Search results for: word representations

Authors: Evangelia-Matroni Tomara

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This thesis answers the question whether the media representations and reporting in 2015-2016 - especially, after the image of the drowned three-year-old Syrian boy in the Mediterranean Sea which made global headlines in the beginning of September 2015 -, the European Commission regulatory sources material and related reporting, have the power to challenge the conceptualization of humanitarianism or even redefine it. The theoretical foundations of the thesis are based on humanitarianism and its core definitions, the power of media representations and the relative portrayal of migrants, refugees and/or asylum seekers, as well as the dominant migration discourse and EU migration governance. Using content analysis for the media portrayal of migrants (436 newspaper articles) and qualitative content analysis for the European Commission Communication documents from May 2015 until June 2016 that required various depths of interpretation, this thesis allowed us to revise the concept of humanitarianism, realizing that the current crisis may seem to be a turning point for Europe but is not enough to overcome the past hostile media discourses and suppress the historical perspective of security and control-oriented EU migration policies. In particular, the crisis helped to shift the intensity of hostility and the persistence in the state-centric, border-oriented securitization in Europe into a narration of victimization rather than threat where mercy and charity dynamics are dominated and into operational mechanisms, noting the emergency of immediate management of the massive migrations flows, respectively. Although, the understanding of a rights-based response to the ongoing migration crisis, is being followed discursively in both political and media stage, the nexus described, points out that the binary between ‘us’ and ‘them’ still exists, with only difference that the ‘invaders’ are now ‘pathetic’ but still ‘invaders’. In this context, the migration crisis challenges the concept of humanitarianism because rights dignify migrants as individuals only in a discursive or secondary level while the humanitarian work is mostly related with the geopolitical and economic interests of the ‘savior’ states.

Keywords: European Union politics, humanitarianism, immigration, media representation, policy-making, refugees, security studies

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Authors: Vishwanath Pethri Kamath, Jayantha Gowda Sarapanahalli, Vishal Mishra, Siddhesh Balwant Bandgar

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Recognition of emotional information is essential in any form of communication. Growing HCI (Human-Computer Interaction) in recent times indicates the importance of understanding of emotions expressed and becomes crucial for improving the system or the interaction itself. In this research work, textual data for emotion recognition is used. The text being the least expressive amongst the multimodal resources poses various challenges such as contextual information and also sequential nature of the language construction. In this research work, the proposal is made for a neural architecture to resolve not less than 8 emotions from textual data sources derived from multiple datasets using google pre-trained word2vec word embeddings and a Multi-head attention-based bidirectional LSTM model with a one-vs-all Multi-Level Classification. The emotions targeted in this research are Anger, Disgust, Fear, Guilt, Joy, Sadness, Shame, and Surprise. Textual data from multiple datasets were used for this research work such as ISEAR, Go Emotions, Affect datasets for creating the emotions’ dataset. Data samples overlap or conflicts were considered with careful preprocessing. Our results show a significant improvement with the modeling architecture and as good as 10 points improvement in recognizing some emotions.

Keywords: text emotion recognition, bidirectional LSTM, multi-head attention, multi-level classification, google word2vec word embeddings

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Authors: R. Marhenke, M. Martini

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The distraction of attentional resources after learning hinders long-term memory consolidation compared to several minutes of post-encoding inactivity in form of wakeful resting. We tested whether an 8-minute period of wakeful resting, compared to performing an adapted version of the d2 test of attention after learning, supports memory retention. Participants encoded and immediately recalled a word list followed by either an 8 minute period of wakeful resting (eyes closed, relaxed) or by performing an adapted version of the d2 test of attention (scanning and selecting specific characters while ignoring others). At the end of the experimental session (after 12-24 min) and again after 7 days, participants were required to complete a surprise free recall test of both word lists. Our results showed no significant difference in memory retention between the experimental conditions. However, we found that participants who completed the first lines of the d2 test in less than the given time limit of 20 seconds and thus had short unfilled intervals before switching to the next test line, remembered more words over the 12-24 minute and over the 7 days retention interval than participants who did not complete the first lines. This interaction occurred only for the first test lines, with the highest temporal proximity to the encoding task and not for later test lines. Differences in retention scores between groups (completed first line vs. did not complete) seem to be widely independent of the general performance in the d2 test. Implications and limitations of these exploratory findings are discussed.

Keywords: long-term memory, retroactive interference, attention, forgetting

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Authors: Gulgassyl Nugmanova, Zhanat Zhunussova, Kuralay Yesmakhanova, Galya Mamyrbekova, Ratbay Myrzakulov

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In this paper, we consider some integrable Heisenberg Ferromagnet Equations with self-consistent potentials. We study their Lax representations. In particular we derive their equivalent counterparts in the form of nonlinear Schr\"odinger type equations. We present the integrable reductions of the Heisenberg Ferromagnet Equations with self-consistent potentials. These integrable Heisenberg Ferromagnet Equations with self-consistent potentials describe nonlinear waves in ferromagnets with some additional physical fields.

Keywords: Heisenberg Ferromagnet equations, soliton equations, equivalence, Lax representation

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Authors: Michael Lousis

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Mathematical competence is the great aim of every mathematical teaching and learning endeavour. This can be defined as an idealised conceptualisation of the quality of cognition and the ability of implementation in practice of the mathematical subject matter, which is included in the curriculum, and is displayed only through performance of doing mathematics. The present study gives a clear definition of mathematical competence in the domains of Arithmetic and Algebra that stems from the explanation of the learners’ errors in these domains. The learners, whose errors are explained, were Greek and English participants of a large, international, longitudinal, comparative research program entitled the Kassel Project. The participants’ errors emerged as results of their work in dealing with mathematical questions and problems of the tests, which were presented to them. The construction of the tests was such as only the outcomes of the participants’ work was to be encompassed and not their course of thinking, which resulted in these outcomes. The intention was that the tests had to provide undeviating comparable results and simultaneously avoid any probable bias. Any bias could stem from obtaining results by involving so many markers from different countries and cultures, with so many different belief systems concerning the assessment of learners’ course of thinking. In this way the validity of the research was protected. This fact forced the implementation of specific research methods and theoretical prospects to take place in order the participants’ erroneous way of thinking to be disclosed. These were Methodological Pragmatism, Symbolic Interactionism, Philosophy of Mind and the ideas of Computationalism, which were used for deciding and establishing the grounds of the adequacy and legitimacy of the obtained kinds of knowledge through the explanations given by the error analysis. The employment of this methodology and of these theoretical prospects resulted in the definition of the learners’ mathematical competence, which is the thesis of the present study. Thus, learners’ mathematical competence is depending upon three key elements that should be developed in their minds: appropriate representations, appropriate meaning, and appropriate developed schemata. This definition then determined the development of appropriate teaching practices and interventions conducive to the achievement and finally the entailment of mathematical competence.

Keywords: representations, meaning, appropriate developed schemata, computationalism, error analysis, explanations for the probable causes of the errors, Kassel Project, mathematical competence

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Authors: Qasim HamaKhurshid HamaMurad, Normal Mat Jusoh, Uznir Ujang

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The concept of the city with an infrastructure of (information and communication) Technology embraces several definitions depending on the meanings of the word "smart" are (intelligent city, smart city, knowledge city, ubiquitous city, sustainable city, digital city). Many definitions of the city exist, but this chapter explores which one has been universally acknowledged. From literature analysis, it emerges that Smart City is the most used terminologies in literature through the digital database to indicate the smartness of a city. This paper share exploration the research from main seven website digital databases and journal about Smart City from "January 2015 to the February of 2020" to (a) Time research, to examine the causes of the Smart City phenomenon and other concept literature in the last five years (b) Review of words, to see how and where the smart city specification and relation different definition And(c) Geographical research to consider where Smart Cities' greatest concentrations are in the world and are Malaysia has interacting with the smart city, and (d) how many papers published from all Malaysia from 2015 to 2020 about smart citie. Three steps are followed to accomplish the goal. (1)The analysis covered publications Build a systematic literature review search strategy to gather a representative sub-set of papers on Smart City and other definitions utilizing (GoogleScholar, Elsevier, Scopus, ScienceDirect, IEEEXplore, WebofScience, Springer) January2015-February2020. (2)A bibliometric map was formed based on the bibliometric evaluation using the mapping technique VOSviewer to visualize differences. (3)VOSviewer application program was used to build initial clusters. The Map of Bibliometric Visualizes the analytical findings which targeted the word harmony.

Keywords: bibliometric research, smart city, ICT, VOSviewer, urban modernization

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Authors: Amanda Aliende da Matta

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This communication presents an aspect of phenomenon selection in an applied hermeneutic phenomenology study on care and vulnerability: the need to consider it as a situated universal. For that, we will first present the study and its methodology. Secondly, we will expose the need to understand phenomena as situation-defined, incorporating feminist thought. In an informatics class for 14 year olds, we explained the exercise: students have to make a 5 slide presentation about a topic of their choice. A does it on streetwear, B on Cristiano Ronaldo, C on Marvel, but J did it on Down Syndrome. Introducing it to the class, J explains the physical and cognitive differences caused by trisomy; when asked to explain it further, he says: "they are angels, teacher," and shows us a poster on his cellphone that says: if you laugh at a different child he will laugh with you because his innocence outweighs your ignorance. The anecdote shows, better than any theoretical explanation, something that some vulnerable people have; something beautiful and special but difficult to define. Let's call this something caring. The research has the main objective of accounting for the experience of caregiving in vulnerability, and it will be carried out with Applied Hermeneutic Phenomenology (AHP). The method's objective is to investigate the lived human experience in its pre-reflexive dimension to know its meaning structures. Contrary to other research methods, AHP does not produce theory about a specific context but seeks the meaning of the lived experience, in its characteristic of human experience. However, it is necessary that we understand care as defined in a concrete situation. We cannot start the research with an a priori definitive concept of care, or we would fall into the mistake of closing ourselves to only what we already know, as explained by Levinas. We incorporate, then, the notion of situated universals. Loyal to phenomenology, the definition of the phenomenon should start with an investigation of the word's etymology: the word cura, in its etymological root, means care. And care comes from the Latin word cogitātus/cōgĭto, which means "to pursue something in mind" and "to consider thoroughly." The verb cōgĭto, meanwhile, is composed of co- (altogether) and agitare (to deal with or think committedly about something, to concern oneself with) / ăgĭto (to set in motion, to move). Care, therefore, has in its origin a meditation on something, a concern about something, a verb that has a sense of action and movement. To care is to act out of concern for something/someone. This etymology, though, is not the final definition of the phenomenon, but only its skeleton. It needs to be embodied in the concrete situation to become a possible lived experience. And that means that the lived experience descriptions (LEDs) should be selected by taking into consideration how and if care was engendered in that concrete experience. Defining the phenomenon has to take into consideration situated knowledge.

Keywords: applied hermeneutic phenomenology, care ethics, hermeneutics, phenomenology, situated universalism

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Authors: Binger Lu

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It remains unclear whether second language (L2) speakers could use discourse context cues to predict upcoming information as native speakers do during online comprehension. Some researchers propose that L2 learners may have a reduced ability to generate predictions during discourse processing. At the same time, there is evidence that discourse-level cues are weighed more heavily in L2 processing than in L1. Previous studies showed that L1 prediction is sensitive to the global validity of predictive cues. The current study aims to explore whether and to what extent L2 learners can dynamically and strategically adjust their prediction in accord with the global validity of predictive cues in L2 discourse comprehension as native speakers do. In a self-paced reading experiment, Chinese native speakers (N=128), C-E bilinguals (N=128), and English native speakers (N=128) read high-predictable (e.g., Jimmy felt thirsty after running. He wanted to get some water from the refrigerator.) and low-predictable (e.g., Jimmy felt sick this morning. He wanted to get some water from the refrigerator.) discourses in two-sentence frames. The global validity of predictive cues was manipulated by varying the ratio of predictable (e.g., Bill stood at the door. He opened it with the key.) and unpredictable fillers (e.g., Bill stood at the door. He opened it with the card.), such that across conditions, the predictability of the final word of the fillers ranged from 100% to 0%. The dependent variable was reading time on the critical region (the target word and the following word), analyzed with linear mixed-effects models in R. C-E bilinguals showed reliable prediction across all validity conditions (β = -35.6 ms, SE = 7.74, t = -4.601, p< .001), and Chinese native speakers showed significant effect (β = -93.5 ms, SE = 7.82, t = -11.956, p< .001) in two of the four validity conditions (namely, the High-validity and MedLow conditions, where fillers ended with predictable words in 100% and 25% cases respectively), whereas English native speakers didn’t predict at all (β = -2.78 ms, SE = 7.60, t = -.365, p = .715). There was neither main effect (χ^²(3) = .256, p = .968) nor interaction (Predictability: Background: Validity, χ^²(3) = 1.229, p = .746; Predictability: Validity, χ^²(3) = 2.520, p = .472; Background: Validity, χ^²(3) = 1.281, p = .734) of Validity with speaker groups. The results suggest that prediction occurs in L2 discourse processing but to a much less extent in L1, witha significant effect in some conditions of L1 Chinese and anull effect in L1 English processing, consistent with the view that L2 speakers are more sensitive to discourse cues compared with L1 speakers. Additionally, the pattern of L1 and L2 predictive processing was not affected by the global validity of predictive cues. C-E bilinguals’ predictive processing could be partly transferred from their L1, as prior research showed that discourse information played a more significant role in L1 Chinese processing.

Keywords: bilingualism, discourse processing, global validity, prediction, self-paced reading

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Authors: Woraya Som-Indra

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This article purposes to decode the notion of democracy embedded in the political speeches of Aung San Su Kyi by adopting critical discourse analysis approach, using Systemic Function Linguistics (SFL) and transitivity as a vital analytical tool. Two main objectives of the study are 1) to analyze linguistic strategies constituted the crucial characteristics of Su Kyi's political speeches by employing SFL and transitivity and 2) to examine ideology manifested the notion of democracy behind Su Kyi’s political speeches. The data consists of four speeches of Su Kyi delivering in different places within the year 2011 broadcasted through the website of US campaign for Burma. By employing linguistic tool and the concept of ideology as an analytical frame, the word choice selection found in the speeches assist explaining the manifestation of Su Kyi’s ideology toward democracy and power struggle. The finding revealed eight characters of word choice projected from Su Kyi’s political speeches, as follows; 1) support, hope and encouragement which render the recipients to uphold with the mutual aim to fight for democracy together and moving forwards for change and solution in the future, 2) aim and achievement evoke the recipients to attach with the purpose to fight for democracy, 3) challenge and change release energy to challenge the present political regime of Burma to change to the new political regime of democracy, 4) action, doing and taking signify the action and practical process to call for a new political regime, 5) struggle represents power struggle during the process of democracy requesting and it could refer to her long period of house arrest in Burma, 6) freedom implies what she has been long fighting for- to be released from house arrest, be able to access to the freedom of speech related to political ideology, and moreover, be able to speak out for the people of Burmese about their desirable political regime and political participation, 7) share and scarify call the recipients to have the spirit of shared value in the process of acquiring democracy, and 8) solution and achievement remind her recipients of what they have been long fighting for, and what could lead them to reach out the mutual achievement of a new political regime, i.e. democracy. Those word choice selections are plausible representation of democracy notion in Su Kyi’s terms. Due to her long journey of fighting for democracy in Burma, Suu Kyi’s political speeches always possess tremendously strong leadership characteristic, using words of wisdom and moreover, they are encoded with a wide range of words related to democracy ideology in order to push forward the future change into the Burma’s political regime.

Keywords: Aung San Su Kyi’s speeches, critical discourse analysis, democracy ideology, systemic function linguistics, transitivity

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Authors: Fuad Al Sarari

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The purpose of the present paper is to study subclasses of analytic functions which generalize the classes of Janowski functions introduced by Polatoglu. We study certain convolution conditions. This leads to a study of the sufficient condition and the neighborhood results related to the functions in the class S (T; H; F ): and a study of new subclasses of analytic functions that are defined using notions of the generalized Janowski classes and -symmetrical functions. In the quotient of analytical representations of starlikeness and convexity with respect to symmetric points, certain inherent properties are pointed out.

Keywords: convolution conditions, subordination, Janowski functions, starlike functions, convex functions

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Authors: Monica Gonzalez Machorro

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Dementia is hard to diagnose because of the lack of early physical symptoms. Early dementia recognition is key to improving the living condition of patients. Speech technology is considered a valuable biomarker for this challenge. Recent works have utilized conventional acoustic features and machine learning methods to detect dementia in speech. BERT-like classifiers have reported the most promising performance. One constraint, nonetheless, is that these studies are either based on human transcripts or on transcripts produced by automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems. This research contribution is to explore a method that does not require transcriptions to detect early Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and mild cognitive impairment (MCI). This is achieved by fine-tuning a pre-trained ASR model for the downstream early AD and MCI tasks. To do so, a subset of the thoroughly studied Pitt Corpus is customized. The subset is balanced for class, age, and gender. Data processing also involves cropping the samples into 10-second segments. For comparison purposes, a baseline model is defined by training and testing a Random Forest with 20 extracted acoustic features using the librosa library implemented in Python. These are: zero-crossing rate, MFCCs, spectral bandwidth, spectral centroid, root mean square, and short-time Fourier transform. The baseline model achieved a 58% accuracy. To fine-tune HuBERT as a classifier, an average pooling strategy is employed to merge the 3D representations from audio into 2D representations, and a linear layer is added. The pre-trained model used is ‘hubert-large-ls960-ft’. Empirically, the number of epochs selected is 5, and the batch size defined is 1. Experiments show that our proposed method reaches a 69% balanced accuracy. This suggests that the linguistic and speech information encoded in the self-supervised ASR-based model is able to learn acoustic cues of AD and MCI.

Keywords: automatic speech recognition, early Alzheimer’s recognition, mild cognitive impairment, speech impairment

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Authors: Roni Naor-Hofri

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This paper shows how self-inflicted pain enabled the expression of love for God among Christian monastic ascetics in medieval central Europe. As scholars have shown, being in a state of pain leads to a change in or destruction of language, an essential feature of the self. The author argues that this transformation allows the self to transcend its boundaries as an object, even if only temporarily and in part. The epistemic achievement of love for God, a non-object, would not otherwise have been possible. To substantiate her argument, the author shows that the self’s transformation into a non-object enables the imitation of God: not solely in the sense of imitatio Christi, of physical and visual representations of God incarnate in the flesh of His son Christ, but also in the sense of the self’s experience of being a non-object, just like God, the target of the self’s love.

Keywords: love for God , pain, philosophy, religion

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Authors: Rui Pedro Fonseca

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This paper presents the results of a research about carnism on Portuguese television. It begins by presenting a case study of MasterChef program (TVI) which conveys carnism in both practices and language, and from which some characteristics of their dominant representations are described. Subsequently, the paper presents the indicators of the presence of carnism in the Portuguese television programming, between 2013 and 2014, in the TVI, RTP1, and SICS channels. The data reveals that there is the hegemony of the carnist ideology in the main channels of the Portuguese television. Also, the samples collected and viewed show no mention of the impacts of carnism in its various dimensions (non-human animals, environment, human health and sustainability).

Keywords: carnism, speciesism, television, Portugal

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Authors: Josee Charette

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The academic and educational success of migrant students is a current issue in education, especially in western societies such in the province of Quebec, in Canada. For people who immigrate with school-age children, the success of the family’s migratory project is often measured by the benefits drawn by children from the educational institutions of their host society. In order to support the academic achievement of their children, migrant parents try to develop practices that derive from their representations of school and related challenges inspired by the socio-cultural context of their country of origin. These findings lead us to the following question: How does strategies implemented by migrant parents to manage the representational distance between school of their country of origin and school of their host society support or not the academic and educational success of their child? In the context of a qualitative exploratory approach, we have made interviews in the French , English and Spanish languages with 32 newly immigrated parents and 10 of their children. Parents were invited to complete a network of free associations about «School in Quebec» as a premise for the interview. The objective of this paper is to present strategies implemented by migrant parents to manage the distance between their representations of schools in their country of origin and in the host society, and to explore the influence of this management on their child’s academic and educational trajectories. Data analysis led us to develop various types of strategies, such as continuity, adaptation, resources mobilization, compensation and "return to basics" strategies. These strategies seem to be part of a continuum from oppositional-conflict scenario, in which parental strategies act as a risk factor, to conciliator-integrator scenario, in which parental strategies act as a protective factor for migrant students’ academic and educational success. In conclusion, we believe that our research helps in highlighting strategies implemented by migrant parents to support their child’s academic and educational success in the host society and also helps in providing a more efficient support to migrant parents and contributes to develop a wider portrait of migrant students’ academic achievement.

Keywords: academic and educational achievement of immigrant students, family’s migratory project, immigrants parental strategies, representational distance between school of origin and school of host society

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Authors: Maja Andrić, Josip Pečarić

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Over the last five decades, an enormous amount of work has been done on Opial’s integral inequality, dealing with new proofs, various generalizations, extensions and discrete analogs. The Opial inequality is recognized as a fundamental result in the analysis of qualitative properties of solution of differential equations. We use submultiplicative convex functions, appropriate representations of functions and inequalities involving means to obtain generalizations and extensions of certain known multidimensional integral and discrete Opial-type inequalities.

Keywords: Opial's inequality, Jensen's inequality, integral inequality, discrete inequality

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Authors: J. Mano Ranjini

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Each and every child is special, born with a unique talent to explore this world. The word Dyslexia is derived from the Greek language in which “dys” meaning poor or inadequate and “lexis” meaning words or language. Dyslexia describes about a different kind of mind, which is often gifted and productive, that learns the concept differently. The main aim of the study is to bring the positive outcome of the reading level by examining the effectiveness of Visual Auditory Kinesthetic Tactile technique on Reading Level among Dyslexic Children at Helikx Open School and Learning Centre. A Quasi experimental one group pretest post test design was adopted for this study. The Reading Level was assessed by using the Schonell Graded Word Reading Test. Thirty subjects were drawn by using purposive sampling technique and the intervention Visual Auditory Kinesthetic Tactile technique was implemented to the Dyslexic Children for 30 consecutive days followed by the post Reading Level assessment revealed the improvement in the mean score value of reading level by 12%. Multi-sensory (VAKT) teaching uses all learning pathways in the brain (visual, auditory, kinesthetic-tactile) in order to enhance memory and learning and the ability in uplifting emotional, physical and societal dimensions. VAKT is an effective method to improve the reading skill of the Dyslexic Children that ensures the enormous significance of learning thereby influencing the wholesome of the child’s life.

Keywords: visual auditory kinesthetic tactile technique, reading level, dyslexic children, Helikx Open School

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Authors: Quoc Hung Le Pham

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Human beings are motivated to satisfy the physiological needs and psychological needs. In the fundamental needs, bodily excretion is the most basic one, while physiological excretion refers to the final products produced in the process of discharging the body. This physiological process is a common human phenomenon. For instance, bodily secretion is totally natural, but people of various nationalities through the times avoid saying it directly. Terms like ‘shit’ are often negatively regarded as dirty, smelly and vulgar; it will lead people to negative thinking. In fact, it is in the psychology of human beings to avoid such unsightly terms. Especially in social situations where you have to take care of your image, and you have to release. The best way to solve this is to approach the use of euphemism. People prefer to say it as ‘answering nature's call’ or ‘to pass a motion’ instead. Chinese and Vietnamese nations are referring to use euphemisms to replace bodily secretions, so this research will take this phenomenon as the object aims to explore the similarities and dissimilarities between two languages euphemism. The basic of the niche of this paper is human physiological phenomenon excretion. As the preliminary results show, in expressing bodily secretions the deeply impacting factor is language and cultural factors. On language factor terms, two languages are using assonance to replace human nature discharge, whilst the dissimilarities are metonymy, loan word and personification. On culture factor terms, the convergences are metonymy and application of the semantically-contrary-word-euphemism, whilst the difference is Chinese euphemism using allusion but Vietnamese euphemism does not.

Keywords: cultural factors, euphemism, human needs, language factors

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Authors: Eric Tardif, Nicolas Meylan

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Recent studies suggest that the consolidation of episodic memory is better achieved through repeated retrieval than with the use of concept mapping or repeated study. Although such laboratory results highly appeal to educationalists, it remains to be shown whether they can be directly used in a classroom setting. Forty-five college students (42 girls; mean age 16.1 y/o) were asked to remember pairs of biology-related words (e.g. mitochondria-energy) in two configurations. The first configuration consisted of a three-minute study of pairs of words followed by a final one-minute test in which the first word of a pair was shown and the subject asked to write down the second associated word. This procedure was repeated three times. The second configuration consisted of a one-minute study of a list of pairs of words, which was immediately followed by a one-minute test. This procedure was repeated 6 times. Subjects filled out a small questionnaire assessing their general mood, level of fatigue, stress and motivation to do the exercise. One week later, subjects were given a final test using the same words. A total of 8 lists of words were studied and tested during the semester. Results showed that subjects recalled more correct words when using the second configuration, both within the study period and one week later, confirming laboratory findings. However, the general performance (mean items recalled) as well as the motivation to do the exercise gradually decreased during the semester. Motivation was positively correlated with performance (r=0.77, p<0.05). The results suggest that laboratory findings may provide some applications in education but other variables inherent to the classroom setting must also be considered.

Keywords: long-term, episodic memory, consolidation, retrieval, school setting

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Authors: Mounia El Jaouhari, Mira Goral, Samir Diouny

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Introduction: Previous research has indicated that language impairments are recognized as a feature of many neurodegenerative disorders, including non-language-led dementia subtypes such as Alzheimer´s disease (AD). In this preliminary study, the focal aim is to quantify the semantic content of naming and connected speech samples of Moroccan patients diagnosed with AD using two tasks taken from the culturally adapted and validated Moroccan version of the Boston Diagnostic Aphasia Examination. Methods: Five individuals with AD and five neurologically healthy individuals matched for age, gender, and education will participate in the study. Participants with AD will be diagnosed on the basis of the Moroccan version of the Diagnostic and Statistial Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-4) screening test, the Moroccan version of the Mini Mental State Examination (MMSE) test scores, and neuroimaging analyses. The participants will engage in two tasks taken from the MDAE-SF: 1) Picture description and 2) Naming. Expected findings: Consistent with previous studies conducted on English speaking AD patients, we expect to find significant word production and retrieval impairments in AD patients in all measures. Moreover, we expect to find category fluency impairments that further endorse semantic breakdown accounts. In sum, not only will the findings of the current study shed more light on the locus of word retrieval impairments noted in AD, but also reflect the nature of Arabic morphology. In addition, the error patterns are expected to be similar to those found in previous AD studies in other languages.

Keywords: alzheimer's disease, anomia, connected speech, semantic impairments, moroccan arabic

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Authors: Cheeno Marlo Sayuno

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Room to Read is an international nonprofit organization aimed at empowering young readers through literature and literacy education. In particular, the organization is focused on girls’ education in schools and bettering their social status through crafting stories and making sure that these stories are accessible to them. In 2019, Room to Read visited the Philippines and partnered with Philippine children’s literature publishers Adarna House, Lampara Books, Anvil Publishing, and OMF-Hiyas with the goal of producing contextualized stories that Filipino children can read. The result is a set of 20 storybooks developed by Filipino writers and illustrators, the author of this paper included. The project led to narratives of experiences in storybook production from conceptualization to publication, towards translations and reimagining in online repository, storytelling, and audiobook formats. During the production process, we were particularly reminded of gender representations, child’s rights, and telling stories that can empower the children in vulnerable communities, who are the beneficiaries of the project. The storybooks, along with many others produced in Asia and the world, are available online through the literacycloud.org website of Room to Read. In this study, the goal is to survey the stories produced in Asia and look at how gender is represented in the storybooks. By analyzing both the texts and the illustrations of the storybooks produced across Asian countries, themes of portrayals of young boys and girls, their characteristics and narratives, and how they are empowered in the stories are identified, with the goal of mapping how Room to Read is able to address the problem of access to literacy among young girls and ensuring them that they can do anything, the way they are portrayed in the stories. The paper hopes to determine how gender is represented in Asian storybooks produced by the international nonprofit organization Room to Read. Thematic textual analysis was used as methodology, where the storybooks are analyzed qualitatively to identify arising themes of gender representation. This study will shed light on the importance of responsible portrayal of gender in storybooks and how it can impact and empower children. The results of the study can also aid writers and illustrators in developing gender-sensitive storybooks.

Keywords: room to read, asian storybooks, young girls, thematic analysis, child empowerment, literacy, education

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Authors: Natcha Wattanaprapa, Alongkorn Taengtong, Phachaya Chaiwchan

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This study investigates and promotes the distribution of community enterprise products of Samut Songkhram province by using e-commerce web technology to help distribute the products. This study also aims to develop the information system to be able to operate on multiple platforms and promote the easy usability on smartphones to increase the efficiency and promote the distribution of community enterprise products of Samut Songkhram province in three areas including Baan Saraphi learning center, the learning center of Bang Noi Floating market as well as Bang Nang Li learning center. The main structure consists of spreading the knowledge regarding the tourist attraction in the area of community enterprise, e-commerce system of community enterprise products, and Chatbot. The researcher developed the system into an application form using the software package to create and manage the content on the internet. Connect management system (CMS) word press was used for managing web pages. Add-on CMS word press was used for creating the system of Chatbot, and the database of PHP My Admin was used as the database management system. The evaluation by the experts and users in 5 aspects, including the system efficiency, the accuracy in the operation of the system, the convenience and ease of use of the system, the design, and the promotion of product distribution in Samut Songkhram province by using questionnaires revealed that the result of evaluation in the promotion of product distribution in Samut Songkhram province was the highest with the mean of 4.20. When evaluating the efficiency of the developed system, it was found that the result of system efficiency was the highest level with a mean of 4.10.

Keywords: community enterprise, digital commerce, promotion of product distribution, Samut Songkhram province

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Authors: Josée Charette

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The academic and educational success of immigrant students is a current issue in education, especially in western societies such in the province of Quebec, in Canada. For people who immigrate with school-age children, the success of the family’s migratory project is often measured by the benefits drawn by children from the educational institutions of their host society. In order to support the academic achievement of their children, immigrant parents try to develop practices that derive from their representations of school and related challenges inspired by the socio-cultural context of their country of origin. These findings lead us to the following question: How does strategies implemented by immigrant parents to manage the representational distance between school of their country of origin and school of the host society support or not the academic and educational success of their child? In the context of a qualitative exploratory approach, we have made interviews in the French-, English- and Spanish-languages with 32 newly immigrated parents and 10 of their children. Parents were invited to complete a network of free associations about «School in Quebec» as a premise for the interview. The objective of this communication is to present strategies implemented by immigrant parents to manage the distance between their representations of schools in their country of origin and in the host society, and to explore the influence of this management on their child’s academic and educational trajectories. Data analysis led us to develop various types of strategies, such as continuity, adaptation, resources mobilization, compensation and "return to basics" strategies. These strategies seem to be part of a continuum from oppositional-conflict scenario, in which parental strategies act as a risk factor, to conciliator-integrator scenario, in which parental strategies act as a protective factor for immigrant students’ academic and educational success. In conclusion, we believe that our research helps in providing a more efficient support to immigrant parents and contributes to develop a wider portrait of immigrant students’ academic achievement. In addition, we think that by improving the experience of immigrant families in Quebec schools, a greater number of migratory projects will be effective.

Keywords: immigrant students, family’s migratory project, school of origin and school of host society, immigrants parental strategies

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Authors: Prakash Singh

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Many schools throughout the world are facing constant pressure to cope with the violence and drug abuse of learners who show little or no respect for acceptable and desirable social norms. These delinquent learners tend to harbour feelings of being beyond reproach because they strongly believe that it is well within their rights to engage in violent and destructive behaviour. Knives, guns, and other weapons appear to be more readily used by them on the school premises than before. It is known that learners smoke, drink alcohol, and use drugs during school hours, hence, their ability to concentrate, work, and learn, is affected. They become violent and display disruptive behaviour in their classrooms as well as on the school premises, and this atrocious behaviour makes it possible for drug dealers and gangsters to gain access onto the school premises. The primary purpose of this exploratory quantitative study was therefore to establish how tobephobia (TBP), caused by school violence and drug abuse, affects teaching and learning in schools. The findings of this study affirmed that poor discipline resulted in producing poor quality education. Most of the teachers in this study agreed that educating learners who consumed alcohol and other drugs on the school premises resulted in them suffering from TBP. These learners are frequently abusive and disrespectful, and resort to violence to seek attention. As a result, teachers feel extremely demotivated and suffer from high levels of anxiety and stress. The word TBP will surely be regarded as a blessing by many teachers throughout the world because finally, there is a word that will make people sit up and listen to their problems that cause real fear and anxiety in schools.

Keywords: aims and objectives of quality education, debilitating effects of tobephobia, fear of failure associated with education, learners' violent behaviour and drug abuse

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Authors: Priscilla Adoley Moffat

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One common element of African cultures is gender role socialization. This is a significant component of African cultures because gender roles are considered in these cultures, to define males and females and distinguish males from females. Various studies have established the impact of gender role socialization on individuals, on activities of individuals, including business activities, and on society, in general. This study further examined the effect of gender role socialization on the marketing of gendered products. The study sought to establish whether gender role socialization affects marketing, particularly word-of-mouth marketing, of gender-specific products. For a comprehensive examination of the influence of gender role socialization on word-of-mouth marketing of gendered products, 2150 respondents (1075 males and 1075 females), comprising 550 students of Marketing from various Ghanaian universities/colleges and 1600 other individuals (100 from each of the 16 regions of Ghana, representing the various cultures) were randomly sampled and interviewed. The study found that females are more willing to market male products than males when tasked to market female products. Also, females are more efficient in marketing male products than males in marketing female products. Again, most female audiences feel uncomfortable or embarrassed and are less receptive when approached by a male marketer of female products. Then, the study found that the fear of stigmatization is a major influencer of males’ negative attitude towards marketing of female products and that female marketers of male products, however, suffer less or no stigma. Aside from its addition to the literature on the impact of gender role socialization on marketing and, for that matter, the influence of socialization on marketing, the findings of the study are useful to multinational companies, which become better informed in their strategy when assigning marketing roles, especially in Africa.

Keywords: gender, socialization, marketing, gendered, role, Ghana

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Authors: Hiromi Kawai

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This study investigates the nature of EFL older children’s L2 perceptive and productive abilities using classroom data, in order to find a pedagogical solution to the teaching of L2 sounds at an early stage of learning in a formal school setting. It is still inconclusive whether older children with only EFL formal school instruction at the initial stage of L2 learning are able to attain native-like perception and production in English within the very limited amount of exposure to the target language available. Based on the notion of the lack of study of EFL Japanese children’s acquisition of English segments, the researcher uses a model of L1 speech processing which was developed for investigating L1 English children’s speech and literacy difficulties using a psycholinguistic framework. The model is composed of input channel, output channel, and lexical representation, and examines how a child receives information from spoken or written language, remembers and stores it within the lexical representations and how the child selects and produces spoken or written words. Concerning language universality and language specificity in the language acquisitional process, the aim of finding any sound errors in L1 English children seemed to conform to the author’s intention to find abilities of English sounds in older Japanese children at the novice level of English in an EFL setting. 104 students in Grade 5 (between the ages of 10 and 11 years old) of an elementary school in Tokyo participated in this study. Four tests to measure their perceptive ability and three oral repetition tests to measure their productive ability were conducted with/without reference to lexical representation. All the test items were analyzed to calculate item facility (IF) indices, and correlational analyses and Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) were conducted to examine the relationship between the receptive ability and the productive ability. IF analysis showed that (1) the participants were better at perceiving a segment than producing a segment, (2) they had difficulty in auditory discrimination of paired consonants when one of them does not exist in the Japanese inventory, (3) they had difficulty in both perceiving and producing English vowels, and (4) their L1 loan word knowledge had an influence on their ability to perceive and produce L2 sounds. The result of the Multiple Regression Modeling showed that the two production tests could predict the participants’ auditory ability of real words in English. The result of SEM showed that the hypothesis that perceptive ability affects productive ability was supported. Based on these findings, the author discusses the possible explicit method of teaching English segments to EFL older children in a formal school setting.

Keywords: EFL older children, english segments, perception, production, speech processing system

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Authors: Marija Zulić, Vanda Hájková, Nina Brkić–Jovanović, Srećko Potić, Sanja Tomić

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The name cerebral palsy comes from the word cerebrum, which means the brain and the word palsy, which means seizure, and essentially refers to the movement disorder. In the clinical picture of cerebral palsy, basic neuromotor disorders are associated with other various disorders: behavioural, intellectual, speech, sensory, epileptic seizures, and bone and joint deformities. Motor speech disorders are among the most common difficulties present in people with cerebral palsy. Social participation represents an interaction between an individual and their social environment. Quality of social participation of the students with cerebral palsy at school is an important indicator of their successful participation in adulthood. One of the most important skills for the undisturbed social participation is ability of good communication. The aim of the study was to determine relation between social participation of students with cerebral palsy and presence of their speech impairment in primary schools in the Czech Republic. The study was performed in the Czech Republic in mainstream schools and schools established for the pupils with special education needs. We analysed 75 children with cerebral palsy aged between six and twelve years attending up to sixth grade by using the first and the third part of the school function assessment questionnaire as the main instrument. The other instrument we used in the research is the Gross motor function classification system–five–level classification system, which measures degree of motor functions of children and youth with cerebral palsy. Funding for this study was provided by the Grant Agency of Charles University in Prague.

Keywords: cerebral palsy, social participation, speech disorders, The Czech Republic, the school function assessment

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Authors: Shuai Liu

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In corporate social responsibility (CSR) reporting, companies are expected to present both the positive and negative parts of the social and environmental impacts of their performance. This study investigates how the companies that listed in fortune 500 respond to this challenge by analyzing the representations of negative part especially the safety performance. It has found that in the level of genre analysis, it presented 3 major moves and 11 steps in terms of the interdiscursivity analysis. It was made up of three dominant discourse.. The study calls for greater focus on the internal and external analysis of the negative aspect of aspects of companies’ self-disclosure.

Keywords: CSR reports, negative parts, critical genre analysis, interdiscursivity

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Authors: Quoc Hung Le Pham

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In the field of language study, classifier is an interesting research feature. In the world’s languages, some languages have classifier system, some do not. Mandarin Chinese and Vietnamese languages are a rich classifier system, however, because of the language system, the cognitive, cultural differences, so that the syntactic structure of classifier of them also dissimilar. When using Mandarin Chinese classifiers must collocate with nouns or verbs, in the lexical category it is not like nouns or verbs, belong to the open class. But some scholars believe that Mandarin Chinese measure words are similar to English and other Indo European languages. The word hanging on the structure and word formation (suffix), is a closed class. Compared to other languages, such as Chinese, Vietnamese, Thai and other Asian languages are still belonging to the classifier language’s second type, this type of language is classifier, it is in the majority of quantity must exist, and following deictic, anaphoric or quantity appearing together, not separation between its modified noun, also known as numeral classifier language. Main syntactic structure of Chinese classifiers are as follows: ‘quantity+measure+noun’, ‘pronoun+measure+noun’, ‘pronoun+quantity+measure+noun’, ‘prefix+quantity+measure +noun’, ‘quantity +adjective + measure +noun’, ‘ quantity (above 10 whole number), + duo (多)measure +noun’, ‘ quantity (around 10) + measure + duo (多) +noun’. Main syntactic structure of Vietnamese classifiers are: ‘quantity+measure+noun’, ‘ measure+noun+pronoun’, ‘quantity+measure+noun+pronoun’, ‘measure+noun+prefix+ quantity’, ‘quantity+measure+noun+adjective', ‘duo (多) +quanlity+measure+noun’, ‘quantity+measure+adjective+pronoun (quantity word could not be 1)’, ‘measure+adjective+pronoun’, ‘measure+pronoun’. In daily life, classifiers are commonly used, if Chinese learners failed to standardize this using catergory, because the negative impact might occur on their verbal communication. The richness of the Chinese classifier system contributes to the complexity in the study of the system by foreign learners, especially in the inter language of Vietnamese learners. As above mentioned, Vietnamese language also has a rich system of classifiers, however, the basic structure order of two languages are similar but both still have differences. These similarities and dissimilarities between Chinese and Vietnamese classifier systems contribute significantly to the common errors made by Vietnamese students while they acquire Chinese, which are distinct from the errors made by students from the other language background. This article from a comparative perspective of language, has an orientation towards Chinese and Vietnamese languages commonly used in classifiers semantics and structural form two aspects. This comparative study aims to identity Vietnamese students while learning Chinese classifiers may face some negative transference of mother language, beside that through the analysis of the classifiers questionnaire, find out the causes and patterns of the errors they made. As the preliminary analysis shows, Vietnamese students while learning Chinese classifiers made some errors such as: overuse classifier ‘ge’(个); misuse the other classifiers ‘*yi zhang ri ji’(yi pian ri ji), ‘*yi zuo fang zi’(yi jian fang zi), ‘*si zhang jin pai’(si mei jin pai); homonym words ‘dui, shuang, fu, tao’ (对、双、副、套), ‘ke, li’ (颗、粒).

Keywords: acquisition, classifiers, negative transfer, Vietnamse learners

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Authors: Maria Venus G. Solares

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The ancient Filipinos had their own spelling or alphabet that differed from the modern Roman alphabet brought by the Spaniards. It consists of seventeen letters, three vowels, and fourteen consonants and is called Baybayin. The word Baybayin is a Tagalog word that refers to all the letters used in writing a language, an alphabet; however, it is also a syllable. The House Bill 4395, first proposed by Rep. Leopoldo Bataoil of the second district of Pangasinan in 2011, which later became House Bill 1022 of what he called The Declaration of the Baybayin as the National Writing System of the Philippines, prompted the researcher to conduct a study on the topic. The main objective of this study was to develop and assess the proposed module for enhancing the reading and writing skills in Baybayin of the students. The researchers wanted to ensure the acceptability of the Baybayin using the proposed module and meet the needs of students in developing their ability to read and write Baybayin through the module. The researchers used quasi-experimental research in this study. The data was collected through the initial and final analysis of the students of Adamson University's ABM 1102 using convenient sampling techniques. Based on statistical analysis of data using weighted mean, standard deviation, and paired t-tests, the proposed module helped improve the students' literacy skills, and the response exercises in the proposed module changed the acceptability of the Baybayin in their minds. The study showed that there was an important difference in the scores of students before and after the use of the module. The student's response to the assessment of their reading and writing skills on Baybayin was highly acceptable. This study will help develop the reading and writing skills of the students in Baybayin and teach Baybayin in response to the revival of a part of Philippine culture that has been long forgotten.

Keywords: Baybayin, proposed module, skill, acceptability

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Authors: Lowai Abed

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The differences in languages play a big role in cross-cultural communication. If meanings are not translated accurately, the risk can be crucial not only on an interpersonal level, but also on the international and political levels. The use of metaphorical language by politicians can cause great confusion, often leading to statements being misconstrued. In these situations, it is the translators who struggle to put forward the intended meaning with clarity and this makes translation an important field to study and analyze when it comes to cross-cultural communication. Owing to the growing importance of language and the power of translation in politics, this research analyzes part of President Bush’s speech in 2001 in which he used the word “Crusade” which caused his statement to be misconstrued. The research uses a discourse analysis of cross-cultural communication literature which provides answers supported by historical, linguistic, and communicative perspectives. The first finding indicates that the word ‘crusade’ carries different meaning and significance in the narratives of the Western world when compared to the Middle East. The second one is that, linguistically, maintaining cultural meanings through translation is quite difficult and challenging. Third, when it comes to the cross-cultural communication perspective, the common and frequent usage of literal translation is a sign of poor strategies being followed in translation training. Based on the example of Bush’s speech, this paper hopes to highlight the weak practices in translation in cross-cultural communication which are still commonly used across the world. Translation studies have to take issues such as this seriously and attempt to find a solution. In every language, there are words and phrases that have cultural, historical and social meanings that are woven into the language. Literal translation is not the solution for this problem because that strategy is unable to convey these meanings in the target language.

Keywords: crusade, metaphor, mistranslation, war in terror

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