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Nowadays, the administration environment is changing rapidly. Since International Institute for Management Development¡]IMD¡^selects ¡§government efficiency¡¨ and ¡§business efficiency¡¨ as the major factors and criteria to compute the rankings of world competitiveness in the World Competitiveness Yearbook. Both governments and enterprises force to innovate and need to strengthen organizational performance to promote work efficiency, and to improve the strategic management system. This research applies the organizational performance theme in public institutions as well as in the operations of private enterprises by using the Balanced Scorecard¡¦s concept for measuring the scale operational activities of organization. To verify the performance of organization management, the questionnaire picks ¡§Likert Scale¡¨ criteria, and adopts the fuzzy membership function transformation to obtain measuring results. The purposes of this research are: 1) to design a performance measure scale with content validity based on Balanced Scorecord; 2) to compare weighted and fuzzy algorithm; 3) to to verify the worth of fuzzy algorithm. The results of this research are: 1) fuzzy algorithm is better than weighted algorithm in validity; 2) the Balance Scorecard helps organizational performance; 3) customer perspective is the first priority of performance measures in the Balanced Scorecard.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2000. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 196-204). Available also in a digital version from Dissertation Abstracts.

Thesis (Ed.D.)--University of Toronto, 2006. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 152-162).

Akademische abhandlung--Helsinki. / "Literaturverzeichnis": p. [180]-185.

This dissertation develops a new framework for reconstructing the diversity of a language at a given historical time period. It applies this framework to the problem of reconstructing the diversity of Arabic dialects immediately prior to the Islamic conquests, which spread speakers of these dialects across much of North Africa and the Middle East. The study first establishes a theoretical framework for reconstructing historical speech communities, defined as groups of speakers linked by shared allegiance. It then analyzes the tribal and non-tribal social organization in Pre-Islamic Arabia, and provides a detailed historical overview of how the Islamic conquests contributed to the Arabization of the conquered territories. Finally, the dissertation reconstructs the linguistic history of the Arabic demonstratives, using them as a variable to determine which speech communities existed in pre-Islamic Arabic, where they were located in time and space, and how the diversity of those communities is related to the diversity of modern Arabic dialects. / text

published_or_final_version / Linguistics / Master / Master of Arts

在大學入學考的英文科目中，英文作文的考題以敘述文與論說文兩種類型最為常見。特別注意的是，於每年二月份所舉行的大學學測的英文考科中，2004年至2014年間，敘述文的出現次數高達八次。因此，如何教導學生進行英文的敘述文寫作是每位高中英文老師所要面對的課題。此外，記敘文與敘述文均為描寫形式的文章，學生容易對這兩種文體產生混淆，可能影響學生的敘述文體的英文寫作而造成負面的影響。 為了幫助學生能夠了解敘述文體的特性，本研究經由以英文母語者的文章整理出七項關於敘述文的特性。此外，本研究也利用敘述文的七項特性來檢驗五篇高中英文教科書的文章與五十篇學生的英文文章，除了審視這五十五篇文章是否達到七項特性之外，也利用學生敘述文的分數發現會影響分數的語言特徵。最後，藉由研究中的發現給予英文教科書編寫與英文敘述文教學及學習上的建議。 / The most common styles of English writing in the college entrance exam are narratives and expository. Furthermore, narrative writing occurs more frequently than expository in the General Scholastic Ability Test (GSAT) held in early February every year. During the years 2004 to 2014, writing a narrative with sequential pictures was used eight times to evaluate Taiwanese senior high school students' English writing abilities. Therefore, the teaching and learning of English narratives is of a great importance for teachers and students in Taiwanese senior high schools. In order to help the teaching and learning of narrative writing, this study aims to find out the linguistic features of the narratives based on the analysis of English narratives written by native speakers. Then, according to the seven linguistic features of the narrative found in this study, fifty-five narratives from Taiwanese English textbooks and senior high school students were investigated to know whether the seven linguistic features were presented. Furthermore, to determine the significant grades-related linguistic features of students' narratives, the grades of students' narratives and the linguistic features are examined in this study. Lastly, by using the findings of the study, some pedagogical implications are offered for English textbooks, the teaching and learning of the narrative style.

The relationship between language and culture has long been acknowledged, defined and discussed in the literature on foreign language learning and teaching (Kramsch, 1997; Krasner, 1999; Omaggio, 2001), though the integration of culture into foreign language learning has been inconsistent. Linguistic competence alone is not enough for learners to be competent in that language, and language learners need to be aware of the culturally appropriate ways to address people, express gratitude, make requests, and agree or disagree with someone. Language must be used with other culturally appropriate behavior to be successful. Despite the critical relationship between language and culture in effective foreign language instruction, postsecondary foreign language education lacks benchmarks, best practices or empirical standards for cultural integration. This forces college instructors of foreign language without guidance about how and when to integrate culture into their instruction. This descriptive case study examines the ways in which culture is integrated into a Basic Russian language university course. Through direct classroom observation, interviews with the instructor and a review of the textbook, the researcher examined the integration of big “C” culture and little “c” culture into foreign language instruction. The observations affirmed the general assertion that cultural infusion in college-level language instruction is limited and often delivered only as incidental additions to grammar and mechanics. Further, it was noted that instructors lack guidance about how to effectively integrate culture into their teaching, and this was further affirmed through a review of the class textbook. The study concludes with recommendations for further study into effective practices for cultural infusion into foreign language instruction and recommendations for improving foreign language teaching through the integration of culture. / text

A growing body of research suggests that patterns of personal pronoun use in couples - particularly we-talk (first person plural pronouns) and you-talk (second person pronouns) - are potentially meaningful markers of adaptive and maladaptive functioning, respectively. Despite this growing couple literature, very little is known about the relational implications of we-talk and you-talk in larger social units like families, where relevant interaction patterns are often triadic and involve members of different generations. The present study employed baseline observational and self-report data from a multi-site study of family therapy for adolescent substance drug abuse to (a) describe patterns of personal pronoun use in families consisting of two parent figures and at least one adolescent child, during conversations that had a collaborative (plan a menu) and a conflictual (discuss a recent argument) valence; and (b) explore associations between pronoun patterns and various indicators of adaptive adolescent and family functioning. As hypothesized, automated text analysis of transcripts from 74 English speaking families revealed more we-talk in the cooperative (menu) task, more you-talk and I-talk in the conflict (argument) task, and significant variations in pronoun frequency by family role (more I-talk by adolescents, more we-talk and you-talk by parents). Additional coding, guided by structural family systems theory, took into account the source and referent of each pronoun utterance (e.g., parent-parent we-talk, cross-generation you-talk), and these structural pronoun variables showed stronger associations with concurrently observed family interaction patterns than global (raw count) pronoun variables did. Contrary to expectation, you-talk was a stronger predictor of concurrent family behavior and adaptive youth/family functioning than we-talk, and associations between pronoun patterns and indicators of adaptive functioning were stronger for the conflict task than the cooperation task. The results suggest that relational meanings of pronouns are substantially more complex in triadic intergenerational family interactions than in dyadic romantic relationships. Discussion of these results includes study limitations and possible directions for further research.