Universiẗat, Habil.-Schr.--Gießen, 2001.

Teachers sometimes assume that their students are more skillful in the use of the dictionary than they actually are. Today's student needs thorough, formal training that is cumulative over his school years and that is based on the same linguistic principles that have raised the art of lexicography to its present high level. It is the purpose of this thesis to provide a plan for attaining these ends.

The dissertation is divided into five chapters and focuses primarily on Melville’s Typee, Omoo, Mardi, and Moby Dick. Chapter I introduces the idea that Melville understood Polynesian better than what critics have demonstrated, and that he used the Polynesian language to develop his own multicultural aesthetic. Chapter II discusses how Melville attempts to resolve his aesthetic preoccupations by opening his narratives to the literary potential of the Polynesian language. The chapter examines representative examples of the orthographic idiosyncrasies of Melville’s Polynesian adoptions and adaptations which describe his new literary aesthetic. The chapter also investigates how Melville’s Polynesian aesthetic affects the construction of meaning in his texts. The chapter finally discusses examples of past editorial choices which have sidestepped Melville’s Polynesian aesthetic and, thus, provided readers with a limited understanding of the Polynesian language’s role in Melville’s texts. Chapter III analyzes samples of Melville’s Polynesian adoptions and adaptations from the above narratives to emphasize the role of the Polynesian language in his Pacific experience. This chapter’s intention is to underline the interaction between Melville’s Polynesian language and culture and his texts, which engendered a complex multicultural aesthetic that permeated his first three works, continued to influence his later writings, and contributed significantly to his cosmopolitan vision of American cultural identity. Chapter IV contains the dictionary, which incorporates approximately two hundred entries. Each entry is divided into four sections. The first is a series of quotes from Melville’s texts that illustrate the various meanings that Melville has given to the term being examined. The second is a list of definitions from various dialects, intended to underline the various Polynesian linguistic elements that Melville adopted or adapted to construct each particular term. The third is an interpretative paragraph that explains how each term is divided into its constituent parts based on Melville’s aesthetic. The fourth section contains specific quotes from other sources of the particular term that underline the significance of that source to Melville’s knowledge of the particular term. Chapter V concludes with the idea that this dissertation is meant as a starting guide to reexamining Melville’s Polynesian aesthetic.

No description available.

No description available.

Jena, Universiẗat, Diss., 1995.

No description available.

Dictionary use has played an important role in English learning. Researches showed that dictionary has facilitating effects on vocabulary learning, writing and reading comprehension. However, not all dictionary users can benefit from the use of dictionaries. In fact, dictionary use is not as easy as what we thought, but dictionary skills instruction does not receive much attention in spite of the prevalence of dictionaries. The purpose of this study is to carry out dictionary skills instruction in English classrooms and to assess the effects of dictionary skills instruction on reading comprehension of junior high EFL students in Taiwan. The subjects in the study were 40 second-year junior high students of two classes from Tainan Municipal Cheng-gong Junior High School. Each class was randomly assigned to the experiment group or the control group. The experiment group received dictionary skills instruction in English classes, and the control group did not. First, the 40 subjects were asked to fill out a questionnaire about their dictionary use backgrounds. Then, they were asked to take a pre-test on their dictionary skills and local reading comprehension. After the pre-test, the experimental group received dictionary skills instructions during each class time for about 20 minutes. The instruction lasted about 3 weeks in the beginning of the second semester. Finally, the 40 subjects were asked to take a post-test on their dictionary skills and local reading comprehension. The major findings of the current study were summarized as follws: 1. Generally speaking, among the ten dictionary skills investigated in the current study, junior high EFL students in Taiwan encounter problems more or less. The problems include understanding short forms, labels, and grammar codes of the dictionary, getting familiar with the alphabetical orders, making use of guide words, scanning a dictionary page, distinguishing a homograph, removing regular inflections, removing affixes of derivatives, scanning nearby entries or seeking in the addendum, recognizing compounds or idioms, and finding the right meaning of a polysemous. 2. In addition to these problems, the frequent application of ¡¥Kidrule strategy¡¦ made the situation worse. The participants were very likely to pick any Chinese fragments ¡¥near¡¦ the target words (or other words with similar spellings.) and misinterpret the fragments as the meanings of the target words. 3. Most of the above mentioned problems could be reduced after receiving dictionary skills instruction from their English teacher in a short time. Only the ability to distinguish a homograph can not be improved merely through the teacher¡¦s instruction in a short time. It seems that, to distinguish homographs, the participants¡¦ grammatical knowledge played a more important role than the dictionary skills instruction. As for the using of guide words and the removing of inflections, these two skills can be improved without the teacher¡¦s instruction. 4. According to the study, the use of dictionaries with proper dictionary skills instruction and enough practice could make a significant difference in the performance of local reading comprehension tasks.

The main purpose of this study was to investigate empirically the impacts of dictionary strategy instruction and exposure on the dictionary performance, perceptions of and attitudes towards dictionary use, and knowledge of dictionary strategy and use by tertiary students of English in Saudi Arabia. Data were collected by means of questionnaires, interviews, observation and students interview feedback. The study was carried out in two phases; phase I, in which 14 participants were chosen to carry out the interviews, and in which the questionnaire was conducted on 77 male students in the preparatory year at the College of Applied Health Science of Qassim University in Saudi Arabia; and phase II where four participants were chosen to carry out the training in dictionary use through a one-to-one tutorial mode. The data in the second phase were collected through observation and students interview feedback. The findings from phase I of the study indicated that the Saudi students did not have appropriate knowledge of their own dictionary. It revealed some instances of failing to take advantage of the potential of dictionary use for language learning and identified factors behind this ineffective use. It demonstrated how the teacher’s role was essential in this respect and could directly influence the process of dictionary implementation inside the classroom The results of phase II demonstrated that strategy training was effective in disseminating the knowledge and skills required of students in using their dictionaries to solve linguistic problems. More importantly, the results showed that the strategy training approach holds great potential for developing students' independence and that it moves them towards greater autonomy. Thus, it is recommended that training be provided to English language learners to optimise their use of this important tool. Finally, specific implications for both teaching and future research are identified.

Integrated Circuits (ICs) are an essential part of nearly every electronic device. From toys to appliances, spacecraft to power plants, modern society truly depends on the reliable operation of billions of ICs around the world. The steady shrinking of IC transistors over past decades has enabled drastic improvements in IC performance while reducing area and power consumption. However, with continued scaling of semiconductor fabrication processes, failure sources of many types are becoming more pronounced and are increasingly affecting system operation. Additionally, increasing variation during fabrication also increases the difficulty of yielding chips in a cost-effective manner. Finally, phenomena such as early-life and wear-out failures pose new challenges to ensuring robustness. One approach for ensuring robustness centers on performing test during run-time, identifying the location of any defects, and repairing, replacing, or avoiding the affected portion of the system. Leveraging the existing design-for-testability (DFT) structures, thorough tests that target these delay defects are applied using the scan logic. Testing is performed periodically to minimize user-perceived performance loss, and if testing detects any failures, on-chip diagnosis is performed to localize the defect to the level of repair, replacement, or avoidance. In this dissertation, an on-chip diagnosis solution using a fault dictionary is described and validated through a large variety of experiments. Conventional fault dictionary approaches can be used to locate failures but are limited to simplistic fail behaviors due to the significant computational resources required for dictionary generation and memory storage. To capture the misbehaviors expected from scaled technologies, including early-life and wear-out failures, the Transition-X (TRAX) fault model is introduced. Similar to a transition fault, a TRAX fault is activated by a signal level transition or glitch, and produces the unknown value X when activated. Recognizing that the limited options for runtime recovery of defective hardware relax the conventional requirements for defect localization, a new fault dictionary is developed to provide diagnosis localization only to the required level of the design hierarchy. On-chip diagnosis using such a hierarchical dictionary is performed using a new scalable hardware architecture. To reduce the computation time required to generate the TRAX hierarchical dictionary for large designs, the incredible parallelism of graphics processing units (GPUs) is harnessed to provide an efficient fault simulation engine for dictionary construction. Finally, the on-chip diagnosis process is evaluated for suitability in providing accurate diagnosis results even when multiple concurrent defects are affecting a circuit.