Mother Tongue Use in Beginner EFL Grammar Classes in Saudi Arabia: A Case Study

Using the mother tongue (MT) in English as a foreign or second language (EFL/ESL) classrooms is indispensable, especially in beginner classes. This paper aims to add to the present literature on this issue by highlighting the attitudes of both students and teachers towards MT use in English as a foreign language (EFL) classroom, the justifications for its use, and some of the actual interaction practices in grammar classes. It investigates the attitudes of 110 Saudi EFL female beginners and their two teachers toward using the Arabic language in EFL grammar classes at Jazan University. It also investigates the students’ reasons for using or avoiding their MT. Moreover, it presents some of the functions that MT serves in EFL grammar classes. To collect the data, the researchers used two questionnaires and classroom observations. For data analysis, they used Microsoft Excel and thematic content analysis. The results indicated that, although both students and teachers generally have positive attitudes toward using the MT in EFL classes, they are also aware of the adverse effects of its overuse. The results also revealed that the teachers and students use MT in EFL classes to serve different classroom functions that ease the teaching and learning processes. Based on these findings, the study provided recommendations for teachers, curriculum designers, and future r

Mother Tongue Use in Beginner EFL Grammar Classes in Saudi Arabia: A Case Study

Using the mother tongue (MT) in English as a foreign or second language (EFL/ESL) classrooms is indispensable, especially in beginner classes. This paper aims to add to the present literature on this issue by highlighting the attitudes of both students and teachers towards MT use in English as a foreign language (EFL) classroom, the justifications for its use, and some of the actual interaction practices in grammar classes. It investigates the attitudes of 110 Saudi EFL female beginners and their two teachers toward using the Arabic language in EFL grammar classes at Jazan University. It also investigates the students’ reasons for using or avoiding their MT. Moreover, it presents some of the functions that MT serves in EFL grammar classes. To collect the data, the researchers used two questionnaires and classroom observations. For data analysis, they used Microsoft Excel and thematic content analysis. The results indicated that, although both students and teachers generally have positive attitudes toward using the MT in EFL classes, they are also aware of the adverse effects of its overuse. The results also revealed that the teachers and students use MT in EFL classes to serve different classroom functions that ease the teaching and learning processes. Based on these findings, the study provided recommendations for teachers, curriculum designers, and future researchers.

Resonating Minds—Emergent Collaboration Through Hierarchical Active Inference

Working together on complex collaborative tasks requires agents to coordinate their actions. Doing this explicitly or completely prior to the actual interaction is not always possible nor sufficient. Agents also need to continuously understand the current actions of others and quickly adapt their own behavior appropriately. Here we investigate how efficient, automatic coordination processes at the level of mental states (intentions, goals), which we call belief resonance, can lead to collaborative situated problem-solving. We present a model of hierarchical active inference for collaborative agents (HAICA). It combines efficient Bayesian Theory of Mind processes with a perception–action system based on predictive processing and active inference. Belief resonance is realized by letting the inferred mental states of one agent influence another agent’s predictive beliefs about its own goals and intentions. This way, the inferred mental states influence the agent’s own task behavior without explicit collaborative reasoning. We implement and evaluate this model in the Overcooked domain, in which two agents with varying degrees of belief resonance team up to fulfill meal orders. Our results demonstrate that agents based on HAICA achieve a team performance comparable to recent state-of-the-art approaches, while incurring much lower computational costs. We also show that belief resonance is especially beneficial in settings where the agents have asymmetric knowledge about the environment. The results indicate that belief resonance and active inference allow for quick and efficient agent coordination and thus can serve as a building block for collaborative cognitive agents.

How categorization impacts the design of requests: Asking for email addresses in call-centre interactions

Marketing research shows that organizations tailor communication for particular customer ‘segments’, but little is known about the live design of interaction for different categories. To investigate this, we examine telephone calls to a holiday sales call-centre (for ‘seniors’) and a university admissions call-centre (for ‘young’ students). While topically different, call-takers in both datasets requested callers’ email addresses in order to progress service. Using conversation analysis, we examine how these requests were designed, where and how ‘age’ was made relevant, and how subsequent service provision was handled in a way that matched callers’ presumed age categories. Contrastive to the static notion of ‘segments’, we show how recipient design is bound up with categorial considerations while being responsive to the live unfolding of actual interaction. The article demonstrates how a comparative collection-based approach can be used to analyse the relevance of social categories in situations where this is implicit or ambiguous. (Membership categorization, customer segmentation, conversation analysis, recipient design, requests, age)*

CMBF: Cross-Modal-Based Fusion Recommendation Algorithm

A recommendation system is often used to recommend items that may be of interest to users. One of the main challenges is that the scarcity of actual interaction data between users and items restricts the performance of recommendation systems. To solve this problem, multi-modal technologies have been used for expanding available information. However, the existing multi-modal recommendation algorithms all extract the feature of single modality and simply splice the features of different modalities to predict the recommendation results. This fusion method can not completely mine the relevance of multi-modal features and lose the relationship between different modalities, which affects the prediction results. In this paper, we propose a Cross-Modal-Based Fusion Recommendation Algorithm (CMBF) that can capture both the single-modal features and the cross-modal features. Our algorithm uses a novel cross-modal fusion method to fuse the multi-modal features completely and learn the cross information between different modalities. We evaluate our algorithm on two datasets, MovieLens and Amazon. Experiments show that our method has achieved the best performance compared to other recommendation algorithms. We also design ablation study to prove that our cross-modal fusion method improves the prediction results.

Do You Feel the Same? On the Robustness of Cued-Recall Debriefing for User Experience Evaluation

Cued Recall Debriefing (CRD) is a form of retrospective think aloud approach. It involves re-immersing users to a level where emotional responses are comparable to those experienced during actual interaction with a system. To validate whether the robustness of CRD would vary with the time gap between the actual and recalled event and with the affective state preceding the recall, two empirical studies with altogether 100 participants were conducted. Specifically, participants’ emotions were measured in terms of galvanic skin response (GSR) , heart rate (HR) , and self-assessment manikin (SAM) rating when they were interacting with an email client seeded with usability problems. The same measures were taken when they viewed the videoed interactions. Two between-subject variables were ‘intervening time’ (from 0 minutes up to 24 hours) and ‘intervening affect’ (images with different valence and arousal). Advanced computational models were applied to optimise the shifting of GSR/HR waves generated at the actual interaction and recall phases, which were found to be significantly correlated. The shifting process is necessary for addressing the memory effect and is a methodological innovation. Overall, CRD proved to be a robust method that can be deployed to a broad range of HCI research and practice contexts.

Examining the synergistic effect of supply chain agility, adaptability and alignment: a complementarity perspective

Purpose Drawing on complementarity theory, this paper aims to examine the type and effect of interdependencies/interaction (i.e. complementarity or substitutability) between the supply chain capabilities of agility, adaptability and alignment. Design/methodology/approach A survey research design is adopted to collect primary and secondary data from 182 international firms. The complementarity (or substitutability) of three As (agile, adaptable and aligned) were analyzed in three-way and pairwise interactions; both, correlation and performance differences methods of testing the type of interactions among the system’s elements were used. Supply chain-centric and firm-centric performance metrics were used to examine the interaction types. Findings The study did not find empirical evidence of three-way complementarity between the three As. However, this paper did find evidence of complementarity in bivariate interactions for alignment and adaptability. Moreover, in the performance difference method, the study found a substitute relationship between all pairs of As. Practical implications The findings related to the substitutability between the three As offer managers guidance on how to allocate their limited resources to avoid unnecessary over-or under-investing in either one of the three As. Originality/value This study helps refine prior findings related to the three As by offering evidence that firms can still achieve their performance-related goals with reduced investment commitments by taking advantage of the substitutability relationship existent between these capabilities. That is, instead of concomitantly developing all three As as past studies have suggested, managers can use the findings to determine how to prioritize their resource allocation better. Furthermore, understanding the actual interaction among the supply chain variables generally provide insights for designing the supply chain, change management in the supply chain, developing supply chain strategy and adopting best practices in the supply chain.

Interaction Boundary Determination of Renewable Energy Sources to Estimate System Strength Using the Power Flow Tracing Strategy

System strength is an important concept in the integration of renewable energy sources (RESs). However, evaluating system strength is becoming more ambiguous due to the interaction of RESs. This paper proposes a novel scheme to define the actual interaction boundaries of RESs using the power flow tracing strategy. Based on the proposed method, the interaction boundaries of RESs were identified at the southwest side of Korea Electric Power Corporation (KEPCO) systems. The test results show that the proposed approach always provides the identical interaction boundaries of RESs in KEPCO systems, compared to the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) method. The consistent boundaries could be a guideline for power-system planners to assess more accurate system strength, considering the actual interactions of the RESs.

Using Cognitive Psychology to Understand Anticipated User Experience in Computing Products

User Experience assessment is an evaluation of user's experience with the product, system or service during ‘use' (i.e., actual interaction experience) as well as ‘anticipated or before use' (i.e., pre-interaction experience).Whereas many user experience researchers may be conversant with explaining a person's experience during use of a product, system or service, they find it difficult to explain experience before a product or service is used (Anticipated Use), which in this chapter is referred to as Anticipated User Experience (AUX). This chapter applies the theory of cognitive psychology and its principles to best explain how Anticipated User Experience occurs and how this experience can be achieved. This chapter goes a long way in informing user experience researchers and practitioners on the relevance of attaining AUX in a computing product and how it can be achieved.

Inventory and situational analysis of recreational and water protection infrastructures on water bodies in the South of Western Siberia

The article presents results of the inventory of recreation facilities in the river basins (the Aley, the Charysh, and the Chumysh) and lakes (Bolshoye Yarovoe, Zavyalovo, and Chany) in the South of Western Siberia. The article shows the actual interaction of elements of recreational and water protection infrastructure on recreation-significant areas of the coast. Out of 72 objects identified in the study area, 19 are located within the water protection zone of water bodies. Potential conflicts of land use and benefits of joint development of recreational and water protection facilities were assessed on the coasts. For spatial analysis, specialized indicators are proposed: the coastal protection index and the recreational reserve index. The results of calculation of indices on the example of basins of key water bodies are presented and their differentiation by the degree of protection of the coast and the level of development of recreational infrastructure is shown. Conclusions are drawn about the need to clarify the theoretical and methodological tools for making tactical and strategic decisions in the management of recreational areas.