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The Vehicle for Bringing Positive Education Into the English-As-A-Foreign-Language Classroom: Task-Based Language Teaching
80-89Views:160The purpose of this article is to provide an overview of the distinctive features of interventions, tasks, and exercises. It is intended to lay theoretical ground to a forthcoming dissertation which is based on action research using positive psychology-based tasks designed or adapted for the secondary English-as-aforeign-language classroom. Therefore, it is essential to first understand the theoretical underpinnings of task-based language teaching and define certain key concepts as well as find the features that distinguish interventions, tasks, and exercises from each other in the language learning classroom. Since literature sometimes refers to these concepts in an interchangeable manner (cf. Seligman et al., 2005; Seligman et al., 2009; Gregersen et al., 2014), an attempt will be made in this theoretical paper to compare them, and then to provide a framework for task descriptions to be used in the dissertation project which is intended to be convergent with current theory and practical enough for teachers.
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Focus on Teacher Motivational Factors: Increasing Innovation Efficiency, Retention in the Teaching Profession
53-63Views:76The shortage of teachers and the challenge of popularizing the teaching profession are some of the most pressing problems in education today. Finding a solution to these issues is a priority task. Our research focuses on which teacher motivational factors improve professional life, create a better school atmosphere, and ensure new career paths, avoiding the harmful consequences of stress and burnout. In interviews with teachers teaching in disadvantaged schools, we tried to identify the motivational factors established by the literature, and we were curious about what factors influence someone’s becom1ing an innovative teacher. All this knowledge can be useful information for teacher training, and help to develop an incentive system for teachers in the field, preventing them from leaving the occupation. During our empirical research, we analyzed 24 interviews with Atlas ti. Our main research question was what are the motivational factors that enable teachers to make adequate professional decisions, and why their pedagogical problem-solving ideas and innovations do not remain isolated data. We investigated which motivational factors can be identified as drivers and which as barriers to the development of innovations, and which are responsible for retention in the teaching profession.
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Fair Data: History and Present Context
45-53Views:304In this paper, we discuss FAIR Data, why it exists, and who it applies to. We further review the principles of FAIR data and how they are managed in research centers. We also discuss the types of problems that researchers encounter, and what an information professional can do to assist them. At present, the vast majority of centers subscribe to the FAIR principles. However, both center and researcher face the arduous task of understanding, managing, and implementing the model. They must know data formats and standards. For a correct description and to facilitate data retrieval and interoperability, they must know about different types of metadata schemas. They must know about digital preservation and specific aspects of knowledge and information management. In addition, there are also ethical issues, intellectual property, and cultural differences. All these controversies translate into extra workload for researchers, who only get a return in the form of citations. It is critical to note that these information professionals can play a key role in the proper management of research data, and can help achieve the objectives described in the principles: making data findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable.
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Health Education in Primary Schools: A Difficult Task
1-10Views:249This study was conducted in a medium-sized French city, in a neighbourhood falling into poverty, with children aged from 9 to 10 years old. Its aim is to build an adapted strategy to improve children’s healthy habits. Our study was based on a mixed methods interdisciplinary approach using interviews, questionnaires, sleep diaries and accelerometers. The unemployment rate of the target population is above 40%, and the families have four children on average. The children of the sample (N=29) practice less physical activity than recommended by the institutions in charge of health matters. The parents correctly manage the sleep cycles of their children, and stand firm when they have to go to school the next day. When the next day is a non-school day, children play more video games in the evening, both on their own and with their families. Healthy habits can be improved through cooperation with the various members of the educational community (parents, teachers and structures in charge of the children). Since it is difficult to manage health education solely during PE classes, this process must be continued both inside and outside school by the community, even more so the family.
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The Two-way Model of Creativity
56-65Views:242Creativity is a term that has proven difficult to define. The field of English language teaching (ELT) especially struggles with this concept, often treating it as an axiom that eludes clear definition or a notion that everyone has an implicit understanding of. In other pieces of research, creativity is equated with divergent thinking as evidenced and measured by performance on different standardized creativity tests. In contrast to these views, this paper argues that sound research begins with a clear definition of key terms; as such, there is a need to establish a suitable model of creativity specifically for the field of ELT. After a review of notable existing views and definitions, a new model for creativity in ELT is outlined. The two-way model of creativity proposes that certain conditions enable creativity through specific tasks that allow for creativity to emerge. This will produce creative results that eventually have a reactive effect on the conditions.
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Designing An instrument to measure explicit and implicit learning processes
92-102Views:551In this research paper, the researcher’s intention was to design an instrument that is able to measure learning under two different conditions: explicit and implicit learning. Exploring explicit and implicit learning is gaining more and more attention nowadays in the field of second language acquisition (SLA). The Quantitative method was used in this study to investigate which learning mechanism proves to be more efficient in the selected sample. The present study involved Hungarian technical school, secondary school, and university students from Budapest (N = 40) who participated in completing an Artificial Grammar Learning (AGL) task. The most important finding of the present research endeavour is that implicit learning has proven to be more effective than explicit learning in the case of the selected participants and this was a statistically significant finding. The pedagogical implication of this study is that the effectiveness of implicit learning should be reconsidered by EFL teachers in Hungary.