Assessing the Writing Task: Do Pictures Change What Students Write?

2018 ◽  
Vol 8 (8) ◽  
pp. 925
Author(s):  
Dan Xu ◽  
Pengcheng Liang
Keyword(s):  
Visual Information ◽  
The Other ◽  
Graphic Novel ◽  
Writing Quality ◽  
Textual Information ◽  
Development Organization ◽  
Efl Students ◽  
Natural Classes ◽  
Writing Task ◽  
Better Than

This article reports an empirical study which compared the effects of different writing tasks on the writing products of EFL students. This study recruited 50 students from two natural classes in a Chinese university. In the pre-test, they were given the same writing task with only textual instruction and no difference was found in their writing quality. In the test, one class was given graphic novel with textual information, while the other class was given the same graphic novel without textual information. It finds that the group given graphic novel performed better than the other group in terms of content richness, plot development, organization, and language accuracy. It concludes that graphic novel is a better way to scaffold EFL student’s narrative writing and visual information should be included in EFL literacy curricula.

scholarly journals The errors of EFL students’ TOEFL iBT integrated writing task

2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 73
Author(s):  
Nurhayati Irmawan ◽  
Rahmi Aulia Nurdini
Keyword(s):  
Error Analysis ◽  
Teaching Approach ◽  
The Other ◽  
Grammatical Errors ◽  
Efl Students ◽  
Toefl Ibt ◽  
Writing Task ◽  
Integrated Tasks

Reading, Listening, Speaking and Writing are four skills tested in TOEFL iBT. The two types of questions in the writing task of TOEFL iBT are independent and integrated. Focusing on the integrated task in which test-takers require to read a passage, to listen to a lecture related to the topic of the reading and to summarize the listening by explaining how it relates to the points in the reading (Peterson, 2007:8). This research analyzed the errors of students' writing production of integrated task. The research samples of the task were taken from 7 (seven)  TOEFL iBT candidates. Examining 14 integrated tasks, this study categorized the errors into three major categories: grammar, mechanics, and content errors. This study found that most frequent grammatical errors were in the verb (22%),  agreement (20%), and followed by a noun (14%). The findings of mechanic errors are mostly in the use of capitalization at the beginning of a sentence. In the part of punctuation errors, it was found that the omission of a comma as a frequent error. The last results are content errors which consist of plagiarism;  own idea addition; question addressing in which if the test takers’ response focuses on one of the two passages and completely ignores the other one; and missed information in which test-takers are unable to absorb key information from reading and listening passage. It is expected that these findings enable TOEFL iBT tutors to recognize candidates' problems and improve their teaching approach to reach better results. Keywords: Error Analysis, TOEFL iBT, integrated writing task, summarizing 

scholarly journals THE EFFECT OF CODED AND NON-CODED CORRECTION FEEDBACK ON THE QUALITY OF INDONESIAN EFL STUDENTS’ WRITING

2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 9
Author(s):  
Ali Saukah ◽  
Desak Made Indah Dewanti ◽  
Ekaning Dewanti Laksmi
Keyword(s):  
High School ◽  
High School Students ◽  
Corrective Feedback ◽  
Senior High School ◽  
Writing Quality ◽  
School Students ◽  
Efl Students ◽  
Better Than ◽  
Senior High School Students

Written corrective feedback (WCF) in L2 writing classrooms has gained considerable attention in applied linguistics research over the past twenty years. WCF may take different forms of teacher’s responses to errors in students’ texts, among others Coded-Correction Feedback (CCF) and Non-Coded Correction Feedback (NCCF). A number of research studies on the effectiveness of various types of corrective feedback have been undertaken; however the effect of CCF and NCCF on the quality of students’ writing in Indonesian context has not yet been explored. The objective of this study was to investigate the effects of Coded Correction Feedback and Non-Coded Correction Feedback on senior high school students’ writing quality. This study investigated the effect of Coded-Correction Feedback (CCF) and Non-Coded Correction Feedback (NCCF) on the quality of Indonesian EFL students’ writing. It involved 53 senior high school students of 11th Grade. Each student was exposed to two different treatments (CCF and NCCF) and the students’ writing quality, after receiving each type of treatments or WCF, was then measured. The effect of each feedback was estimated by comparing the individual students’ scores in writing composition after receiving CCF with their scores after receiving NCCF. The result of this study revealed that the quality of the students’ writing with CCF was better than that with NCCF. The findings of this study showed that the quality of the students’ writing receiving CCF was better than that receiving NCCF because CCF promotes awareness with noticing as well as understanding. Hence, the use of CCF can be considered more effective than NCCF.  Therefore, it is suggested that CCF be employed in giving corrective feedback to the students’ compositions to improve the quality of their writing, and that teachers employ CCF when giving WCF to improve the quality of students’ writing.

Effects of Pinyin and Script Type on Verbal Processing: Comparisons of China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong Experience

1991 ◽  
Vol 14 (4) ◽  
pp. 429-448 ◽  
Author(s):  
May Jane Chen ◽  
Joseph Chak-Kau Yuen
Keyword(s):  
Hong Kong ◽  
Lexical Decision ◽  
Visual Information ◽  
The Other ◽  
Chinese Script ◽  
Decision Task ◽  
Verbal Processing ◽  
Republic Of China ◽  
Similarity Judgement ◽  
Better Than

Children in the People's Republic of China (PRC) learn to read Chinese using a simplified script by pinyin, an alphabetic system. Taiwanese children learn Chinese using traditional characters and pinyin, Hong Kong children also learn Chinese with traditional characters, but without pinyin. The effects of these experiences were assessed by comparing children's performance on three tasks relevant to verbal processing. This study involved groups of children from each of the three places, China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. Three tasks were used: pseudohomophone naming, similarity judgement, and lexical decision. The results showed that the PRC children and Taiwanese children performed better than the Hong Kong children in the naming of pseudohomophones. In the similarity judgement task, the children were required to choose between two response words, one of which was similar to the target word in pronunciation and the other in appearance. The PRC children tended to choose the visually similar reponse words more often than did the Taiwanese and Hong Kong children. In the lexical decision task, the PRC children were far less accurate than the other children in rejecting nonwords as real words. These results suggest that pinyin training helps readers pronounce unfamiliar words by facilitating the extraction of phonological information for pronunciation and that the PRC children's experience in learning the simplified Chinese script has made them more responsive to visual information but less precise in word recognition.

Closing the GAP—A 5Å Scanning Microscope

1969 ◽  
Vol 27 ◽  
pp. 6-7
Author(s):  
A. V. Crewe
Keyword(s):  
Normal Form ◽  
The Other ◽  
Resolving Power ◽  
Scanning Microscope ◽  
Conventional Microscope ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
Closing The Gap ◽  
Thermal Sources ◽  
Better Than ◽  
Transmission Microscope

We have become accustomed to differentiating between the scanning microscope and the conventional transmission microscope according to the resolving power which the two instruments offer. The conventional microscope is capable of a point resolution of a few angstroms and line resolutions of periodic objects of about 1Å. On the other hand, the scanning microscope, in its normal form, is not ordinarily capable of a point resolution better than 100Å. Upon examining reasons for the 100Å limitation, it becomes clear that this is based more on tradition than reason, and in particular, it is a condition imposed upon the microscope by adherence to thermal sources of electrons.

MUNDANE MIRACLES IN AWADH. ENCOUNTERS WITH THE REVEALED AND THE HIDDEN

2020 ◽  
pp. 130-140
Author(s):  
Maxim B. Demchenko ◽  
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
Local People ◽  
Natural Phenomena ◽  
Mughal Empire ◽  
The Public ◽  
British Raj ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Other World ◽  
Better Than

The sphere of the unknown, supernatural and miraculous is one of the most popular subjects for everyday discussions in Ayodhya – the last of the provinces of the Mughal Empire, which entered the British Raj in 1859, and in the distant past – the space of many legendary and mythological events. Mostly they concern encounters with inhabitants of the “other world” – spirits, ghosts, jinns as well as miraculous healings following magic rituals or meetings with the so-called saints of different religions (Hindu sadhus, Sufi dervishes),with incomprehensible and frightening natural phenomena. According to the author’s observations ideas of the unknown in Avadh are codified and structured in Avadh better than in other parts of India. Local people can clearly define if they witness a bhut or a jinn and whether the disease is caused by some witchcraft or other reasons. Perhaps that is due to the presence in the holy town of a persistent tradition of katha, the public presentation of plots from the Ramayana epic in both the narrative and poetic as well as performative forms. But are the events and phenomena in question a miracle for the Avadhvasis, residents of Ayodhya and its environs, or are they so commonplace that they do not surprise or fascinate? That exactly is the subject of the essay, written on the basis of materials collected by the author in Ayodhya during the period of 2010 – 2019. The author would like to express his appreciation to Mr. Alok Sharma (Faizabad) for his advice and cooperation.

Temperature Effects during Endodormancy Induction on Subsequent Anthesis and Growth of Peach Trees

HortScience ◽  
1998 ◽  
Vol 33 (3) ◽  
pp. 452c-452 ◽  
Author(s):  
Schuyler D. Seeley ◽  
Raymundo Rojas-Martinez ◽  
James Frisby
Keyword(s):  
Temperature Effects ◽  
Shoot Length ◽  
The Other ◽  
Nighttime Temperatures ◽  
Peach Trees ◽  
Better Than

Mature peach trees in pots were treated with nighttime temperatures of –3, 6, 12, and 18 °C for 16 h and a daytime temperature of 20 °C for 8 h until the leaves abscised in the colder treatments. The trees were then chilled at 6 °C for 40 to 70 days. Trees were removed from chilling at 40, 50, 60, and 70 days and placed in a 20 °C greenhouse under increasing daylength, spring conditions. Anthesis was faster and shoot length increased with longer chilling treatments. Trees exposed to –3 °C pretreatment flowered and grew best with 40 days of chilling. However, they did not flower faster or grow better than the other treatments with longer chilling times. There was no difference in flowering or growth between the 6 and 12 °C pretreatments. The 18 °C pretreatment resulted in slower flowering and very little growth after 40 and 50 days of chilling, but growth was comparable to other treatments after 70 days of chilling.

Nglyc: A Random Forest Method for Prediction of N-Glycosylation Sites in Eukaryotic Protein Sequence

2020 ◽  
Vol 27 (3) ◽  
pp. 178-186 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ganesan Pugalenthi ◽  
Varadharaju Nithya ◽  
Kuo-Chen Chou ◽  
Govindaraju Archunan
Keyword(s):  
Random Forest ◽  
Protein Sequence ◽  
Glycosylation Site ◽  
Computational Method ◽  
The Other ◽  
Eukaryotic Protein ◽  
Random Forest Method ◽  
Glycosylation Sites ◽  
Human And Mouse ◽  
Better Than

Background: N-Glycosylation is one of the most important post-translational mechanisms in eukaryotes. N-glycosylation predominantly occurs in N-X-[S/T] sequon where X is any amino acid other than proline. However, not all N-X-[S/T] sequons in proteins are glycosylated. Therefore, accurate prediction of N-glycosylation sites is essential to understand Nglycosylation mechanism. Objective: In this article, our motivation is to develop a computational method to predict Nglycosylation sites in eukaryotic protein sequences. Methods: In this article, we report a random forest method, Nglyc, to predict N-glycosylation site from protein sequence, using 315 sequence features. The method was trained using a dataset of 600 N-glycosylation sites and 600 non-glycosylation sites and tested on the dataset containing 295 Nglycosylation sites and 253 non-glycosylation sites. Nglyc prediction was compared with NetNGlyc, EnsembleGly and GPP methods. Further, the performance of Nglyc was evaluated using human and mouse N-glycosylation sites. Results: Nglyc method achieved an overall training accuracy of 0.8033 with all 315 features. Performance comparison with NetNGlyc, EnsembleGly and GPP methods shows that Nglyc performs better than the other methods with high sensitivity and specificity rate. Conclusion: Our method achieved an overall accuracy of 0.8248 with 0.8305 sensitivity and 0.8182 specificity. Comparison study shows that our method performs better than the other methods. Applicability and success of our method was further evaluated using human and mouse N-glycosylation sites. Nglyc method is freely available at https://github.com/bioinformaticsML/ Ngly.

pLoc_bal-mEuk: Predict Subcellular Localization of Eukaryotic Proteins by General PseAAC and Quasi-balancing Training Dataset

2019 ◽  
Vol 15 (5) ◽  
pp. 472-485 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kuo-Chen Chou ◽  
Xiang Cheng ◽  
Xuan Xiao
Keyword(s):  
Drug Development ◽  
Subcellular Localization ◽  
Basic Research ◽  
The Other ◽  
Training Dataset ◽  
Sequence Information ◽  
Eukaryotic Proteins ◽  
Validation Tests ◽  
User Friendly ◽  
Better Than

<P>Background/Objective: Information of protein subcellular localization is crucially important for both basic research and drug development. With the explosive growth of protein sequences discovered in the post-genomic age, it is highly demanded to develop powerful bioinformatics tools for timely and effectively identifying their subcellular localization purely based on the sequence information alone. Recently, a predictor called “pLoc-mEuk” was developed for identifying the subcellular localization of eukaryotic proteins. Its performance is overwhelmingly better than that of the other predictors for the same purpose, particularly in dealing with multi-label systems where many proteins, called “multiplex proteins”, may simultaneously occur in two or more subcellular locations. Although it is indeed a very powerful predictor, more efforts are definitely needed to further improve it. This is because pLoc-mEuk was trained by an extremely skewed dataset where some subset was about 200 times the size of the other subsets. Accordingly, it cannot avoid the biased consequence caused by such an uneven training dataset. </P><P> Methods: To alleviate such bias, we have developed a new predictor called pLoc_bal-mEuk by quasi-balancing the training dataset. Cross-validation tests on exactly the same experimentconfirmed dataset have indicated that the proposed new predictor is remarkably superior to pLocmEuk, the existing state-of-the-art predictor in identifying the subcellular localization of eukaryotic proteins. It has not escaped our notice that the quasi-balancing treatment can also be used to deal with many other biological systems. </P><P> Results: To maximize the convenience for most experimental scientists, a user-friendly web-server for the new predictor has been established at http://www.jci-bioinfo.cn/pLoc_bal-mEuk/. </P><P> Conclusion: It is anticipated that the pLoc_bal-Euk predictor holds very high potential to become a useful high throughput tool in identifying the subcellular localization of eukaryotic proteins, particularly for finding multi-target drugs that is currently a very hot trend trend in drug development.</P>

Empire after Liberalism: The Transatlantic Right and Identitarian War

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-26
Author(s):  
CHRISTOPHER VIALS
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
American Studies ◽  
White Male ◽  
First Century ◽  
The Other ◽  
Graphic Novel ◽  
Carl Schmitt ◽  
Source Text ◽  
Far Right ◽  
The One

American studies has developed excellent critiques of post-1945 imperial modes that are grounded in human rights and Enlightenment liberalism. But to fully gauge US violence in the twenty-first century, we also need to more closely consider antiliberal cultural logics. This essay traces an emergent mode of white nationalist militarism that it calls Identitarian war. It consists, on the one hand, of a formal ideology informed by Identitarian ethno-pluralism and Carl Schmitt, and, on the other, an openly violent white male “structure of feeling” embodied by the film and graphic novel 300, a key source text for the transatlantic far right.

scholarly journals Chance or Necessity—The Fungi Co−Occurring with Formica polyctena Ants

Insects ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 204
Author(s):  
Igor Siedlecki ◽  
Michał Gorczak ◽  
Alicja Okrasińska ◽  
Marta Wrzosek
Keyword(s):  
Molecular Identification ◽  
High Frequency ◽  
Its Rdna ◽  
The Other ◽  
Formica Polyctena ◽  
Ant Nests ◽  
Mutualistic Fungi ◽  
The Tropics ◽  
High Diversity ◽  
Better Than

Studies on carton nesting ants and domatia−dwelling ants have shown that ant–fungi interactions may be much more common and widespread than previously thought. Until now, studies focused predominantly on parasitic and mutualistic fungi–ant interactions occurring mostly in the tropics, neglecting less−obvious interactions involving the fungi common in ants’ surroundings in temperate climates. In our study, we characterized the mycobiota of the surroundings of Formica polyctena ants by identifying nearly 600 fungal colonies that were isolated externally from the bodies of F. polyctena workers. The ants were collected from mounds found in northern and central Poland. Isolated fungi were assigned to 20 genera via molecular identification (ITS rDNA barcoding). Among these, Penicillium strains were the most frequent, belonging to eight different taxonomic sections. Other common and widespread members of Eurotiales, such as Aspergillus spp., were isolated very rarely. In our study, we managed to characterize the genera of fungi commonly present on F. polyctena workers. Our results suggest that Penicillium, Trichoderma, Mucor, Schwanniomyces and Entomortierella are commonly present in F. polyctena surroundings. Additionally, the high diversity and high frequency of Penicillium colonies isolated from ants in this study suggest that representatives of this genus may be adapted to survive in ant nests environment better than the other fungal groups, or that they are preferentially sustained by the insects in nests.

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