The present article reports a descriptive and explanatory case study, whose objective was to identify and describe to what extend students develop cultural awareness through activities designed under the principles of the Text-Driven Approach (TDA). This approach, presented by Brian Tomlinson, answers the question of how a second language can be learned or acquired in the most effective way in the classroom, and also aims to design interesting materials for students which lead them to think, reflect, and communicate. The research deals with developing cultural awareness in Elementary English students in the Modern Languages Degree at Pontificia Universidad Javeriana. Basically, the research development comprised 3 stages. The first one consisted of the identification of the problem, which was intended to figure out if students develop cultural awareness in their English classes; the second stage was intended to design a set of activities following the TDA principles. Said design became the core of the pedagogical intervention to give answers to the problem found. The third stage was featured by the implementation of the activities in two different classrooms for a period of three months. During such implementation of the activities, data were collected by using 3 important instruments: the observation sheets, which were helpful in order to gather information about observable students’ behaviors (what students do). The second instrument was a questionnaire, in which students had the opportunity to express what they thought and learned during the implementation of the activities (what students say they do) and finally, we count on artifacts from students (what students really do), regarding the activities designed in order to develop cultural awareness; such artifacts were found by means of the teacher’s guide, the document in which the activities were presented. Therefore, the same phenomenon was observed from 3 different perspectives obtaining a triangulation, a technique, which was considered the most appropriate to do the analysis of the data. The information collected led researchers to 4 important categories through which answers were given to the research question: knowledge (savoir), socio-cultural competence (savoir fare), attitude (savoir etre), understanding ‘’the other’’. Such categories allowed researchers to classify the information gathered and obtain the preliminary findings, which showed that the activities designed definitely developed cultural awareness to some extend in Elementary English students.

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Developing Cultural Awareness: The Text-Driven Approach as Evidence of a Good Language Teaching Practice

In-depth diachronic and synchronic analysis of five Japanese films revealed that with careful planning and film-clip selection, teachers can profitably use films in interactive video (IV) format to teach honorifics in the Japanese classroom. The framework for analysis included influence of Confucianism, Bourdieu's work on “language and symbolic power,” the Japanese concept of kejime, Bachnik's notion of variability, Lebra's concept of “bun” and what Hendry termed “linguistic wrapping” or “keigo.”

The use of digitized films for teaching honorifics in japanese

THE SIMPLEST mechanical sense is that of touch. This may be subserved by (i) receptors of contact projecting from the surface of the body, (ii) sense organs stimulated by the strains set up in the cuticle by pressure, or (iii) organs sensitive to changes of tension within the body. These three types of receptors merge rather indefinitely into one another: in the last analysis they are all stimulated by pressure changes in the end organ of the nerve. Further, any of them may serve to detect either Stimuli from the outside world, or Stimuli resulting from the position or movements of the insect’s own body; that is, they may act as exteroceptors or as proprioceptors. Proprioceptive Stimuli may result from the action of gravity; so that the same receptors may subserve a static sense. Finally, the perceptions of these same sense organs may be so refined that they respond to the pressure changes and movements in the air, which we perceive as sounds; that is, they serve as organs of hearing.

Sense Organs: Mechanical and Chemical Senses

Phase stability of nanostructured thin films can be significantly different from the stability of the same materials in bulk form because of the increased contribution from surface and interface effects. Zirconia (ZrO2), stabilized in tetragonal and cubic phases, is a technologically important material and is used for most high temperature applications. In literature, zirconia can be found to be stabilized in its high temperature phases down to room temperature via two routes, doping with divalent or trivalent cations and crystallite size controls. Apart from these, in the alumina/zirconia thin-film multilayer system, a constraining effect on the zirconia layers provides another route to stabilization of the tetragonal zirconia phase at room temperature. However, in such nanostructured geometries, at high temperatures, the small diffusion lengths involved can influence the phase stability. The present work deals with the high-resolution transmission electron microscope (HRTEM) studies of pulsed laser ablated alumina–zirconia thin-film multilayers in the as deposited state and annealed up to 1473 K at 2 × 10−5 mbar. Conventional techniques such as X-ray diffraction lack the ability to detect localized phase changes at nanometre length scales and also for the low volume fraction of newly formed phases. Cross-sectional HRTEM techniques have been successful in detecting and characterizing these interactions.

/pdf/hrtem-investigation-of-phase-stability-in-alumina-zirconia-157165geq1.pdf

Mary Weld Coates

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