Learner autonomy and English proficiency of Indonesian undergraduate students

This research aims at investigating the relationship between learner autonomy including technical, psychological, political, and sociocultural and language proficiency of Indonesian university EFL learners. Forty second-year undergraduate students majoring in English in a public university in Indonesia participated in this research. The data were collected through a learner autonomy questionnaire and English language skills scores. The outcome of the research showed that the variables in this research model had a very good relationship. In addition, the results of hypothesis testing indicated that the technical, psychological, and political variables had a positive and significant effect on English proficiency, while the sociocultural variable did not show either a positive or a significant influence on English proficiency. The finding suggested that both teachers and students should be aware of the important roles of learner autonomy to improve English proficiency. In addition, it mandatory to equip students with learner training to become learners that were more autonomous. Keywords: Autonomous learner, English proficiency, learner autonomy, learner training, undergraduate students, SEM-PLS.

Gender-related variables for health research

Background In this paper, we argue for Gender as a Sociocultural Variable (GASV) as a complement to Sex as a Biological Variable (SABV). Sex (biology) and gender (sociocultural behaviors and attitudes) interact to influence health and disease processes across the lifespan—which is currently playing out in the COVID-19 pandemic. This study develops a gender assessment tool—the Stanford Gender-Related Variables for Health Research—for use in clinical and population research, including large-scale health surveys involving diverse Western populations. While analyzing sex as a biological variable is widely mandated, gender as a sociocultural variable is not, largely because the field lacks quantitative tools for analyzing the influence of gender on health outcomes. Methods We conducted a comprehensive review of English-language measures of gender from 1975 to 2015 to identify variables across three domains: gender norms, gender-related traits, and gender relations. This yielded 11 variables tested with 44 items in three US cross-sectional survey populations: two internet-based (N = 2051; N = 2135) and a patient-research registry (N = 489), conducted between May 2017 and January 2018. Results Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses reduced 11 constructs to 7 gender-related variables: caregiver strain, work strain, independence, risk-taking, emotional intelligence, social support, and discrimination. Regression analyses, adjusted for age, ethnicity, income, education, sex assigned at birth, and self-reported gender identity, identified associations between these gender-related variables and self-rated general health, physical and mental health, and health-risk behaviors. Conclusion Our new instrument represents an important step toward developing more comprehensive and precise survey-based measures of gender in relation to health. Our questionnaire is designed to shed light on how specific gender-related behaviors and attitudes contribute to health and disease processes, irrespective of—or in addition to—biological sex and self-reported gender identity. Use of these gender-related variables in experimental studies, such as clinical trials, may also help us understand if gender factors play an important role as treatment-effect modifiers and would thus need to be further considered in treatment decision-making.

TYPES OF POLITENESS IN ENGLISH: LINGUISTIC ASPECTS AND PEDAGOGICAL IMPLICATIONS

The paper focuses on the research of lexi cal and grammatical means of politeness as one of the universals in language usage, which expresses the concern of the speaker for interlocutors in particular social contexts. It considers four types of politeness as a linguistic phenomenon: showing the value and respect, softening t he communication, assisting in creating the eff ect of a compliment, and deliberating elimination of the importance of a request. In addition, the use of modal verbs and modal expressions are discussed. Furthermore, the paper outlines the concept of linguistic politeness and discusses its interaction with sociocultural variables. Finally, it describes the TALAS (Teaching and Learning Academic Subjects) web-application implemented in virtual English classrooms, which is equipped with tools for working with well-organized interactive assignments and contributes to acquiring knowledge on the linguistic means of expressing politeness. Key words: politeness, linguistic unit, grammatical form, sociocultural variable, virtual environment, web-application.

School Violence and the Culture of Honor

We investigated the hypothesis that a sociocultural variable known as the culture of honor would be uniquely predictive of school-violence indicators. Controlling for demographic characteristics associated in previous studies with violent crime among adults, we found that high-school students in culture-of-honor states were significantly more likely than high-school students in non-culture-of honor states to report having brought a weapon to school in the past month. Using data aggregated over a 20-year period, we also found that culture-of honor states had more than twice as many school shootings per capita as non-culture-of-honor states. The data revealed important differences between school violence and general patterns of homicide and are consistent with the view that many acts of school violence reflect retaliatory aggression springing from intensely experienced social-identity threats.