Exploring pedagogical strategies to integrate a holistic approach to education into ESL classes

Holistic education is a popular trend in the midst of various educational reforms, yet little systematic research has been done to consider its application in the teaching of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) and English as a Second Language (ESL) for Asian Chinese learners. According to the New Zealand Ministry of Education, holistic education is defined as an approach to teaching to include the physical, social, emotional, cultural, and cognitive dimensions of a person’s growth. Education reform in Taiwan has adopted a Western constructivist approach. However, in Confucian Heritage Culture (CHC), open teacher–student and student–student interactions are not as common as they are in the social constructivist model found in the Anglo-Saxon culture. CHC values social harmony, teachers’ authority, and silence to avoid confrontation. Without understanding the affective and social environment in the Western context, holistic education is unlikely to be successfully implemented in Taiwan. The purpose of this research is to understand the contextualization of the holistic environment and pedagogical strategies that nurture student–teacher and student–student interactions in a holistic approach to EFL. This study utilized qualitative research methods of observation and in-depth interviews of New Zealand English teachers and observed the pedagogical practices in New Zealand English classes. This research provided effective pedagogical strategies for implementing the social and affective support of a holistic educational approach for Asian EFL students.

Support vector machine for predicting protein interactions using domain scores

Protein-protein interactions play a crucial role in the cellular process such as metabolic pathways and immunological recognition. This paper presents a new domain score-based support vector machine (SVM) to infer protein interactions, which can be used not only to explore all possible domain interactions by the kernel method, but also to reflect the evolutionary conservation of domains in proteins by using the domain scores of proteins. The experimental result on the Saccharomyces cerevisiae dataset demonstrates that this approach can predict protein-protein interactions with higher performances compared to the existing approaches.     

Te Kotahitanga: Addressing educational disparities facing Māori students in New Zealand

The major challenges facing education in New Zealand today are the continuing social, economic and political disparities within our nation, primarily between the descendants of the European colonisers and the Indigenous Māori people. These disparities are also reflected in educational outcomes. In this paper, an Indigenous Māori Peoples' solution to the problems of educational disparities is detailed. Te Kotahitanga is a research and professional development project that seeks to improve the educational achievement of Māori students in mainstream secondary schools. Students ‘voices’ were used to inform the development of the project in a variety of ways: firstly to identify various discursive positions related to Māori student learning; secondly, to develop professional development activities, and thirdly, to create an Effective Teaching Profile. The paper concludes by identifying how implementing the Effective Teaching Profile addresses educational disparities.     

Invalidated identities: The disconfirming effects of racial microaggressions on Black doctoral students in STEM

Black students face repeated racial microaggressions that may challenge their mental health and academic performance in engineering doctoral programs. Researchers attribute this to stereotypes and institutional climates that juxtapose their STEM and racial identities as incongruent. In this article, we analyzed the perceptions of environmental, behavioral, and verbal racial microaggressions of 33 Black doctoral students and postdocs, with a focus on their interactions with non-Black peers. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews with Black doctoral students from 11 Predominantly White Institutions in the United States. To analyze the experiences of our participants, we utilized two theoretical frameworks: Racial microaggressions and identity nonverification. Across the interviews, participants described various forms of racial microaggressions that greatly challenged their sense of belonging and identities as engineers. This research affirms the need to develop initiatives at the departmental and institutional levels to encourage more inclusive spaces for diverse students in STEM doctoral programs and to combat the types of exclusionary practices found in this study.     

基于主题细分的社交网络用户间交互特征分析

[目的/意义]针对一微博子网,从主题细分的角度对用户间历史交互记录进行研究,发现用户间交互的主题偏好特征,以期从微观层面了解用户信息传播行为的规律。[方法/过程]通过用户实例分析得出对用户间交互进行主题细分的必要性;利用主题模型(LDA)对用户间历史交互记录进行主题细分,采用多维向量表示用户间在不同主题下的交互强度;通过统计分析和网络分析方法探索用户间交互的主题特征。[结果/结论]各主题下用户间交互强度的分布具有长尾特征;用户间的交互内容在时序上具有主题相关性;基于多维的用户间交互强度,可抽取出特定主题下的用户交互子网。用户间交互在时序上具有主题相关性这一特征,以及特定主题的用户交互子网,可用于对特定主题的信息传播进行监控和预测。     

Heteroheptacene-based acceptors with thieno[3,2-b]pyrrole yield high-performance polymer solar cells

Rationally utilizing and developing synthetic units is of particular significance for the design of high-performance non-fullerene small-molecule acceptors (SMAs). Here, a thieno[3,2-b]pyrrole synthetic unit was employed to develop a set of SMAs (ThPy1, ThPy2, ThPy3 and ThPy4) by changing the number or the position of the pyrrole ring in the central core based on a standard SMA of IT-4Cl, compared to which the four thieno[3,2-b]pyrrole-based acceptors exhibit bathochromic absorption and upshifted frontier orbital energy level due to the strong electron-donating ability of pyrrole. As a result, the polymer solar cells (PSCs) of the four thieno[3,2-b]pyrrole-based acceptors yield higher open-circuit voltage and lower energy loss relative to those of the IT-4Cl-based device. What is more, the ThPy3-based device achieves a power conversion efficiency (PCE) (15.3%) and an outstanding fill factor (FF) (0.771) that are superior to the IT-4Cl-based device (PCE = 12.6%, FF = 0.758). The ThPy4-based device realizes the lowest energy loss and the smallest optical band gap, and the ternary PSC device based on PM6:BTP-eC9:ThPy4 exhibits a PCE of 18.43% and a FF of 0.802. Overall, this work sheds light on the great potential of thieno[3,2-b]pyrrole-based SMAs in realizing low energy loss and high PCE.     

Identifying Exemplary Science Teachers Through Their Classroom Interactions with Students

The purpose of the study described in this paper was to use the Questionnaire on Teacher Interaction (QTI) to identify and describe exemplary science teachers. With a sample of over 493 science students, the reliability of the QTI scales ranged from 0.69–0.87. The exemplary teachers were identified as those whose students' perceptions were more than one standard deviation above the mean on the scales of Leadership, Helping/Friendly, and Understanding and more than one standard deviation below the mean on the Uncertain, Dissatisfied and Admonishing scales. The construct validity of the QTI to identify these exemplary teachers was confirmed through interviews with students and these views are reported in the article. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Infants’ experience with ‘near and clear’ educator talk: individual variation and its relationship to indicators of quality

This study investigated the quantity of audible and intelligible (‘near and clear’) educator talk directly experienced by under-two-year-old infants attending early childhood education and care (ECEC) programmes and examined whether the quantity of educator talk was related to characteristics of quality in their ECEC room. Participants were 57 infants attending separate infant rooms in and around the Sydney metropolitan area, Australia. Each infant was observed for 3?h, wearing a small, custom-designed digital language processor (DLP) which digitally recorded and generated measures of ‘near and clear’ adult talk, unclear talk and infant vocalisations. Structural quality indicators include educator qualification, group size and educator-infant ratios, and Interaction Quality was assessed using the ITERS-R Interaction and Listening and Talking subscales. Infants’ experience with ‘near and clear’ talk was predicted by Interaction Quality, the presence of a degree-qualified teacher and group size. ‘Near and clear’ talk was also significantly and positively related to the quantity of infant vocalisation and, negatively, to their level of exposure to unclear talk. Findings are discussed in terms of conceptualisations of quality in infant ECEC rooms, as well as the potentials and limitations of the ‘near and clear’ talk measure for use in future studies of language development in this context.     

不可压缩湍流的多尺度方程组

The short-range property of interactions between scales in incompressible turbulent flow was examined.Some formulae for the short-range eddy stress were given.A concept of resonant-range interactions between extremely contiguous scales was introduced and some formulae for the resonant-range eddy stress were also derived.Multi-scale epuations for the incompressible turbulent flows were proposed.     

An English-Speaking Prekindergarten Teacher for Young Latino Children: Implications of the Teacher–Child Relationship on Second Language Learning

This case study was designed to describe how an effective English-speaking prekindergarten teacher develops strategies for communicating with and teaching young English language learners. The teacher’s classroom practices to enhance her own relationship with the children promoted opportunities for the Latino children to become full participants in the classroom community. At the end of the year, the Latino children showed progress in formal and informal measures of receptive vocabulary in both English and Spanish. Findings from the study suggest the importance of the affective and social nature of second language learning in young children. Implications for practice and research are discussed.