Digital Commons Network^™

Promoting Cultural Awareness In An International Business Program Through Foreign Language Communication, Mary Vigier, Nancy Smoller Le Floch

Global Business Languages

The article examines a module developed over the past 20 years at a French management school to show how culturally based learning activities in the foreign language classroom can improve the school’s management training curriculum. Through debates, role plays, and discussions, the module improves students’ communicative skills and enhances their comprehension of self and others. The assignments aid students in making sense of unfamiliar contexts. By developing cultural awareness in addition to linguistic fluency, the class contributes to the school’s mission to train future business professionals to become open-minded and thereby to operate more effectively in today’s global business environment.

List Of Contributors, Allen G. Wood

Global Business Languages

No abstract provided.

Introduction: Partnerships And New Alliances, Allen G. Wood

Global Business Languages

As we go to press, Greece is poised on the brink, yet again it seems, of defaulting on its massive debt, with predictions and fears of local, regional, and perhaps ultimately global dire consequences. The interconnectedness of economies around the globe has come into sharp focus as the prospects of financial crisis, perhaps even collapse, in the eurozone threatens to drag down the weak economic recovery in the United States, and adversely affect Asian economic stability. The past few years have shown all too clearly that globalization has a very real downside. Yet we hope to avoid a major crisis, …

Retaining Engineering Students Through A January Term German Immersion Study Tour, Sigrid Berka

Global Business Languages

Retention of engineering students is a national and international concern, since a globalizing world needs ever more culturally competent and technically adept graduates to fulfill the work force demands of companies operating globally. The data on retention of engineering students agrees that the freshman year is of critical importance; we fi nd that only about 40 to 50% of the students graduate with an engineering degree. The International Engineering Program (IEP) organizes a 10 to 14-day German Study Tour during January break, which is an effective retention tool for students enrolled in The University of Rhode Island’s demanding five-year dual …

Teaching Arabic To Business Students, Amel Mili

Global Business Languages

It has become increasingly more critical for business students to be fluent in foreign languages and knowledgeable of foreign cultures. There is more to teaching a foreign language to a business student than teaching vocabulary and grammar. In order to prepare students to be successful businesspersons in the target geographic area, we must also introduce them to such topics as the local culture, local economic conditions, and local business ethics. In this article, I discuss my experience at Lauder with the Arabic language and culture program, by discussing in turn its requirements, premises, and lessons learned.

And They Were There: Reports Of Meetings -- 2010 Charleston Pre-Conference And Conference, Sever Bordeianu

Against the Grain

No abstract provided.

If Rumors Were Horses, Katina Strauch

Against the Grain

No abstract provided.

Atg Interviews Springer, Tom Gilson, Katina Strauch

Against the Grain

No abstract provided.

The Challenge Of Transcultural Competence: Background Reading Of Target Culture Current Events Articles, Norbert Hedderich

Global Business Languages

At the lower and intermediate-levels of language instruction, students do not have sufficient language proficiency to inform themselves about current events in the target language. Knowledge of current events is an important part of cultural competence and should not be absent from instruction because of linguistic restrictions. This article proposes to remedy this problem, by creating out-of-class reading assignments of current events articles from US and international English language news sources. The article provides practical information on selection criteria for articles, suggests news sources, and gives examples of assignments.

Inanimate Speech From Lovecraft To Žižek, Apple Z. Igrek

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Inanimate Speech from Lovecraft to Žižek" Apple Z. Igrek explores an influential line of reasoning associated with our contemporary loss of the Real. The argument describes how the contingencies and nuances of social life have been reduced to an operational, friction-free, and homogeneous realm of signs. Slavoj Žižek contends that our inherently traumatic relationship with the Other is being foreclosed and replaced by an omnipresent technological screen of virtual communication. The danger of this shift, identified as the "digital break," is that it facilitates an extraordinary form of divine violence which strikes back at the social system …

Eliot's The Waste Land And Surging Nationalisms, Pouneh Saeedi

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Eliot's The Waste Land and Surging Nationalisms" Pouneh Saeedi analyzes T.S. Eliot's poem in the context of the impact of World War I and the emergence of nationalisms. In the midst of the ruins of both his personal life and Europe, Eliot expresses the loss of a universal understanding delineated in the fragmentation of language and a disassociation of sensibility. In The Waste Land, the West and the East — represented in their respective canonical texts — commingle and cohere to present an image of oneness that goes beyond oppositional binaries and leads the egotistical self …

How Business Professionals Perceive Intercultural Differences: A Survey, Lan Zhang

Global Business Languages

This article reports the findings of a survey conducted among business professionals who have either worked in China or are US based and have relationships with Chinese companies. The intention is to discover what business culture differences they perceive between the US and China and how they cope with the language and cultural challenges. As a result, Chinese language instructors can then understand business students’ needs better and thus teach more effectively by incorporating the findings into the Chinese business language curricula.

Comparative Literature In Chinese And An Interview With Yue, Hui Zhang, Daiyun Yue

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In their article "Comparative Literature in Chinese and an Interview with Daiyun Yue" Hui Zhang and Daiyun Yue present a review of the discipline of comparative literature based on an interview with Yue (2010). Because Yue's work with comparative literature is intertwined with her personal journey, the interview sheds light on other Chinese scholars and their work who would not be known audiences outside China. The interview also touches on the academic and political reasons why the joint dualisms of "ancient/modern" and "Chinese/foreign" continue to be major structuring principles of the discipline in China, as well as how the development …

The Tartu School And Catalan Scholarship: A Book Review Article Of New Work In Reception And Communication Studie, Christopher Larkosh

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

Academic Discourse And Literacy Narratives As "Equipment For Living", Kris Rutten

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Academic Discourse and Narratives of Literacy as 'Equipment for Living'" Kris Rutten discusses practices of academic discourse and argues that students entering higher education have to become part of a specific community of institutional discourse. Rutten claims that narratives of and about literacy — narratives that revolve around issues dealing with language and the acquisition of literacy — "dramatize" the tension of moving from one discourse community to another. By charting situations of "type," fictional literacy narratives can be used by students as "equipment for living" in order to reflect on confrontations and difficulties they experience in …

Dante's Linguistic Detail In Shelley's Triumph Of Life, Anita O'Connell

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Dante's Linguistic Detail in Shelley's Triumph of Life" Anita O'Connell analyzes Shelley's attention to detail in Dante's poetic style and presents a close textual analysis of the ways Shelley draws on the beauty of Dante's texts. When Dante's Divine Comedy re-emerged into the public sphere in Britain through Henry Cary's 1814 translation, his reputation was as a stern, dark, Medieval poet and readers and writers alike shared a love of the perceived gothicism particularly of The Inferno. Shelley, however, differed from this general view of Dante: despite the grotesque descriptions in his Triumph of Life …

The Metroburb: American Values In Facebook Culture, Heather Marie Carlson

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Using critical discourse analysis, fantasy themes were extracted from user profiles and postings to examine American values found in Facebook culture.

Core values found on Facebook worked to create not only socially recognizable identities enacted and communicated through the participants, but also a particular culture to which participants both reflected and contributed in Facebook. Themes and values extracted from findings indicate that Facebook users should be casual, technologically-aware, social, respectful and fair to others, “good little copers,” financially savvy while at the same time valuing higher education, a healthy lifestyle, family and travel.

Because Facebook is an interestingly fluid cultural …

The Smoke Of Battle Pressing, Matthew Bodett

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

the smoke of battle pressing engages the reader by requiring a sacrifice similar to that experienced in the game of chess. During a famous chess match in 1912 between Marshall and Levitsky, Marshall sacrificed his queen, the most powerful piece, in a counter-intuitive way that led to an immediate victory for Marshall. A sacrifice of similar gravity is made when the reader resigns presumptions or expectations in order to have a more meaningful experience. A sacrifice on my part is made when I remove myself from the artwork and give up my authority over the image in much the same …

The Watchmaker Series, Christopher Michael Seelie

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

The Watchmaker Series celebrates and inquires into time as a biproduct of consciousness and practices the application of this notion in poetry. The series begins with the numeral poems, all of which relate directly to the theoretical and polemical aspects. Along the way, other poems with individual titles are interspersed to reflect or redirect the abstract considerations to more concrete subjects. Gradually, as the series progresses, the interacting and recurring associations meld theory and practice into a compositional whole.

The central notion that contemporary poetry is not a machine made of words but rather, like the watch that gives itself …

Dimensionalizing Cultures: The Hofstede Model In Context, Geert Hofstede

Online Readings in Psychology and Culture

This article describes briefly the Hofstede model of six dimensions of national cultures: Power Distance, Uncertainty Avoidance, Individualism/Collectivism, Masculinity/Femininity, Long/Short Term Orientation, and Indulgence/Restraint. It shows the conceptual and research efforts that preceded it and led up to it, and once it had become a paradigm for comparing cultures, research efforts that followed and built on it. The article stresses that dimensions depend on the level of aggregation; it describes the six entirely different dimensions found in the Hofstede et al. (2010) research into organizational cultures. It warns against confusion with value differences at the individual level. It concludes …

Fuzzy-Genetic Controller For Congestion Avoidance In Computer Networks, Mohammed Z., Ali M. Mahmood

Iraqi Journal of Computers, Communications, Control and Systems Engineering

In this paper a fuzzy proportional-Integral (FPI) controller is designed as an Active Queue Management (AQM) in internet routers to improve the performance of PI controller for congestion avoidance in computer networks. Firstly the parameters of FPI controller are selected by trial and error method, but to get the best controller parameters the Genetic Algorithm (GA) is used as an optimization method for tuning the FPI parameters. The analytical results for linearized TCP/AQM model are presented in MATLAB version 7.0. From the obtained results, a faster response time as well as the regulation of the output to a constant value …

The Association Between Reading Comprehension And Prerequisite Skills For Children In Poverty, Hyo Jin Yoon

Theses and Dissertations (ETD)

The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between reading comprehension and the prerequisite skills typically assessed by a school based speech pathologist with a focus on children raised in poverty. Based upon previous studies, three hypotheses were developed. First, children from low socioeconomic status (SES) backgrounds would not perform as well as children from the standardization sample on norm referenced language tests although the language tests would predict reading comprehension. Second, decoding would not be as good a predictor of reading comprehension for children from low SES backgrounds as it is in typically developing children from middle …

Accessing Justice: The Availability And Adequacy Of Counsel In Removal Proceedings (New York Immigrant Representation Study Report: Part 1), Peter L. Markowitz, Jojo Annobil, Stacy Caplow, Peter V.Z Cobb, Nancy Morawetz, Oren Root, Claudia Slovinsky, Zhifen Cheng, Lindsay Nash

Cardozo Law Review

The article addresses the immigrant representation crisis in U.S. immigration courts, highlighting a severe shortage of competent legal representation for individuals in removal proceedings. This crisis is marked by both a lack of quantity and quality of representation, exacerbated by rising deportation rates, detention practices, and resource constraints faced by removal defense providers (RDPs). The study underscores the critical role of legal representation in achieving successful outcomes, with stark disparities in success rates between represented and unrepresented individuals. It advocates for systemic solutions, including expanded funding, improved coordination among providers, and policy reforms to ensure fair and competent representation for …

Endless Yarns: Interdisciplinary Creative Work In Text And Textile, Louisa Owen Sonstroem

Honors Scholar Theses

In this thesis I explore the relationship between text and textile. What is it that connects them? I engage this question from an aesthetic perspective, through process as much as through theory. The thesis project consists of three components: creative text pieces, creative textile pieces, and an essay that attempts to deal with the questions which arose during my creative process.

An Analysis Of Literacy Instruction In Tennessee Reading First Schools With High Levels Of Proficiency In Reading/Language Arts Scores, James Herman

Masters Theses and Doctoral Dissertations

Reading proficiency has been declining in the US schools. The Reading First (RF) program was designed to combat this trend. The purpose of this study was to investigate the reasons why some RF programs were successful and some were not. The study brings a Tennessee perceptive to the research of the relationship between literacy instruction implementation factors and school performance. In this study, reading proficiency assessment data were used to assign the included Tennessee RF schools to one of three categories: highly successful, moderately successful, and Unsuccessful. It was somewhat troubling to see that in some schools as many as …

Carrollian Language Arts & Rhetoric: Dodgson's Quest For Order & Meaning, With A Purpose, Madonna Farjado Kemp

Masters Theses and Doctoral Dissertations

Lewis Carroll (Rev. Charles Dodgson) is a language specialist who has verifiably altered our lexicon and created fictional worlds that serve as commentary on our ability to effectively create meaning within our existing communicative systems. This ability to create language and illustrations of everyday language issues can be traced back to his personal quest for order and meaning; the logician and teacher has uncovered the accepted language and language practices that can result in verbal confusion and ineffective speech, as well as the accepted practices that can help us to avoid verbal confusion and social conflict—all of which reveals a …

Is There A Relationship Between Electronic White Boards In The Classroom And Student Success?, John Joseph Mundy

Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to determine the effect of interactive electronic white boards, an advanced technology, on the academic performance of kindergarten through fifth grade elementary students. The participants represent seven local school districts with approximately 700 teachers instructing 16,421 students. The research gathered data from the teachers through a questionnaire designed by the researcher. Student data was also gathered as well as perceptions of trainers, teachers and administrators.

The study was designed to examine the independent variables and the impact or effect it has on students’ achievement in a Kindergarten through fifth grade elementary classroom. The independent …

Barriers And Enablers Of Interdisciplinary Research At Academic Institutions, Leslie Suzanne Thornton Butler

Dissertations

This research study examines the factors that motivate and lead to the success of faculty members who conduct interdisciplinary research. Because a comprehensive study of the research patterns of interdisciplinary researchers has not been conducted, the main intent of this research project was to create an instrument that would measure research habits and attitudes. It is important that such research be conducted using individuals who are interdisciplinary researchers as well as disciplinary researchers. One intent of the research study was to provide comparisons between disciplinary researchers and interdisciplinary researchers. Another intent was to provide university administrators with a better understanding …

Vaccine-Preventable Diseases And Foreign-Born Populations, Marc Altshuler, Md, Giang Nguyen, Md

Department of Family & Community Medicine Faculty Papers

Foreign-born individuals account for over 12% of the U.S. population, according to the most recent census data. Since many vaccine-preventable outbreaks in the U.S. have been correlated with disease importation, Congress has mandated vaccinations for numerous immigrant populations. It is essential for primary care physicians to be knowledgeable on the unique immunization-related needs of foreign-born individuals, to recognize some of the cultural and linguistic challenges that immigrants have accessing healthcare, and remember to use each medical encounter as an opportunity to provide necessary vaccinations.

Genocide Studies: An Australian Perspective, Colin Tatz

Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal

The burgeoning field of genocide studies is faced with several concerns. Foremost is the challenge of finding a space for encompassing and embracing the Holocaust with some comfort. The Judeocide is an ally, not an enemy, and not on the margins. Our maturing discipline needs to find a sense of collegiality, consensus on terminology, and yardsticks with which to measure scales, dimensions, and degrees of the crime. Several other themes also need attention: wider perspectives on the prerequisites of genocide, starvation as a genocidal weapon, a clear separa- tion between motive and intent, genocide by omission, the elusive concepts of …