Search results for "mathematics"

Analysis of New Concept English from the Perspective of Cross-cultural Communication–A Case Study in Book 2

2018

New Concept English (NCE) is a series of English language textbooks, four volumes in total, which have gained national popularity and wide acceptance by English teachers, learners and parents in China. In the academic circle, apart from the analysis of the contents of NCE, which has been mostly discussed, many contrast studies between NCE and other English course-books are not new topics either. This paper focuses on the analysis of NCE from the perspective of cross-cultural communication and develops a detailed study on the second volume based on eight parameters: norm, value, art, custom, religion, language, ways of life, material culture. Hopefully, the current study will shed new light …

Support for end-weight as a determinant of linguistic variation and change

2016

The term end-weight refers to the tendency for bulkier constituents to occur at the end of sentences. While end-weight has occasionally been analysed as a more general short-before-long principle in the sense of Behaghel's (1909–10) Law of Growing Constituents, the operation of end-weight in absolute sentence-final position has until recently lacked empirical verification. This article shows that end-weight effects can be observed in grammatical variation contexts in which language users have a choice between variants that differ in terms of length and degree of explicitness. Using two variation phenomena as a testing ground, we empirically investigate the hypothesis that the more explicit …

Relationship between students' opinions, background factors and learning outcomes: Finnish 9th graders learning English

2017

Online Intercultural Exchanges Through Digital Storytelling

2017

This article focuses on the affordances of a digital storytelling project in developing students' language, digital and other skills: learning and innovation, creativity, critical thinking, problem solving, team working, and life and career skills. The project was undertaken by university English for Specific Purposes students and was conducted within an Online Intercultural Exchange between the Cyprus University of Technology and the University of Valencia. Its design was based on a Project-Based Learning (PBL) methodology. It incorporated active learning and multimodal resources and capabilities. The need for transforming language teaching pedagogies was borne in mind, as it is necessary …

Case Distribution and Nominalization: Evidence from Finnish

2009

.  In many languages, case is distributed among many grammatical elements inside of argument DPs. This article shows that case distribution in Finnish is sensitive to certain nontrivial structural properties of those DPs. This makes it possible to use case distribution as a tool to investigate the internal structure of a variety of DPs, including nominalized clauses. It is argued, based on such new evidence, that (i) there exists a syntactic nominalizer head n within various kinds of nominal phrases, and that (ii) genitive argument DPs of nominalized clauses undergo raising analogous to the EPP-triggered DP raising in finite clauses. Furthermore, these genitive arguments are base-generated …

Training the modern translator – the acquisition of digital competencies through blended learning

2019

This paper presents the ERASMUS+ DigiLing project, which aims to teach and improve linguists’ and translators’ skills and knowledge of digitalisation to prepare them for today’s job market. Against this background, it discusses the development of digital competencies and distinguishes them from traditional domain-specific and general competencies. For the purpose of competence acquisition, six online courses have been created which all revolve around the field of ‘digital linguistics’, including localization in the digital age and post-editing machine translation. We provide an overview of the project, the course contents and the didactic methodology. In addition, we discuss which competenc…

Metaphors in the mirror: The influence of teaching metaphors in a medical education programme

2016

Medical students often face problems in using and understanding metaphors when communicating with a patient or reading a scientific paper. These figures of speech constitute an interpretative problem and students need key strategies to facilitate metaphor comprehension and disambiguation of meaning. This article examines how medical students' strategies of metaphor comprehension could be improved by specific teaching on metaphors using a Cognitive Linguistics approach. Medical students' ability to comprehend mirror neuron metaphors was assessed comparing the performance of students who did not receive any instruction about metaphoric extension strategies after a lesson on mirror neurons wit…

Creación de un modelo estadístico predictivo para la determinación de las funciones de atenuación en español hablado

2018

Recientemente, algunos autores han definido distintas variables para caracterizar la atenuación lingüística en el marco de una base de datos multidimensional (Briz/Albelda; Albelda/otros). En este estudio se han seleccionado 982 elementos de atenuación de dieciocho entrevistas de español hablado; todos ellos han sido supervisados por hasta cuatro entrevistadores del proyecto Es.VaG.Atenuación. Finalmente, los datos se han evaluado mediante tres pruebas estadísticas para la clasificación y la reducción de variables: el análisis múltiple de correspondencias, el árbol de clasificaciones y el Random Forest. Las variables más determinantes en la discriminación de las funciones de atenuación han …

English pronunciation teaching at different educational levels: Insights into teachers’ perceptions and actions

2016

The aim of the present paper is to reflect upon the place of pronunciation in English as a foreign language (EFL) teaching at different educational levels in Poland. To collect the data, an on-line survey was conducted among EFL professionals teaching at primary, lower secondary, and higher secondary schools in Poland. The questions focused on the respondents’ beliefs about pronunciation, teachers’ competences regarding pronunciation and pronunciation teaching, and the pronunciation teaching techniques they use. The results depict the most and least frequently used pronunciation teaching techniques at each of the three educational stages, and the beliefs of EFL teachers in Poland regarding …

The internally layered foot in Dutch

2017

AbstractRecent metrical studies have proposed that, under certain circumstances, a weak syllable may be adjoined to a binary foot, giving rise to a minimally recursive foot. Adding to a growing body of research from metrical stress and foot-conditioned phenomena in various languages, the goals of this paper are twofold. First, we aim at providing empirical evidence for internally layered feet based on the distribution of three foot-conditioned processes of Dutch: vowel reduction, glottal stop /ʔ/ insertion and /h/ licensing/deletion. Second, we explore a less studied theoretical and descriptive advantage of internally layered feet: their potential to predict phonological strength distinctio…