Giardia duodenalis is a protozoan of public health interest that causes gastroenteritis in humans and other animals. In the city of Campinas in southeast Brazil, giardiasis is endemic, and this pathogen is detected at high concentrations in wastewater effluents, which are potential reservoirs for transmission. The Samambaia wastewater treatment plant (WWTP) in the city of Campinas employs an ac...

The purpose of this research was to examine how Korean and Japanese EFL learners’ speech act of compliment is transferred from their native cultures when they are interacting in English, and to investigate if the two cultural groups display different or similar strategies in giving and responding compliment. The subjects were 20 intermediate-level Korean and Japanese university students, who pa...

A generalized enhanced Fourier law (EFL) that accounts for quasiballistic phonon transport effects in a formulation entirely in terms of physical observables is derived from the Boltzmann transport equation. It generalizes the previously reported EFL from a gray phonon population to an arbitrary quasi-ballistic phonon mode population, the chief advantage being its formulation in terms of observ...

This article draws on qualitative classroom observation data from case studies of three EFL classes in Hong Kong primary schools. It analyses four themes relevant to the classroom implementation of task-based learning with young learners, namely, noise/indiscipline, the use of the mother tongue, the extent of pupil involvement, and the role of drawing or colouring activities. For each of these ...

This study aims at determining whether collocational features automatically extracted from EFL (English as a foreign language) texts are useful for quality scoring, and allow the improvement of a competitive baseline based on, amongst other factors, bigram frequencies. The collocational features were gathered by assigning to each bigram in an EFL text eight association scores computed on the ba...

Environmental education has increasingly become part of the English as a Foreign Language (EFL) curriculum worldwide. This article analyses 26 EFL textbooks used in Japan, to discover what kind of environmental education they offer, and what this says about intercultural communication in the teaching/learning process. The results show how textbooks, by concentrating mainly on technical solution...

_______________ A lack of reading quantity in EFL (English as a Foreign Language) classrooms has remained one of the most serious problems faced by teachers of English in Japan. Although the extensive reading (ER) approach is regarded as having significant potential in addressing this problem, it is not used in many EFL classrooms. This study investigates the effect of a quasi-extensive reading...

Research regarding the teaching of reading for English as a Foreign Language (EFL) and English as a Second Language (ESL) is still ongoing. This study focused on metacognitive reading strategies for these learners, first revisiting the concept of metacognition as proposed by Flavell, and then going on to explain reading strategies that require metacognitive skills within three knowledge dimensi...

The paper evaluates Chinese EFL (English Foreign Language) learners’ attitudinal responses toward Chinese accent. Questionnaires administered among 81 intermediate proficiency EFL learners who were from China and UK (70 of whom were university students, 11 of whom were university English teachers). Results show clearly that the respondents do not have significant negative attitude towards their...

This study reports some prosodic characteristics in the quasispontaneous classroom speech of Chinese EFL learners. Recordings of ten dialogues produced by twenty second-year non-English majors were analyzed to extract the following features: durations of interand intra-turn pauses, duration of filled-in pauses, numbers of words per tone unit, tone unit durations, speech rates and pitch accent t...