THE IMPLEMENTATIONS OF GAMES IN ENHANCING VOCABULARY FOR STUDENTS AT A PUBLIC UNIVERSITY

In recent years, teaching English has become a compulsory subject at schools, colleges and universities. That is the reason why teaching and learning English effectively play a crucial role in the development of educational system. However, students seem to be weak in communicative skills due to they are lack of English vocabulary knowledge. The aim of this paper is to seek out the evidence to prove that teaching games is very helpful in the language classroom because this method helps to improve and increase students’ vocabularies. The results show that language games not only enhanced students’ lexical knowledge but also made the lesson more enjoyable, students became motivated in learning English and had plenty of interactions with teachers and classmates. The study suggests that before employing games in the language classroom, teachers should choose appropriate materials, levels, contexts, topic, time allowance for games.

Locality constraints in nominal evaluation times

The temporal arguments of VPs and adverbs must be locally coindexed with the nearest time abstraction above them (Percus 2000). In contrast, nouns, which also have time arguments, have been noted to have multiple available evaluation times (Enç 1981), often coinciding with the topic time (e.g. Musan 1995, Tonhauser 2002, Keshet 2008) or utterance time (O’Leary 2017, O’Leary & Brasoveanu 2018). I argue that we can explain the possible temporal interpretations of nouns in a way that makes their behavior consistent with that of VPs and adverbs by positing an analogous locality constraint and making a simple appeal to quantifier raising. I additionally propose that the need for a locality constraint on the coindexing of temporal arguments extends to all predicates introducing novel referents.

Appraising carnivore (Mammalia: Carnivora) studies in Bangladesh from 1971 to 2019 bibliographic retrieves: trends, biases, and opportunities

In contrast to <7% natural forest covers and >1,000 people living km-2, Bangladesh, one of the smallest countries in Asia, shelters 28 carnivorous mammals. The species are of six families, nearly half of the entire carnivore diversity of the Indian Subcontinent. Carnivores of Bangladesh are little understood and they are disappearing fast despite receiving stern protection. Yet, there has been no assessment on the status of existing knowledge. A review was aimed to assess the existing knowledge and evaluate the research trends in country’s mammalian carnivores. Peer-reviewed works published from 1971 to 2019 were skimmed and categorized systematically according to five traits: publication type, research topic, time of publication, region, and species of study. In a total of 95 works examined, substantial numbers were on tiger (n=45) and the Sundarbans (n=47). In imbalance to action plans procured for tiger conservation, 14 carnivores have never been exclusively studied in Bangladesh. Of the research topics, preference was evident for wildlife management and conflict analyses as there were 31 scientific papers out of 63 in these categories. Inventory compilation for books (18 of 24) comprised the next preferred subject. The assessment could identify gaps in related knowledge in different regions of the country. Eastern region has experienced a meagre amount of work, although its mixed evergreen forests have larger combined area than the Sundarbans, and is known for its higher richness of diversity. Exclusive works outside legally defined protected areas were also low. We found no works in northwestern and southern Bangladesh. In the last two decades, the temporal trajectory of research effort has been more, and the topics have started to diversify. In order to improve conservation practices, we stress that gaps in knowledge pertaining to region or subject may be bridged with contemporary study techniques. This is crucial to highlight the status of carnivore species that are otherwise ‘elusive’, ‘apparently absent’, or ‘least-known’.

MDER: Multi-Dimensional Event Recommendation in Social Media Context

Events represent a tipping point that affects users’ opinions and vary depending upon their popularity from local to international. Indeed, social media offer users platforms to express their opinions and commitments to events that attract them. However, owing to the volume of data, users are encountering a difficulty to accede to the preferred events according to their features that are stored in their social network profiles. To surmount this limitation, multiple event recommendation systems appeared. Nevertheless, these systems use a limited number of event dimensions and user’s features. Besides, they consider users’ features stored in a single user’s profile and disregard the semantic concept. In this research, an approach for multi-dimensional event recommendation is set forward to recommend events to users resting on several event dimensions (engagement, location, topic, time and popularity) and some user’s features (demographic data, position and user’s/friend’s interests) stored in multi-user’s profiles by considering the semantic relationships between user’s features, specifically user’s interests. The performance of our approach was assessed using error rate measurements (mean absolute error, root mean squared error and cross-validation). Experiment that results on real-world event data sets confirmed that our approach recommends events that fit the user more than the previous approaches with the lowest error rate values.

Definite descriptions of events: progressive interpretation in Ga (Kwa)

This paper demonstrates that the progressive interpretation in Ga is an effect of the interaction between the imperfective aspect and a definite description of events. Crucially, the data from Ga point to the consequences of the view that definite descriptions of events encode the familiarity of the discourse referent and its uniqueness in bearing the property in question. Namely, they yield direct evidentiality and the necessary ongoingness of the event at the topic time. Thus, the paper identifies previously unattested variation in the semantics of the progressive in a cross-linguistic perspective and shows that not only lexical but also grammatical aspect exhibits striking parallelisms with the nominal domain.

The Complexities of Digital Storytelling

This chapter describes a pair of studies investigating factors involved in task-based learning using digital storytelling. In Study 1, the stories were analyzed using the factors of topic, time, medium, and reported technological proficiency. Student attitudes towards the tasks were gauged using a questionnaire that measured perceived task cost and value, engagement with the task, and expectancy for success on future tasks. In Study 2, three mid-task planning conditions were introduced and a questionnaire was administered to see student attitudes towards various modes of mid-task planning. The results of Study 1 suggest that digital storytelling can be incorporated into EFL classes to reduce foreign language anxiety, to provide greater opportunities to use English, and to foster ICT skills. The results of Study 2 suggest that students favor a teacher-led planning condition, and that this planning condition had a positive effect on student attitudes towards the project (value and cost).