高中生自主学习能力与英语听力水平的调查与分析

听力水平不仅是高中学生英语水平的最直接表现,也是高中英语教学效果的最关键指标。影响高中生英语听力水平的因素包括自主学习能力和性别两个方面,而自主学习能力也受性别的影响。定量（实验）研究数据表明：自主学习能力和听力成绩之间存在一定的正相关性;女生自主学习能力和听力水平都显著高于男生;男生自主学习能力的提高,可以弥补在英语听力水平上与女生的差距。因此,在英语教学过程中,必须要加强对学生自主学习能力的培养。     

Performative Listening

Communication as transaction implies the importance of listening, but it leaves room for the mistaken impression that listening fails to shape the content of the encounter. Listening scholarship focuses on the constituent elements and effects of the act but has left unaddressed the ways the listening act is entirely sufficient to fulfill duties and/or create relationships. Borrowing the elements of speech act theory, I describe three categories of illocutionary performative listening—listening toward relationship, toward leadership, and toward fairness—and call for research into such corollaries as listener credibility and meta-listening.     

The Effect of Activating Metacognitive Strategies on the Listening Performance and Metacognitive Awareness of EFL Students

This study investigates the effect of activating metacognitive strategies on the listening performance of English as a foreign language (EFL) university students and explores the impact of such strategies on their metacognitive awareness of the listening task. The participants were N = 50 students of English literature at the state university of Qom, Iran. After screening the participants from among 60 students, they were randomly assigned to the experimental and control groups. The experimental group (n = 25) received the metacognitive strategy instruction based on the models proposed by Vandergrift and Tafaghodtari (2010), while the control group (n = 25) received just the listening input with no strategy instruction. The listening module of the International English Language Testing System (IELTS) was utilized to evaluate the listening performance of the participants in both groups in pretests and posttests, and the Metacognitive Awareness Listening Questionnaire (MALQ) instrument was applied to measure the metacognitive awareness of the treatment group before and after the treatment. The results of the IELTS test revealed that the experimental group significantly outperformed the control group on the posttest and according to the analysis of the MALQ instrument there was a significant improvement in the students’ level of metacognitive awareness after strategy instruction. The interview results in the discussion section also supported the findings and shed more light on the details.     

The Role of Metacognition in the Development of EFL Learners’ Listening Skill

This study investigated the impact of metacognitive instruction on the listening skill, and metacognitive knowledge of a group of male students (N = 30) who were learning English as a Foreign Language (EFL) in Iran. The study participants spoke Persian as a first language and were high-intermediate EFL learners. The participants received a guided lesson plan in metacognition (planning, monitoring, and evaluation) through a pedagogical cycle approach over a semester (eight weeks). International English Language Testing System listening tests (practice) were used to track the participants’ listening performance. Participants also completed a Metacognitive Awareness Listening Questionnaire, which examined their use of metacognitive awareness when engaged in listening tasks. Results indicated that the students improved their listening skill after being taught about metacognition; however, no significant use of metacognitive awareness was reported. This study concludes with a discussion of some potential implications, and provides scope for future research.     

Essay: An Insight into Current German Research on Listening,as Exemplified by the Educational Project “GanzOhrSein”

The article gives us an exemplary insight into research in Germany that deals directly or indirectly with aspects of listening. The reader is given a clear picture of the Munich university project GanzOhrSein aimed at promoting listening skills in schools. The educational value of listening is initially derived from research findings and the model course of action to promote listening skills is explained via the cultural potential. The findings of the accompanying research clearly show that the diverse ways of promoting listening ability that have been developed and tested, do broaden the hearing and listening habits of the children and teachers participating in the project, and do facilitate listening conditions in lessons. The article will also demonstrate what researchers and everyday school practice can gain from this project, and how the institutionalisation of the promotion of listening can benefit.     

It’s All in the Definition: Color-Blind Interpretations of School Diversity

Color-blind theory posits that ignoring race is a purposeful tool for protecting white privilege. Implicit in this theory is the idea that color blindness arises in times of racial threat because color-blind attitudes provide individuals with a tool for justifying racialized practices. Schools provide an ideal context for testing these implicit assumptions of color-blind theory. Public schools have shifted from using race conscious practices, such as forced busing, to racially ambiguous ones, such as touting diversity to address racial integration. Diversity is racially ambiguous because it can be interpreted as the inclusion of racial minorities but can also have a broader, color-blind meaning. In this study, I use a survey experiment to test whether experiencing racial threat leads white participants to have a color-blind interpretation of school diversity and whether racialized practices (in this case, picking a whiter school) mediates that relationship. I find evidence corroborating color-blind theory. Experiencing racial threat increases the probability that participants have a color-blind understanding of school diversity. Further, I find evidence that the mechanism explaining this relationship is participants picking whiter schools, highlighting that color blindness can be used as a tool to justify racialized practices.     

Beyond the mirror towards a plurilingual prism: exploring the creation of plurilingual ‘identity texts’ in English and French classrooms in Toronto and Montpellier

In an age of transnational mobility, there has been a growing recognition of the need for both English and French mainstream classroom teachers to be trained to teach increasingly plurilingual student populations. In this article, I begin by describing the context for an exploratory comparative and collaborative ethnographic action research study in four English and French schools in Toronto, Canada and one school in Montpellier, France that engaged children as co-researchers of their lived plurilingualism. I analyse in particular the process of creating plurilingual multimodal books with students and teachers across the five different school cases. This paper focuses on the iterative ‘identity text’ creation process across all five schools by examining one plurilingual identity text from each case, along with students’ research conversations about their creative productions, and interviews with their classroom teachers and parents. Finally, I summarize five features of inclusive plurilingual pedagogy that emerged across the five cases and call for further collaborative research across English and French schools and scholarly communities investigating creative plurilingual language and literacy production in the twenty-first century.     

台湾高中第二外语教育现状与发展方向

今日,国际化的定义非常多样化,也逐渐在学校教育中扎根、发展。教育部门和学校一方面要不断推进英语教育的推广与改进,另一方面也要思考在多文化、多语言社会产生的"内部国际化"课题。在台湾,提早实施英语教育、推进高中第二外语教育、推行中小学及高中的国际教育政策等皆是教育改革重要部分。作为教育改革中的重要环节,20世纪90年代后期开始积极推动的高中第二外语教育已经取得了一定成效,但依旧存在专业教师培养与大学课程的衔接等方面问题。     

The Sources of Error in Psychology

The backgrounds and roles of school interpreters who provide interpretation services for limited English proficient students were investigated through a survey study. The results are based on a total of 89 interpreters working in schools throughout New York State. A total of 29 languages were represented in the two samples of interpreters with Spanish being the most frequently used language. Most of the interpreters had Bachelors Degrees or higher but very few had any formal training in interpretation. The results suggest that most interpreters work on a part-time basis. The interpreters reported providing services for a number of different school personnel while fulfilling numerous roles that included interpreting during assessment sessions as well as during parent meetings. The implications of the findings are discussed from the perspectives of the training and recruiting ofschool interpreters. The limitations of the findings are also examined.     

Extracurricular activities, athletic participation, and adolescent alcohol use: gender-differentiated and school-contextual effects

This research investigates the effects of extracurricular activities on alcohol use among male (n = 4,495) and female (n = 5,398) adolescents who participated in the 1990-92 National Education Longitudinal Study. Previous studies have assessed the association between extracurricular activities and alcohol use, but none have explored whether the association depends on the school context. Using a multilevel model, I examine whether school-level factors affect the relationship between involvement in athletic or nonathletic activities and changes in adolescent alcohol use from 1990 to 1992. The results indicate that the negative association between nonathletic activities and alcohol use is stronger among males in low-minority-population schools. Moreover the positive association between athletic involvement and alcohol use is stronger among females in lower-socioeconomic-status schools and males in higher-socioeconomic-status schools. I propose that these results reflect variation in high school cultures and in the resources available to schools.     

Relationship between Listening Comprehension Strategy Use and Listening Comprehension Proficiency

This study explores the relationship between students’ listening comprehension strategy use and their listening comprehension proficiency with regard to the group, level, and degree of strategy use. Forty-four university students of an English Language teaching department comprised the study population. Three listening comprehension tests were given to participants with two-week intervals to measure their listening comprehension proficiency. To measure the students’ listening comprehension strategy use, a listening comprehension strategy inventory developed by the researcher was used. Data analysis showed a positive correlation between the level of listening comprehension strategy use and listening comprehension proficiency. When different groups of listening comprehension strategy use of learners were taken into account, there was a statistically significant difference between the students’ listening comprehension achievements in favor of the group with high metacognitive strategy use.     

VOUCHERS,PUBLIC SCHOOL RESPONSE,AND THE ROLE OF INCENTIVES: EVIDENCE FROM FLORIDA

This paper analyzes the incentives and responses of public schools in the context of an educational reform. Much of the literature studying the effect of voucher programs on public schools has looked at the effect on student and mean school scores. This paper tries to go inside the black box to investigate some of the ways in which schools facing the Florida accountability‐tied voucher program behaved. Schools getting an “F” grade for the first time were exposed to the threat of vouchers, but did not face vouchers unless and until they got a second “F” within the next 3 years. In addition, “F,” being the lowest grade, exposed the threatened schools to stigma. Exploiting the institutional details of this program, I analyze the incentives built into the system and investigate the behavior of the threatened public schools facing these incentives. There is strong evidence that they did respond to incentives. Using highly disaggregated school‐level data, a difference‐in‐differences estimation strategy as well as a regression discontinuity (RD) analysis, I find that the threatened schools tended to focus more on students below the minimum criteria cutoffs rather than equally on all. Second, consistent with incentives, the threatened school improvements were, by far, the largest in writing. These results are robust to controlling for differential preprogram trends, changes in demographic compositions, mean reversion, and sorting. These findings have important policy implications. (JEL H4, I21, I28)     

College Women's Career Self-Efficacy and Educational Environments

This study examined the relationship between the composition by sex of women's high school and college environments as well as the sex of their selected influential teachers in each of these settings and their reported self-efficacy in careers judged traditional or nontraditional for women. Two hundred and seventy-four junior and senior female students from both single-sex and coeducational private liberal arts colleges served as participants. Results indicated no main effects for composition by sex of an institution, or the sex of influential teachers, nor were there any significant two-way interactions. Two significant (p > .05) three-way interactions did emerge, however. One indicated that nontraditional career self-efficacy was predicted by a single-sex high school and college environment with either no high school influential teacher or the choice of a male one. The second predicted three-way interaction indicated increased nontraditional career self-efficacy by students attending single-sex high schools and colleges and choosing a male college influential teacher.     

Consecration and meritocracy in elite business schools: The case of a Swedish student union

Sociologists are paying increasing attention to the business and financial elites that control today's global economy; indeed, there's a great need to understand who these elites are, what they do, and what makes them tick, as individuals, and as a class. But we also need to understand how the economic elites aremade in the current social and economic system, and one significant way of doing this, is by examining elite business schools, that is, the institutions that aim to train and prepare people to assume important leadership and decision-making positions in business, finance and related sectors of critical importance to the management of modern capitalism. Based on the notion of consecration, I empirically examine how the student union of Sweden's premier business school, The Stockholm School of Economics, offers its members a learning environment partly separated from the school, and how this semi-independent organization contributes to making undergraduate students socially, morally and esthetically meritorious for elite jobs in primarily management consulting and finance; a process that is largely shaped by corporate actors that participate formally and informally in the student union activities. The paper contributes to the sociological literature on business schools and higher education and elites, both theoretically through the twin notions of meritocracy and consecration, and empirically through its unique focus on student union activities in an elite business school setting.     

Using activity theory to evaluate and improve K-12 school and university partnerships

This article reports on an evaluation methodology development study for K-12 school and university partnerships. The method is based on Engeström's (1987). Learning by expanding: An activity-theoretical approach to developmental research. Helsinki: Orienta-Konsultit Oy activity systems analysis that allows researchers to examine qualitative datasets of complex human interactions. This study was designed for participants to evaluate partnership relations and activities. We investigated how the use of activity systems analysis in K-12 school and university partnership evaluation meetings affected participant communication processes. In this study, during a 1-day retreat K-12 school staff and university staff used a modified activity systems model to identify persisting institutional tensions in their program that often trigger miscommunications and strain their relations. During the discussion sessions, study participants collaboratively examined their partnership relations and identified strategies for overcoming difficulties. Additionally, in subsequent monthly partnership meetings during the school year, participants examined findings from the evaluation to design and implement improvement strategies. The results from this methodology development and implementation study provided researchers and partnership participants a new means to (a) evaluate partnership activities, (b) identify institutional barriers, (c) plan future activities, and (d) listen to and incorporate the ideas of less vocal staff members into the planning of future activities.     

School Gangs of Yogyakarta: Mass Fighting Strategies and Masculine Charisma in the City of Students

In Yogyakarta twenty-three school gangs including secular, Catholic, Christian and Islamic school gangs were identified in 2007/2008. Gangs not only proliferated in city settlements or kampong after the fall of the New Order regime in 1998, but they also developed in urban secondary schools and many are beholden to political parties. The growth of gangs is due to a number of conditions, including weakening authority of the state, absence of state surveillance and the reduction in social control from families and schools. This article addresses three questions: how and why did schoolboy gangs emerge in Yogyakarta; what is the pattern of hostility and what drives the young men to confront each other through violence and; how do the leaders of the gangs express their identities and charisma both in front of their enemies and in front of their anak buah (followers)? The first part of this essay gives an overview of the emergence of Indonesian youth gangs; the second considers contestation and hostility including tawuran (mass fighting) and stealth and attack strategies, such as nglitih (a sudden attack by a few); and the third addresses the nature of charismatic leadership through depictions of gentho (the powerful leader). I also describe how a student builds prowess as a leader during the preparation of tawuran and when carrying out attacks on the enemy school.     

WEIGHING THE MILITARY OPTION: THE EFFECTS OF WARTIME CONDITIONS ON INVESTMENTS IN HUMAN CAPITAL

Serving in the military is an important vehicle through which young Americans invest in their human capital. As such, changes in the desirability of military service may affect the attainment of enlistment requirements, such as a high school degree or equivalent. Using American Community Survey data, we find that exposure to home‐state combat fatalities during the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars decreased the probability of high school completion, and increased the probability of general equivalency diploma completion. Using military data, we confirm that exposure to home‐state fatalities selectively deterred some individuals from enlisting. The results suggest military service and educational investments are complements. (JEL I20, I26, J24)     

Trends and transitions from secondary school: insights from a boarding school for disadvantaged New Zealand youth

Engagement in further education, employment or training following the completion of compulsory schooling is an important predictor of adult life adjustment. As a key microsystemic context, supportive school environments can facilitate positive transitions, especially for disadvantaged youth who are at higher risk of underachievement and not engaging in further education, employment or training (NEET) in emerging adulthood. The present research consists of quantitative and qualitative analyses of secondary data of three student cohorts from a New Zealand boarding secondary school for males from disadvantaged backgrounds to investigate positive transition outcomes and experiences. The quantitative study (N = 178) compared participants’ educational attainment and NEET status across cohorts and with national statistics. Results showed that participants’ achievement and transition outcomes were consistently superior to the national comparison. The qualitative study (N = 38) examined the subjective experiences of a subsample of participants who transitioned to tertiary study and apprenticeship courses. These findings highlight the importance of cultivating students’ holistic development during the secondary school years. Implications for secondary schools are discussed.     

Learning to Be Invisible

Abstract

This study is based on E-mail interviews with 27 self-identified lesbian and bisexual female high school students. The interviews were conducted in an informal style over a period of several months, permitting the participants an opportunity to respond to a series of questions, as well as voice any other concerns relevant to their school experiences. This process involved three distinct objectives: (a) to define the forms of homophobia and heterosexism in the high school environment, (b) to explore ways in which homophobia and heterosexism have impacted the participants, and (c) to propose ways to combat heterosexism and homophobia in high schools. This paper gives voice to these young lesbian and female bisexual students so that readers may develop a better understanding of the realities of their experiences in school.     

Rapport‐building activities in corner shop interactions

This paper examines a range of interactional activities participants carry out in the course of corner shop transactions in Quito, Ecuador. These activities include: phatic communication exchanges as traditionally conceived, that is, conventionalized forms such as how‐are‐you and health inquiries; individualized exchanges in the form of conversational work around a range of topics (e.g. politics, health, school); and creative language play activities (e.g. wordplay and linguistic play with names). These activities are described as reflecting participants' orientation to the maintenance of positive rapport or friendly relations ( Aston 1988a ) with the effect that the service transaction becomes a pleasant and even an entertaining encounter. Such orientation is described here in relation to the familiarity existing between shopkeepers and customers as a result of frequent contact in the context of the barrio (residential neighbourhoods) in Quito. As such the study lends support, from a different socio‐cultural perspective, to recent work in the area that highlights the centrality of phatic communication in task‐oriented interactions in English (cf. Coupland 2000a , 2000b , 2003 ), and brings to the fore a wider range of activities which appear to be employed for rapport‐building purposes in service encounters.