This study attempts to investigate the teaching of written English in Vietnam with special attention to the main problems encountered by teachers of English at the main language institutions in the light of the literature and practices in general ELT. The first chapter is the introduction of the study. It covers the aim and scope to be achieved in the study, and explains the sources of data to be used for the study. Terminology of some phrases and abbreviations for convenient use are also given. Chapter 2 focuses on general ELT developments. Major trends in ELT and their practices are brought into discussion. Then in the light of the literature in ELT, the teaching of writing is taken into consideration. Being an important component in ELT, the teaching of writing has to satisfy this need of learners - the need for effective communication - without overlooking correctness, accuracy and other features of good writing. However, there is no single approach that can provide a perfect answer to all the learners' problems. Chapter 3 discusses the teaching and learning situation in Vietnam in three stages from 1959 to 1986. It is made clear that the situation is not satisfactory due to the methods, techniques, materials and the quality of teachers. Then special investigation is made into the writing area. It is discovered that complex writing is avoided because of the teachers' low standard and their methods and techniques in teaching written English. Improvement courses have been held, but they did not include writing programmes for teachers. Chapter 4 analyses the main problems affecting the teaching of writing in Vietnam, such as teachers' unawareness of language appropriateness and correctness, their difficulty at discourse level and lack of cultural knowledge. Teachers' misconceptions about errors and lack of methods and techniques in dealing with errors also result in ineffective teaching. In Chapter 5 some recommendations are made for teaching writing to inservice teachers in the upgrading course. They focus on the methods and techniques to be used in such a writing course. Some techniques for composition correction are also suggested. Unfortunately, there is no single book that is ideal for such a course. A selection of current writing coursebooks is given in the hope that teachers will find material to suit the needs of their students in them. The last recommendations are for teaching academic writing which involves more sophisticated skills than writing on general topics. Finally the writer makes some comments on her own work and suggests further research into the writing area.

L'Optique Active est une discipline en plein essor qui a obtenu ses lettres de noblesse sur les plus grands télescopes du monde. Les grands projets instrumentaux en cours ou à venir intègrent désormais l'Optique Active à tous les niveaux de leur conception. Les miroirs actifs présentent l'avantage d'une grande qualité de surface combinée à une versatilité et une flexibilité qui en font des pièces indispensables pour réaliser des télescopes et instruments de plus en plus performants an d'atteindre les objectifs scientifiques du futur. Trois techniques d'Optique Active, basées sur le polissage sous contrainte et la déformation in situ, sont au cœur du travail présenté. Ces techniques sont développées dans le cadre de trois projets majeurs de la communauté astronomique : 1) le miroir secondaire déformable du VLT, 2) l'instrument de recherche d'exoplanètes Sphere sur le Vlt et 3) le projet de spectrographe grand champ multi-objet Eagle pour l'European-Elt. A partir de la théorie des plaques minces en flexion, les modèles analytiques permettent de définir les configurations de charges et distributions d'épaisseur des substrats de miroirs à déformer. Les analyses par éléments finis sont un atout majeur pour l'optimisation et la validation des techniques proposées. De nombreuses passerelles sont utilisées ou créées entre élasticité, théorie des aberrations et analyse spectrale an d'évaluer la qualité optique des déformations de surfaces des miroirs. Trois procédés de fabrication sont ainsi développés de bout en bout an de produire une lame mince convexe hyperbolique, des miroirs toriques de grande précision et de miroirs à toricité variable de grande dynamique, le point commun de ces procédés étant l'excellente qualité de surface des miroirs.

This study aims at finding out instructors&rsquo / perceived competencies in Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) and Ministry of Education (MONE) competencies, and accordingly exploring strengths and weaknesses of the ELT undergraduate program as well as providing suggestions for a more effective and fruitful program. At the first phase of the research, a questionnaire is given to seventy-five participants, working in the department of Foreign Languages at various universities. For the second phase of the study, an interview prepared in the light of the questionnaire results is conducted with thirty-four of aforementioned participants. The results of this study illustrate that the participants find themselves more competent in learning, language proficiency, planning, instructing, and content than assessing, identity and context, and commitment and professionalism since the participants believe in the need of improving themselves in latter standards. Similarly, they consider the methodology, general education and language components of the ELT undergraduate program effective because they find those components practical and focused during the program while the literature and linguistics components are thought to be ineffective in preparing them for the profession as the methodology of these components, which is not integrated with ELT enough. Lastly, in the lights of these findings, some suggestions are made for improving the program. For further research, all ELT teachers&rsquo / perceptions in Turkey can be investigated and suggestions for a better undergraduate program can be asked.

The purpose of this study was two fold: (1) to examine how the distribution of resources within and outside an Enhanced Language Training Program (ELT) affected a group of newcomers’ access to Internet literacy development; and (2) to discuss ensuing pedagogical and curricular implications for the ELT Program. The relationship between the distribution of resources and a group of newcomers’ access to Internet literacy development was studied through a hybrid of two frameworks: van Dijk’s (2005) digital divide and Warschauer’s (2004) social inclusion. The key findings were that the distribution of resources affected access four ways: (1) resources affected multiple types of access, (2) the effect of resource distribution on access was both cumulative and successive, (3) distribution of resources could either facilitate or impede access, and (4) Internet literacy development could potentially increase or decrease the resources. The findings resulted in implications for the ELT program and teaching.

The purpose of this study was two fold: (1) to examine how the distribution of resources within and outside an Enhanced Language Training Program (ELT) affected a group of newcomers’ access to Internet literacy development; and (2) to discuss ensuing pedagogical and curricular implications for the ELT Program. The relationship between the distribution of resources and a group of newcomers’ access to Internet literacy development was studied through a hybrid of two frameworks: van Dijk’s (2005) digital divide and Warschauer’s (2004) social inclusion. The key findings were that the distribution of resources affected access four ways: (1) resources affected multiple types of access, (2) the effect of resource distribution on access was both cumulative and successive, (3) distribution of resources could either facilitate or impede access, and (4) Internet literacy development could potentially increase or decrease the resources. The findings resulted in implications for the ELT program and teaching.

In addition to general knowledge on the official curriculum subjects, including the English language, schools convey multiple cultural and ideological meanings, playing a significant role in the processes of socialization and cultural reproduction. The function of school textbooks as powerful agents of socialization is realized through the texts and visuals in the content. Locally issued ELT materials, written in English by local authors, comprise a combination of local and foreign social meanings. Positive social change may be initiated by constant revision of cultural and ideological implications in educational media and subsequent exclusion of integrated biased meanings and linguistic forms reinforcing social inequities. This research study deals with gender representations and gender discriminatory meanings in ELT textbooks. It focuses on the ways gender-related social inequalities are reflected in texts and illustrations in two ELT series published by the Turkish Ministry of National Education and the Iranian Ministry of Education. Critical discourse analysis was chosen for investigation of gender issues integrated in the content of the textbooks. The study examined representations of female and male characters at code level in the pronoun and noun systems, at sentence level in reading passages and dialogues, and in visuals. The study revealed imbalance in representations of woman and man, and gender-related stereotypes in all examined categories of both ELT series. In both Turkish and Iranian textbook sets, traditional female and male roles depicting women as mothers and housewives and men as breadwinners were emphasized more than modern ones sustaining gender egalitarianism in public and family spheres. In contrast to women, men took active parts in all essential social fields, and bigger numbers of males than females were involved in texts and illustrations. Authors&rsquo / gender did not have a big influence on the results obtained by the current research. It was suggested that gender-related ideologies and stereotypes are shared, supported, and unconsciously reproduced by both women and men in a society.

This study aimed at investigating university preparatory school students&rsquo / and teachers&rsquo / perceptions of computer-assisted language learning (CALL) environment. The sample consisted of 308 students and 50 teachers from Zonguldak Karaelmas University Preparatory School. Data was gathered from the participants via two Effective CALL Questionnaires (ECALLQ) developed by the researcher. Both inferential and descriptive statistics were used to analyze the data. Principal component analysis was used to find the dimensions of the student questionnaire. Repeated measures ANOVA and paired-samples t-test were employed to define the priorities of the students within the dimensions of each subscale. MANOVA was used to investigate whether there were significant differences among students&rsquo / CALL environment perceptions with respect to certain background variables.Descriptive statistics were used to analyze students&rsquo / and teachers&rsquo / perceptions of computer&rsquo / s role and teacher&rsquo / s role in CALL environment and to analyze all participants&rsquo / responses to the open-ended questions.The study indicated that students perceive the computer&rsquo / s role with respect to (1)language skills, (2) overall effect of computer and (3) motivation / teacher&rsquo / s role with respect to (1) teacher assistance, (2) teacher guidance and (3) teacher presence / students&rsquo / expectations from the teacher with respect to (1) laboratory activities guided by the teacher and (2) overall guidance. According to the students&rsquo / perceptions, language skills,teacher assistance and lab activities guided by the teacher were found to be the most effective dimensions.Descriptive statistics showed that both students and teachers are undecided about the effectiveness of CALL, and they believe that teachers are effective in CALL environment.

The purpose of the present study was to investigate the cultural load of the reading texts of the Spot On 8 ELT textbook published in Turkey, and to find out the teachers&rsquo / and students&rsquo / perceptions concerning the presence of native, target and other world cultures (C1, C2 and C3 respectively) in ELT textbooks. In order to fulfill these aims, a checklist, a teacher questionnaire, a student questionnaire, a teacher interview were developed by the researcher. Moreover, the impressionistic overview and the item frequency procedure were applied for the analysis of cultural content of the textbook. Quantitative data were analyzed by calculating the frequencies, percentages, and the Chronbach alpha. Qualitative data were analyzed by applying the coding system for the categorization of collected responses and content analysis. The results showed that the cultural load of the textbook was insufficient and that the percentage of cultural elements in the reading passages is significantly low. The teachers&rsquo / satisfaction with the textbook appeared to be relatively low and students showed neither high level of satisfaction with their textbook nor dissatisfaction with it. Overall, there is a serious mismatch between teachers&rsquo / and students&rsquo / perceptions of culture and the real cultural load of the textbook. The target culture prevails in the reading texts although teachers considered native and other world cultures to be important as well, and students showed equally low interest in target and other world cultures giving the preference dominantly to their native culture.

This study investigates how the relationship between nationalism and language learning is manifested in discourse at an English language classroom facilitated in Nogales Sonora along the Mexico/US border. Employing ethnographically-sensitive critical discourse analysis, this study contributes to the fields of English Language Teaching (ELT), Border Studies, and Nationalism Studies by introducing three analytical terms that provide a means to document the social construction of nation-states (termed herein as imagined national communities of practice). The three terms are (1) nationalist practices, which refers to social practice that presupposes nationalist principles, (2) nationalist border practices, which refers to discerning self/other along nationalist lines, and (3) nationalist standard practices, which refers to the articulation of nationalist standards of language and subjectivity. The students attending the class under analysis comprise a unique population in that they are adults who occupy positions of economic and social privilege in the Nogales Sonora community because of their management-level employment at maquila factories. Reflecting their status, the students are invested in nationalist practices of border and standard in order to align themselves with nation-state institutions and to distance themselves from cultural and linguistic liminality (e.g., Mexican-American, paisano, code-switching, and Spanglish) characteristic of border regions. The classroom under observation upheld nationalist borders and standards, with important consequences. First, nationalist notions of border led classroom participants to disavow the bilingual language use that was clearly necessary for successful classroom operations, despite an English immersion classroom policy. Second, nationalist practices established the local classroom space as indexically linked to an imagined American community of practice, understood by students to be authentically monolingual, monocultural, and distinct from Mexico. Association with--but not full incorporation into--this particular understanding of the American nation-state is advantageous to students for maintaining their elevated social and economic positioning in the local Nogales Sonora community. Thus, this classroom serves as a site of nationalist border reproduction and the reinforcement of hierarchies of privilege. The study encourages teacher reflection on what nationalism can mean to formal language learning contexts and suggests directions for re-aligning classroom practice to approaches that embrace multilingual realities of language learning contexts.

Multi-Object Adaptive Optics promises to be a useful tool for the upcoming class of Extremely Large Telescopes. Like current adaptive optics systems, MOAO systems compensate optical aberrations caused by atmospheric turbulence, but with the added benefit of being able to compensate multiple portions of a telescope’s field at the same time. To ensure the success of the eventual MOAO systems built for the ELTs, several demonstrator instruments have been designed and tested on current telescopes. Raven is one of these demonstrators, designed by the University of Victoria Adaptive Optics Lab for the Subaru 8.2 meter telescope to feed the InfraRed Camera and Spectrograph. Raven corrects the light of two science targets using wavefront information from three natural guide stars, and a single laser guide star. The topic of this thesis is the design and implementation of Raven’s tip/tilt compensation system, used to stabilize the output image positions on IRCS’s 0.140” slit. Tip/tilt correction of the science targets is done using a combination of motorized pick-off arms, piezoelectric tip/tilt platforms, and deformable mirrors. Through digital filtering and calibration, it is shown that these actuators are able to collectively keep the output science images stationary during simulated laboratory observations. A performance reduction due to residual tip/tilt errors is expected to be less than 5%. Raven goes on-sky in mid-2014, and it will be the first MOAO instrument to attempt scientific observations. / Graduate / 0548 / 0606