Everyday Contexts Research Articles

Facial Cues of the Mouth and Language Learning in an Era of Face Coverings and Virtual Courses

Facial Cues of the Mouth and Language Learning in an Era of Face Coverings and Virtual Courses Elizabeth Zwanziger Educators are accustomed to adapting teaching to different learning situations according to external factors imposed upon them. Current challenges include face-to-face (F2F) teaching with face coverings and shifting from F2F to virtual learning. Language teachers have additional layers to consider, given that the content they teach is also the medium by which they teach it. This article focuses on confronting the challenges of teaching a foreign language in person with face coverings or in a virtual setting. In the F2F format where teachers and students are required to wear face coverings, speech becomes muffled and mouth cues are withdrawn. These factors have a direct bearing on the students' perception and processing of aural language input. In a virtual setting, the obstacle of the mask is removed from the equation, but other factors such as resources and course design come into play. After a very brief review of the research on facial cues and language learning, pedagogical considerations will be discussed. Language learning is a multimodal phenomenon involving sound, body gesture, and facial expression. It is generally accepted that gestures—pointing, nodding, pantomiming, tracing an outline in the air—aid learners in their perception and comprehension of meaning in speech. In the literature, facial cues have often been treated separately from body gestures. Even within the area of facial cues, movements of the different parts of the face, such as eyebrows, eyes, and mouth, are considered separately. There is a robust amount of psycholinguistic research that provides insight into the relationship between facial cues and speech, both for infants in their first language and learners of additional languages. The focus here is on only a few of many studies on facial cues specifically involving the mouth, and the perception, comprehension, and production of speech that are germane to the discussion on mask wearing in the classroom and virtual instruction. The importance of pairing visuals with audio is evident in our daily lives. Jesse and Massaro make reference to an everyday context of this phenomenon in the title of their article, "Seeing a Singer Helps Comprehension of the Song's Lyrics." Similarly, perceiving and comprehending spoken speech is not solely an auditory [End Page 111] endeavor. Humans begin pairing visuals with sound as infants. Facial movements provide visual cues that complement the auditory content, particularly in the case of lip movements as they are directly related to speech perception and comprehension. The combination of head and facial movements coupled with speech is referred to as visual prosody (Graf et al. 396). Visual prosody has been shown to contribute to speech perception in infants, who pay more attention to the audio aspect of speech when it is paired with synchronized visual information displaying mouth movement (Blossom and Morgan 9; Hollich et al. 607). Sueyoshi and Hardison propose: "Lip movements are the primary, though perhaps not the sole, source of facial cues to speech" (665). Additional research discusses how perception of speech is manifested after infancy in language learners' comprehension and production of foreign language. Sueyoshi and Hardison investigated how facial cues from lip movements affect intermediate and advanced university-level ESL learners' listening comprehension of informal, conversational-style speech resembling that of a typical academic setting (669). Participants were divided into three groups. One group received audiovisual, gesture, and face input, the second received audiovisual and face input, and the third received only audio input (673). Participants in the audiovisualgesture-face and the audiovisual-face groups performed better on a listening comprehension task than the audio-only group (685). Reisberg et al. reported that native speakers of English learning French were better able to mimic French sentences when they were presented in an audiovisual format allowing for lip reading rather than an audio-only format. Inceoglu states, in regard to specific sounds, that learners of French often find the perception and production of the sounds that do not exist in their first language challenging as the new sounds are not yet in their phonemic inventory (48). In a study of adult American English speakers learning French as a second language at...

Lost in Intensity

Contrary to the emotions we feel in everyday contexts, the emotions we feel for fictional characters do not seem to require a belief in the existence of their object. This observation has given birth to a famous philosophical paradox (the ‘paradox of fiction’), and has led some philosophers to claim that the emotions we feel for fictional characters are not genuine emotions but rather “quasi-emotions”. Since then, the existence of quasi-emotions has been a hotly debated issue. Recently, philosophers and psychologists have proposed to solve this debate by using empirical methods and experimentally studying differences between ‘real’ and ‘fictional’ emotions. In this paper, our goal is to assess the success of these attempts. We begin by surveying the existing empirical literature and stressing the methodological problems that plague most studies that might seem relevant to the debate, before focusing on recent studies that avoid this pitfall. We then argue that, due to conceptual problems, these studies fail to be relevant to the philosophical debate and emphasise new directions for future empirical research on the topic.

Where have all the followers gone?

In this short article, we explore and problematise the axiomatic assumption of follower in the field of leadership studies notably the leader–follower axiom as the essential foundation of much leadership theorising. We do so, firstly by drawing on our experiences of exploring followership conceptually, and secondly, by reviewing conversations with executive MBA students. From these sources, we argue that the absence of identifications with followership offers a challenge to leadership assumptions around the socio-materiality of followers and their relations with leaders within organisational contexts. This leads us to questions like: what if follower identifications do not typically exist or are rejected in everyday organisational working contexts – despite discursive labelling of individuals as followers or following practices? Would or should leadership research and its examination of leader–follower dynamics fundamentally change and in what ways? We explore these questions and suggest very different orientations that might appear with regards to notions of the leadership relationship, leading and following dynamics, practice-based attention to leadership and perhaps very different approaches to leadership development. Such a (re)appraisal of the leadership lexicon may move notions of follower identification out of social constructions of organisational leadership and towards social media (Facebook, Twitter and Instagram) – where the phenomenon of being a follower is ever present, but is redefined as a phenomenon of vicarious fantasy associated with interest, curiosity and entertainment.

Mobile financial services in Bangladesh: Understanding the affordances

AbstractMobile financial services (MFS) have the potential to impact developing countries by making financial services more accessible. To realize this potential, it is imperative to illuminate why and how people use these new platforms to accomplish their goals. Using affordance theory as a guiding tool, this study aims to uncover the underlying goal directed affordances and actualization techniques used by MFS users in Bangladesh. The data are collected through in‐depth interviews with MFS users and analyzed using thematic analysis to uncover affordances along with actualization techniques that are embedded in everyday social contexts of the users. The study finds that users in their attempts to accomplish specific goals uncover various latent affordances of MFS platforms such as financial services accessibility, self‐controlling ability, spatial and temporal mobility, disintermediation ability, self‐sustainability, secrecy maintainability, and networkability, and employ several techniques to actualize those affordances. These results have implications for utilizing MFS platforms to promote ICT4D goals.

Управление многообразием в эпоху транснационализма: перспективы и ограничения в образовательном пространстве

В статье на материалах проведенного исследования поднимаются вопросы, связанные с особенностями инклюзивного образования детей-инофонов в России. Рассматривая текущую ситуацию в социальной политике в области инклюзивного образования, мы учитываем транснациональный характер современных миграционных процессов. Их специфика соотносится с вариативностью и трансформациями дискурса об «адекватности» адаптационных мер, долгое время содержательно раскрывавшихся в логике ассимиляции. Институт образования, в частности, школа, является одним из ключевых каналов инклюзии этнических и культурных групп. В связи с этим нами предпринимается попытка сделать видимыми основные особенности повседневного контекста образовательного процесса детей из семей с миграционным опытом. В статье рассматривается, с одной стороны, как этот процесс оценивается учителями и кураторами, работающими с детьми-инофонами, с другой – каким образом руководство лицея и педагоги осуществляют репрезентацию деятельности проекта в публичной сфере, в частности то, как отражается образовательный процесс «Перелетных детей» в социальной сети Facebook. В рамках теории репрезентации видимые или акцентуированные различия обычно воспринимаются в качестве производящих отношения власти. Формирование публичного образа субъекта в таком случае оказывается определяющим фактором его дальнейшего восприятия в обществе. Поэтому анализ специфики представлений о той или иной группе детей важен с точки зрения понимания возможного отношения к ним как внутри коллектива школы, так и вне нее – со стороны родителей и других социальных агентов. Мы предполагаем, что в зависимости от особенности представления проекта на публичных площадках формируется общий образ лицея и его руководства. Нашей работой мы отвечаем на вопрос о том, каким образом интерпретация культурных различий педагогами может отразиться на подходе к образовательному процессу и характере социально-культурной инклюзии детей из семей с миграционным опытом.

Osallisena yhteisessä arjessa

This paper studies what migrant mothers in Finland say about their social relationships, language use and sense of belonging. The main focus of my study is on the mothers’ stories and the factors that they consider relevant for their socialization into the local language and sense of belonging. This longitudinal ethnographic study (2012–2018) explores the case of eleven migrant mothers. The data is analyzed applying nexus analysis (Scollon & Scollon 2004). The study focuses on language socialization and languaging. In everyday contexts, language is understood as a target and it is also used as a central tool in action. The results indicate that multilingual contexts in everyday life are relevant for constructing the sense of belonging since they offer possibility to give and receive social and linguistic support.

Typical: A Theory of Typicality and Typicality Explanation

Typicality is routinely invoked in everyday contexts: bobcats are typically short-tailed; people are typically less than seven feet tall. Typicality is invoked in scientific contexts as well: typical gases expand; typical quantum systems exhibit probabilistic behaviour. And typicality facts like these support many explanations, both quotidian and scientific. But what is it for something to be typical? And how do typicality facts explain? In this paper, I propose a general theory of typicality. I analyse the notion of a typical property. I provide a formalism for typicality explanations, and I give an account of why typicality explanations are explanatory. Along the way, I show how typicality facts explain a variety of phenomena, from everyday phenomena to the statistical mechanical behaviour of gases. Finally, I argue that typicality is not the same thing as probability.

Initial Results From an Everyday Memory and Metacognitive Intervention for Older Adults

We report results from a new intervention study implementing an Everyday Memory and Metacognitive Intervention (EMMI). This intervention trains older adults on self-regulatory procedures for achieving everyday life goals by implementing a metacognitive perspective where participants learn mindful control over life tasks that place demands on planning and memory (e.g., learning new names and managing prospective memory demands). Fifty-three participants, age range 65 to 83, were assigned to either the EMMI treatment group (n = 32, mean age = 70.13, SD = 3.2) or a waitlist control group (n = 21, mean age = 71.76, SD = 4.7). Individuals with probable memory impairments, as indexed by low MOCA scores, were excluded from the study. Outcomes included daily diary reports of everyday memory errors and a prospective memory telephone task. EMMI participants had fewer reported memory errors per day (M = 0.42) than controls (M = 0.64), one-tailed p = .03. EMMI participants also performed better than controls on the telephone task outcome variables: total number of phone calls completed and mean absolute deviation of call times from scheduled times for successfully completed calls (ps<.001). Subjective outcomes, including personal memory beliefs, life satisfaction, and perceived stress, showed greater pretest-posttest improvement in the EMMI group compared to the control group. This study is a successful initial demonstration of the efficacy of our intervention for improving everyday cognition in older adults and highlights the possibility of improving success in memory-demanding everyday life contexts, thereby contributing to resilient aging in an older population.

Authentizität – diskursives Wertkonzept und wissenschaftliche Kategorie

The authentic as a category of description and value is on the one hand an element of public discourse in order to constitute authenticity and truthfulness in various everyday contexts, on the other hand represents a central object of cultural studies. The functional difference in use resulting from this diversity of the concept is included in the following contribution, which is on the one hand in the context of the research network “Historical Authenticity” of the Leibniz Scientific Association. On the other hand, the considerations are derived from a planned research project on a linguistic social history 1933 to 1945.&#x0D; Newer developments in use and changes in the semantic structure of authentic and the word family are reconstructed in order to answer the question of authenticity as a social construct. On the basis of this finding on the general use of authentic/authenticity, considerations follow, concerning the handling of such language data in the context of language history writing, which are not authentic in the strict sense, i. e. genuine and original. It is about the predicate “authentic” in terms of language data. More precisely, the category “authentic” is placed as a valuation term in the context of language history with the question: What is an authentic language date?

Explore Your Local Biodiversity – How School Grounds Evoke Visions of Sustainability

Biodiversity and sustainability are key words of modern nature-of-science teaching. While most studies use rather abstract examples for biodiversity loss, we focused on habitats that students are familiar with. Our module was developed to deepen the understanding of domestic botanical ecosystems by having students work with and on designated pasture areas. The economic implications of sustainability were addressed by contrasting intensive and extensive agriculture, as well as by touching upon topics such as organic labels and modern agriculture. By focusing on domestic ecosystems within everyday contexts, combined with digital teaching methods, we successfully increased individual knowledge levels when taking before-and-after participation scores into account. Based on these results, we conclude that our approach to using different forms of pasture on the school grounds is a promising way to improve students’ understanding of the economic and ecological implications of sustainability.

Technology-centred learning processes as digital artistic development: On the reciprocal effects of conceptual models, metaphors and presets

This case study looks at a self-directed learning process of a professional classical-trained musician adopting a previously unknown digital-material musical device. In order to achieve the desired artistic result, the musician has to modify his music-related action in favour of the device’s calls for action, which are shown to him by a preset session. For this purpose, a specific interface relation must be established in the connection between the user and the device. The case study is contrasted with data from its framing research project. Findings include aspects as affirmation or degrees of unfamiliarity and their respective impacts on the subject’s action repertoires. A model of learning in the context of digital media or interfaces is introduced and discussed. It offers a specific potential for identifying particularities of how meaning and functionality of digital-material musical devices are embedded into everyday artistic contexts.

Lost in Translation? Constructing Ancient Roman Martyrs in Baroque Bavaria

Over the course of the early modern period, parish, monastic, and pilgrimage churches across Catholic Europe and beyond eagerly sought to acquire the relics of ancient Roman martyrs excavated from the Eternal City's catacombs. Between 1648 and 1803, the duchy of Bavaria welcomed nearly 350 of these “holy bodies” to its soil. Rather than presenting the remains as fragments, as was common during the medieval period, local communities forged catacomb saint relics into gleaming skeletons and then worked to write hagiographical narratives that made martyrs’ lives vivid and memorable to a population unfamiliar with their deeds. Closely examining the construction and material presentation of Bavarian catacomb saints as well as the vitae written for them offers a new vantage point from which to consider how the intellectual movement known as the paleo-Christian revival and the scholarship it produced were received, understood, and then used by Catholic Europeans in an everyday religious context. This article demonstrates that local Bavarian craftsmen, artists, relic decorators, priests, and nuns—along with erudite scholars in Rome—were active in bringing the early Christian church to life and participated in the revival as practitioners and creative scholars in their own right.

Schooling as a contribution or threat to wellbeing? A study of Norwegian teachers’ perceptions of their role in fostering student wellbeing

ABSTRACT Little is known about the role of teachers in fostering wellbeing in the everyday context of school life. This paper explores the phenomenon among a sample of Norwegian teachers. Focus groups with 23 teachers in four schools (grades 1–10) in Norway were conducted. In the analysis of the findings three themes were developed: 1) fostering student wellbeing as the foundation to teachers’ everyday philosophies, 2) managing the everyday reality of student performance expectations, and 3) teachers struggling to manage these tensions and dilemmas. This study indicated that the teachers viewed concern for students’ wellbeing as integrated in their professional identity, seeing wellbeing and learning as intertwined. However, dilemmas and tensions in teachers’ every day practices were identified, which related to competing expectations and conflicting priorities in the school context. High expectations on academic performance seem to leave the teachers little room for an holistic approach to schooling, where students’ academic and personal development were interwoven. We discuss the possible consequences these findings may have for teachers’ professional identity and judgements, alongside suggestions for how to address these aspects in CPD and initial teacher training programmes.

Connecting computational thinking in everyday reasoning and programming for elementary school students

Computational thinking (CT) has been advocated as an essential problem solving skill students need to develop. Emphasizing on CT applied in both programming and everyday contexts, we developed a humanoid robotics curriculum and a computerized assessment instrument. We implemented the curriculum with six classes of 125 fifth graders. Quantitative methods were used to compare students’ performance from pretest to posttest. Learning analytics techniques were applied to examine students’ problem solving processes. The results showed that students’ CT performance improved in both programming and everyday reasoning contexts and that the curriculum benefited students with varied initial performance. The study shed light on how to connect and assess CT in everyday reasoning and programming contexts.

Partial Dictation vs. Dictogloss Effect on Listening Comprehension of Iranian EFL Learners

The unique characteristics of the listening skill and the vital role they play in language learning and communication do not receive the attention they deserve and the situation is worsened in EFL contexts due to lack of communication in everyday context. Given this, the present study was an attempt to empirically investigate if partial dictation versus dictogloss had any significant effect on listening comprehension of Iranian EFL learners. To this end, 60 male EFL learners were selected via double sampling and, after taking homogeneity test and listening pre-test, they were randomly assigned to two experimental groups (partial dictation versus dictogloss) and a control group. The first experimental group was exposed to dictogloss, while the second experimental group was exposed to partial diction. The control group underwent the mainstream usual classroom activities. After the treatment which took one hour each session for seven sessions, a listening post-test was given to all groups. The thorough analysis of data using paired sample t-test indicated that partial dictation group slightly outperformed the dictogloss group in the listening post-test and both experimental groups significantly outperformed the control group in the listening test. The result can have implications for learners, teachers, and material developers in all second and, especially, foreign language contexts where listening comprehension does not receive the attention it deserves and this, in turns, deprives EFL learners of viable sources of input. It is recommended that dictation in either partial format or dictogloss become an instructional activity in English classes because of its usefulness in improving listening comprehension and, more importantly, because of its practicality which is an important concern in many language learning contexts. &#x0D; Key words: Dictogloss; English as a Foreign Language, Listening Comprehension; Partial Dictation

Concurrent validity of the Warner Initial Developmental Evaluation of Adaptive and Functional Skills and the Bayley Scales of Infant and Toddler Development, Third Edition.

To determine the concurrent validity of the Warner Initial Developmental Evaluation of Adaptive and Functional Skills (WIDEA-FS), a criterion-specified questionnaire that assesses a child's adaptive skills in everyday contexts, and the Bayley Infant and Toddler Scales of Development, Third Edition (Bayley-III). In a prospective cohort study, 431 WIDEA-FS and Bayley-III assessments were completed among 341 children, aged 10 to 36months corrected age (158 females, 183 males; median [interquartile range] gestational age at birth 32wks [29-38]), monitored in a high-risk neonatal intensive care unit follow-up clinic. WIDEA-FS scores were significantly associated with Bayley-III scores in all domains. Lower scores on the WIDEA-FS were significantly associated with an increased risk of adverse developmental performance on all Bayley-III scales. The association was strongest for motor and language Bayley-III scores when tested at <30months of age, and for cognitive Bayley-III scores when tested at ≥30months of age. The WIDEA-FS has concurrent validity with the Bayley-III and may be a useful tool in high-risk follow-up settings. WIDEA-FS mobility, communication, and social cognition domains are concurrently valid in infants at high-risk for neurodevelopmental disability. Bayley-III motor, language, and cognitive composite scores are concurrently valid in the same group. The WIDEA-FS mobility and communication domains may be most clinically useful in children <30months.

Climbing to freedom on an impossible staircase: Exploring the emancipatory potential of becoming an entrepreneur-employer

This article contributes to critical discussions questioning the emancipatory potential of entrepreneurship by examining the experiences of men and women entrepreneurs who have recently become employers in South Wales, the United Kingdom. Our research uses a co-creative visual method based in interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) to explore transitions from entrepreneur to entrepreneur-employer in everyday contexts. Findings demonstrate how initial emancipatory experiences become increasingly bounded when becoming an entrepreneur-employer. This exposes a Catch-22 of entrepreneuring-as-emancipation as a symptom of neoliberal entrepreneurial discourses that constrain what entrepreneurs are encouraged to do: grow. We find a plurality of particular emancipations, but conclude that within a developed context entrepreneurship, and more specifically, becoming an entrepreneur-employer is a relational step through which perceived constraints become more readily experienced and emancipation never fully realised.

Dialectical Design Dialogues: Negotiating Ethics in Participatory Planning by Building a Critical Design Atlas

This article explores ‘dialectical design dialogues’ as an approach to engage with ethics in everyday urban planning contexts. It starts from Paulo Freire’s pedagogical view (1970/2017), in which dialogues imply the establishment of a horizontal relation between professionals and amateurs, in order to understand, question and imagine things in everyday reality, in this case, urban transformations, applied to participatory planning and enriched through David Harvey’s (2000, 2009) dialectical approach. A dialectical approach to design dialogues acknowledges and renegotiates contrasts and convergences of ethical concerns specific to the reality of concrete daily life, rather than artificially presenting daily life as made of consensus or homogeneity. The article analyses an atlas as a tool to facilitate dialectical design dialogues in a case study of a low-density residential neighbourhood in the city of Genk, Belgium. It sees the production of the atlas as a collective endeavour during which planners, authorities and citizens reflect on possible futures starting from a confrontation of competing uses and perspectives of neighbourhood spaces. The article contributes to the state-of-the-art in participatory urban planning in two ways: (1) by reframing the theoretical discussion on ethics by arguing that not only the verbal discourses around designerly atlas techniques but also the techniques themselves can support urban planners in dealing more consciously with ethics (accountability, morality and authorship) throughout urban planning processes, (2) by offering a concrete practice-based example of producing an atlas that supports the participatory articulation and negotiation of dialectical inquiry of ethics through dialogues in a ‘real-time’ urban planning process.

Cultural violence in the aftermath of the Brexit Referendum: manifestations of post-racial xeno-racism

ABSTRACT This paper makes a novel contribution to the academic debate on Brexit and racism. It emphasizes the need to distinguish different manifestations of post-racial xeno-racism in the aftermath of the Brexit Referendum as either direct, structural or cultural violence. This distinction of different types of violence is important for everyday and academic contexts, because it affects the ways in which racist behaviour is identified and addressed. Cultural violence in the form of nationalist defensive, anti-immigration statements is the most common type of racist violence that we found in our analysis. Yet, it also tends to be more readily dismissed as “not racist” by its perpetrators and targets, and contributes to feelings of subdual and powerlessness amongst the latter. Our arguments are based on findings from 15 semi-structured interviews that we conducted in 2017 with British and non-British residents of Great Yarmouth, a seaside borough in East Anglia.

A ROMAN TEMPLE FROM SOUTHERN BRITAIN: RELIGIOUS PRACTICE IN LANDSCAPE CONTEXTS

Traditionally, Roman temples and shrines in Britain have been contextualised in relation to wider ‘Roman’ religious practices. Until recently, considerations of architectural form and named deities have dominated discussions. The wider turn in archaeological discourse recognising ritual in everyday contexts has highlighted the importance of lived experience and landscape practice in shaping belief. Here we reflect on the implications of such ideas when approaching ritual practice at Roman temples, using a recently excavated example from Wiltshire, southern Britain, as a case study. The exceptional artefactual assemblages from the site demonstrate the importance of local and regional landscape practices and belief in shaping ritual practice in a sacred space. In addition, geophysical survey and analysis of Portable Antiquities Scheme (PAS) finds suggests that those occupying the landscape had long-term access to wealth. Deposition in the temple itself indicates the continuing importance attached to prehistoric objects in the Roman period, but also to the adoption of new votive practices of miniaturisation, mutilation and sacrifice. These rituals, although part of wider grammars of religious behaviour, had their roots in specific local contexts. Our detailed analyses provide a picture of a temple dedicated to a previously unknown local god, Bregneus, framed against that of an active community involved in farming, iron processing, quarrying, hunting and woodland management.