Search results for "English"
showing 10 items of 846 documents
The foreign language teaching profession in Finnish and Japanese society: a sociocultural comparison
2016
The social basis of a teaching profession is created through behavioural and cultural patterns, specific artefacts, and their connection to certain institutional practices. The purpose of this study is to discover the conditions that structure the teaching profession in a cultural context and to find out what it is to be a foreign language (FL) teacher in Finland and Japan. Both countries have high educational equality but with contrasting patterns of management policies that are manifested in their teacher education curricula. Educational policy documents as well as teacher interviews and classroom observations were conducted in both countries and the findings compared by one Japanese and …
Identity and War in Michael Ondaatje’s
2012
Abstract This paper addresses the issue of identity in relation to war through a close reading of Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient. It investigates the connections between war and the construction of identity, focusing on aspects such as violence and death. In his novel Ondaatje uncovers private histories alongside the framing events of World War Two. Kip’s perception of war and his way of living through it suggest that the engagement on the world’s battlefield is riddled with inner conflicts separating people or bringing them together. In The English Patient what is at issue is the quest for a redefinition of the self: Hanna, Kirpal Singh and Almásy attempt to liberate the self throu…
Touring the magical North : Borealism and the indigenous Sámi in contemporary English-language children’s fantasy literature
2017
Discourses of exotic Lapland with its indigenous inhabitants, the Sámi, are widely circulated in the tourist industry and also surface in contemporary English-language children’s fantasy fiction. In contrast to the ‘self-orientalism’ of discourses of tourism, where places and people are represented as exotic to a tourist gaze, the portrayals of the North and its inhabitants gain different symbolic meanings in fictional texts produced by outsiders who rely on earlier texts – myths, fairy tales and anthropological accounts – rather than on their own lived experience of the North or indigeneity. This article applies the concept of Borealism to examine cross-cultural intertextuality and discou…
Giménez Moreno, Rosa (ed.). (2010). Words for Working. Professional and Academic English for International Business and Economics
2011
Gimenez Moreno, Rosa (ed.). (2010). Words for Working. Professional and Academic English for International Business and Economics. Valencia. Universitat de Valencia (PUV). Coleccion: Educacio. Laboratori de Materials 28. Pages: 400. ISBN: 978-84-370- 7873-1 There are many ways in which one can sell and it is certainly one of the most important aspects of business to be able to place a product successfully in the market. From a creative and editorial point of view a telling title is similarly weighty and this book fulfils that premise: a hand-book whose very title calls the attention of the prospective reader/user by underlining its operative quality. Words to work with, operative language, …
Different facets of attitudes towards having children: The Procreation Attitude Scale (PrAttS)
2020
The attitudes towards children are more complex than simple positive/negative distinctions. In the present study, we sought in two studies (N = 445) to provide a tool to explore different facets of attitudes towards babies and procreation by developing and validating a questionnaire regarding attitudes towards procreation. Study 1 was conducted to develop an English language scale tapping into adults’ attitudes toward having offspring. A larger number of statements were formulated that expressed an emotional value and motivational attitudes towards having babies. The sample consisted of n = 157 participants. Participants’ responses were subjected to a preliminary principal components analys…
Syntactic complexity in Finnish-background EFL learners’ writing at CEFR levels A1–B2
2022
Eurooppalaisen viitekehyksen (EVK) merkitys kielikoulutukselle on lisännyt tutkimusta sen taitotasojen kielellisistä piirteistä; tarkempi tieto näistä piirteistä auttaisi EVK:n soveltamista opetusmateriaalien, kurssien ja arviointin laatimiseen. Tutkimuksessa selvitettiin eroavatko EVK:n tasot toisistaan syntaksin kompleksisuuden perusteella. Suomalaiset 14- ja 17-vuotiaat englannin oppijat (N=379) kirjoittivat kolme kirjoitelmaa, jotka arvioitiin EVK:n taitotasoille. Arviointiaineisto tutkittiin monitahoisella Rasch-analyysillä ja tekstien piirteet selvitettiin automaattisilla analyysiohjelmilla. Tuloksien perusteella alimpia EVK-tasoja (A1–A2) erotti selvimmin toisistaan lauseiden ja T-yk…
Polish and Finnish teenagers’ motivation to learn English:the role of context
2016
Abstract Language learning motivation has been investigated in a number of contexts (Dornyei and Ushioda 2009). However, there has been only one attempt (Taguchi et al. 2009) at a systematic comparison of models of motivation to learn English by students from different countries. The aim of this study is to investigate the role of context by comparing motivational characteristics and SEM (Structural Equation Modelling) models of language learning motivation of 15-16 year-old students from Finland and Poland. The data from both countries was collected using the same motivational questionnaire with a total of 351 students completing it. A number of differences were identified between the two …
The International Comparable Corpus: Challenges in building multilingual spoken and written comparable corpora
2021
This paper reports on the efforts of twelve national teams in building the International Comparable Corpus (ICC; https://korpus.cz/icc) that will contain highly comparable datasets of spoken, written and electronic registers. The languages currently covered are Czech, Finnish, French, German, Irish, Italian, Norwegian, Polish, Slovak, Swedish and, more recently, Chinese, as well as English, which is considered to be the pivot language. The goal of the project is to provide much-needed data for contrastive corpus-based linguistics. The ICC corpus is committed to the idea of re-using existing multilingual resources as much as possible and the design is modelled, with various adjustments, on t…
Etude numérique d'équations aux dérivées partielles non linéaires et dispersives
2011
Numerical analysis becomes a powerful resource in the study of partial differential equations (PDEs), allowing to illustrate existing theorems and find conjectures. By using sophisticated methods, questions which seem inaccessible before, like rapid oscillations or blow-up of solutions can be addressed in an approached way. Rapid oscillations in solutions are observed in dispersive PDEs without dissipation where solutions of the corresponding PDEs without dispersion present shocks. To solve numerically these oscillations, the use of efficient methods without using artificial numerical dissipation is necessary, in particular in the study of PDEs in some dimensions, done in this work. As stud…
Viabilidad de la informatización del examen lengua extranjera de las Pruebas de Acceso a la Universidad
2016
[ES] Tras el anuncio por parte del Gobierno de la inclusión de una sección oral en el examen de lengua extranjera de la Prueba de Acceso a la Universidad, que estaba prevista para 2012, diferentes posibilidades en cuanto a la informatización de dicha sección se analizaron en un esfuerzo por encontrar una propuesta viable para la evaluación de las destrezas orales y un estudio cualitativo se llevó a cabo con 286 participantes. Los resultados arrojaron luz en cuanto a la recepción inicial de las soluciones tecnológicas desarrolladas dentro de un sistema de gestión del aprendizaje y en cuanto a la viabilidad de la informatización de la sección oral de la prueba, mostrando que es posible implan…