal and collaborative language. This study clarifies the quality of secondary school students' collaboration in dyadic face-to-face and computer chat debates during argumentative discussions. The speech acts produced in 24 debates were first classified into either on-task or off-task categories. The on-task speech acts were then further classified into six collaborative and two non-collaborative categories. The students commonly presented questions and made requests for clarifi…

Dealing with Intercultural Communicative Competence in the Foreign Language Classroom

2007

Intercultural communicative competence in the context of the European higher education area

2009

Abstract In this paper, we analyse the close relationship between the European higher education area (EHEA), the common European framework of reference for languages and intercultural communicative competence (ICC) and show how the implementation of ICC in foreign language teaching can become an essential tool to acquire the full achievement of the EHEA. En este articulo analizamos la estrecha relacion entre el Espacio Europeo de Educacion Superior, el Marco Europeo de las Lenguas y la competencia comunicativa intercultural y mostrar como la implementacion de la CCI en la ensenanza de una lengua extranjera puede convertirse en una herramienta esencial para conseguir los objetivos del EEES.

Promoting multilingual communicative competence through multimodal academic learning situations

2016

This paper presents information on the factors affecting the development of multilingual and multicultural communicative competence in interactive multimodal learning environments in an academic context. The interdisciplinary course in multilingual interaction offered at the University of Jyväskylä aims to enhance students’ competence in multilingual and multicultural academic communication by promoting the use of their entire linguistic repertoire in various learning situations. Throughout the course, we observed the students’ engagement in multilingual and multicultural activities. These observations suggest that simultaneous use of multiple languages in synchronous and asynchronous learn…

‘Community Cohesion’ and English Disruptions of the Multicultural Peace: The Northern Riots, White ‘Backlash’ and the ‘Evocation of a Faith Sector’

2013

This chapter takes as its starting point controversies surrounding the concept and policy ‘agenda’ associated with community cohesion, a concept first voiced in the official reports into the riots in Oldham, Burnley and Bradford in May–July 2001. The most influential of these, the ‘Cantle Report’, deliberately framed itself in opposition to the analysis of reports into previous urban disturbances (e.g. Scarman 1981) with their emphasis on ‘systems, process and institutions’, and hence by implication their link to much academic discourse in the social policy field; choosing instead to focus on the interpersonal, on communication between individuals and groups, and on ‘values’, in line with t…

Mobile social networking in theory and practice

2008

Mobile social networks have gained the attention of the media, academy and mobile market. Despite of the robust tradition of network and community studies, mobile social networks are often addressed improperly. This paper presents a theoretical framework to study mobile social networking and examines the design implications of results of an exploratory study conducted with a group of 18 young adults in Finland. The findings of this study indicate that the quality of mobile applications offering social networking could be greatly increased by integrating the knowledge of two traditions that so far developed in parallel, namely the mathematical as well as social approaches to social networks.

Struggling for the New Role for Business Controller

2008

The recent discussion on changes in the controller's role has mainly focused on the national and organizational level culture aspects of that professional role. While earlier studies have demonstrated how the role changes have been stimulated by corporate culture, IT systems, new accounting technologies and interprofessional competition, we contend that such changes cannot be achieved without active individuals in organizations. Our study is informed by the concept of institutional entrepreneurship, concentrating on changes in institutions, such as professional roles, which are achieved by an active agency. Thus we concentrate on the individual level by tracing how the role of a single cont…

Learning with belief levels

2008

AbstractWe study learning of predicate logics formulas from “elementary facts,” i.e. from the values of the predicates in the given model. Several models of learning are considered, but most of our attention is paid to learning with belief levels. We propose an axiom system which describes what we consider to be a human scientist's natural behavior when trying to explore these elementary facts. It is proved that no such system can be complete. However we believe that our axiom system is “practically” complete. Theorems presented in the paper in some sense confirm our hypothesis.

Incremental Generalized Discriminative Common Vectors for Image Classification.

2015

Subspace-based methods have become popular due to their ability to appropriately represent complex data in such a way that both dimensionality is reduced and discriminativeness is enhanced. Several recent works have concentrated on the discriminative common vector (DCV) method and other closely related algorithms also based on the concept of null space. In this paper, we present a generalized incremental formulation of the DCV methods, which allows the update of a given model by considering the addition of new examples even from unseen classes. Having efficient incremental formulations of well-behaved batch algorithms allows us to conveniently adapt previously trained classifiers without th…

Minimality as vacuous distinctness: Evidence from cross-linguistic sentence comprehension

2009

Abstract Psycholinguistic theorising has long been shaped by the assumption that the processing system endeavours to minimise structures/relations during online comprehension. Within the scope of a recent cross-linguistic, neurocognitive model of sentence comprehension (Bornkessel and Schlesewsky, 2006), we also proposed that the assumption of a very general ‘Minimality’ principle can account for a variety of psycholinguistic findings from a range of languages. In the present paper, we review empirical evidence for this notion of Minimality, before going on to discuss its limitations. On the basis of this discussion, we propose that, rather than constituting an independent processing princi…