An Analysis of Communication Strategies Applied by English Study Program Students in Speaking for Presentation

This Study was a mix method research which used the combination of both qualitative and quantitative data. This study was aimed to find out the types and the dominant communication strategies used by the fourth semester students of English Study Program in University of Bengkulu. The instruments used in this research were observation checklist adapted from Dornyei (1995) and video recorder to collect data. The data were analyzed by Dornyei’s Theory of Communication Strategies. The population of this study was fourth semester students of class A of English Study Program. The samples of this study were selected with purposive sampling technique. The findings of this research were: (1) the students used all types of communication strategies, namely: a) message replacement, b) topic avoidance, c) message abandonment, d) circumlocution, e) approximation, f) word coinage, g) non-verbal signal, h) literal translation, i) foreignizing, j) code switching, k) time gaining strategy, and l) appeal for help, and 2) the dominant type of communication strategies used by the students is time gaining strategy with 47.87%. The students mostly used time gaining strategy because they already have good proficiency but they still needed times or delays to produce the utterances.

Can infants use robot gaze for object learning?

Previous research has shown that although infants follow the gaze direction of robots, robot gaze does not facilitate infants’ learning for objects. The present study examined whether robot gaze affects infants’ object learning when the gaze behavior was accompanied by verbalizations. Twelve-month-old infants were shown videos in which a robot with accompanying verbalizations gazed at an object. The results showed that infants not only followed the robot’s gaze direction but also preferentially attended to the cued object when the ostensive verbal signal was present. Moreover, infants showed enhanced processing of the cued object when ostensive and referential verbal signals were increasingly present. These effects were not observed when mere nonverbal sound stimuli instead of verbalizations were added. Taken together, our findings indicate that robot gaze accompanying verbalizations facilitates infants’ object learning, suggesting that verbalizations are important in the design of robot agents from which infants can learn. Keywords: gaze following; humanoid robot; infant learning; verbalization; cognitive development

Breath holding at beginning of exercise

Men stood astride a moving treadmill belt and at a verbal signal held their breath, jumped on the treadmill belt, and walked or ran at a series of speeds up to 9 mph until the breaking point was reached. Breath-holding time decreased sharply with increasing exercise rates, but began to level off at approximately 30 sec between 6 and 9 mph. Breaking-point alveolar Po2 decreased and Pco2 increased with increasing treadmill speeds. When these two factors were applied in the Otis, Fenn, and Rahn ventilation equation to describe ventilation at the breaking point, the ventilation ratio increased, and it was observed that the men withstood a stronger stimulus to breathe as the work rate increased, even though the breath-holding time remained fairly constant at higher work levels. Apparently at the beginning of work the stimulus to breathe is the combination of a relatively weak neurogenic stimulus and an accumulating chemical stimulus. It is postulated that the constancy of beginning breath-holding times at high work rates may reflect a transport time for the chemical stimulus to reach the receptor area from working muscles via the circulation. Submitted on September 25, 1961