Search Results (995)

The current study examined the perceptions of elite high school students in the United Arab Emirates about their experiences in learning and acquiring mathematical concepts and skills through the ALEKS system that stands for Assessment and Learning in Knowledge Spaces. ALEKS is an e-assessment and tutoring platform that facilitates the teaching and learning of mathematics for students in Grades 5–12 using versatile and personalized teaching functions. Eight participants of equally mixed gender participated in the study, four Grade 9 and four Grade 10 students. A qualitative research design in the form of one-to-one semi-structured interviews was used to have a deeper understanding of students’ ALEKS experiences, identify the challenges encountered while studying with it, and pinpoint the benefits and advantages of using ALEKS. Results showed that participating students frequently used ALEKS because of two main factors, including rewards promised by teachers and immediate feedback and feeling of immediate achievement provided by the platform. Challenges related to ALEKS were language barriers among the Arabic-speaking students studying in English, a lack of human interaction and support, time management issues, and the necessity for supplementary resources. Multiple advantages were also found, most noticeably how the ALEKS individualized adaptive learning environment helped participants gain more knowledge of mathematical concepts and develop their mathematics skills. Recommendations for mathematics teachers and policymakers include allowing students to utilize ALEKS in small groups in school, aligning ALEKS themes and topics with textbooks learning goals and objectives, giving systematic and personal guidance for increased independent use at home, and making bilingual editions and Arabic-language assets (e.g., tutorial videos) available. Full article

This study presents a multimodal deep learning framework for automatic proficiency and style classification of parallel Bilingual Tamil–Hindi learner data. The proposed system employs a dual-headed neural architecture to simultaneously predict proficiency levels (Basic, Advanced) and stylistic categories (Formal, Literary) using shared feature representations. A curated dataset of bilingual text samples is utilized, along with synthetic speech generated through text-to-speech (TTS) to enable controlled multimodal experimentation. Five deep learning architectures are evaluated under text-only, audio-only, and learnable fusion settings. Experimental findings indicate that text-based models consistently achieve strong performance in both proficiency and style classification tasks. In contrast, the audio-only model demonstrates limited effectiveness, highlighting the constraints of synthetic acoustic features in capturing meaningful linguistic information. The fusion models provide only marginal improvements over text-based approaches, suggesting that textual representations play a dominant role in proficiency and stylistic classification within controlled datasets. These results emphasize the importance of linguistic features over acoustic signals for automated language assessment in low-resource settings. The proposed framework provides a scalable and reproducible approach and offers a foundation for future work incorporating real speech data and more diverse linguistic inputs. Full article

Language is social, as it is used by individuals to communicate and exchange ideas in society. Language is also cognitive, as the primary function of language, even before communicating and exchanging ideas, is to think. This article connects the social representations of what bilingualism is in the United States and how transnational youth are talked about in U.S. society with how both of these social representations create cognitive representations (e.g., thoughts, ideas, and beliefs) about transnational youth that result in negative educational policies and practices and shameful psychological and behavioral experiences for these youth. We begin with an ethnosemantic analysis of the word “bilingual” in the U.S. and then use the cognitive linguistic phenomena of conceptual metaphor and conceptual metonymy to explain how bilingualism is cognitively viewed as a “shameful problem” in society for transnational youth. We link linguistic shame, brought on by the social cognitive representations of bilingualism as transnational youth metonymically being incomplete, broken, in disrepair, fractured, unsettled, displaced, lacking fully built linguistic structures, not fully in possession of any language, to the phenomenon of and conceptual metaphor of TRANSNATIONAL YOUTH’S BILINGUALISM IS LINGUISTIC HOMELESSNESS. We conclude by putting forth a new metaphor, TRANSNATIONAL YOUTH FUNDS OF KNOWLEDGE ARE MYCELIAL NETWORKS, that rejects the concept of linguistic homelessness by pointing to these youth’s expanding networks of fluid languaging practices, transnational academic skills, and ever adapting identities. Through this new discourse, we advocate for new ways of socially talking about transnational youth and their languaging practices that may lead to different cognitive representations of these students; reorienting bilingualism from a problem to a resource and a right. Full article

With the rapid development of public digital cultural resources, the lack of cross-lingual information retrieval (CLIR) services catering to multilingual users in practical applications has created significant language barriers. This hinders the promotion of public digital culture and results in the underutilization of relevant resources. To address this need, this paper constructs M-APE, a shared semantic model that operates without reliance on parallel corpora. Through a three-step process comprising the generation, fine-tuning, and optimization of a shared semantic space, M-APE establishes a common semantic framework for diverse languages. The model utilizes a Chinese semantic space, transferred and trained on authentic public cultural corpora, as its input. Evaluation based on bilingual dictionary induction quality demonstrates that M-APE significantly enhances semantic sharing performance between Chinese and Indo-European languages, represented here by English and French, achieving an average cross-family transformation accuracy of 56.6%. Furthermore, focusing on the CLIR needs of multilingual users within China’s public cultural engineering projects, this study develops a Chinese-English-French cross-lingual information retrieval framework by integrating M-APE into public cultural domain tasks. Experimental results indicate that the proposed method achieves superior cross-lingual retrieval performance in terms of average metrics. Full article

Research has shown that bilinguals’ first (L1) and second language (L2) interact constantly. One well-documented case is the gender congruency effect, where grammatical gender retrieval is facilitated when a noun has the same gender in both languages. While this effect has been extensively studied in the direction of the L1 influencing the L2, less is known about how gender retrieval in the L1 is influenced by gender in the L2. The present study investigated whether exposure to L2 Dutch affects grammatical gender retrieval in L1 German among speakers who are constantly exposed to the L2. We tested 40 L1 German–L2 Dutch bilinguals living in the Netherlands and 28 L1 German monolinguals using a gender decision task in German. Stimuli included nouns with congruent and incongruent gender in the two languages, as well as cognates and non-cognates. Results revealed no evidence that L2 Dutch affected L1 German gender retrieval in bilinguals, indicating that grammatical gender in the L1 appears robust to L2 influence during online processing, even after prolonged immersion in the L2 environment. Full article

Visual learning is a valuable resource in inclusive educational settings. This study aims to analyse the effectiveness of using visual tools and media in the teaching process in primary schools, with a particular focus on foreign pupils. A mixed-methods approach was employed, integrating quantitative (pre–post tests) and qualitative (interviews and observations) methods to evaluate the impact of visual teaching on language comprehension, participation, and sense of belonging to the school. The results revealed significant improvements in learning and motivation, particularly among students from migrant backgrounds. Full article

Teachers’ readiness in bilingual early childhood education is increasingly recognized as a multidimensional construct shaped by both professional and language-related factors. However, existing research has typically examined these factors separately, with limited evidence on how they combine across teacher groups, particularly in minority-language contexts. This study examined teachers’ readiness to deliver state-language instruction to dual language learners (DLLs) in Hungarian-medium kindergartens in Slovakia. A total of 313 kindergarten teachers participated in the study. Data were collected through a survey assessing multiple dimensions of readiness. Principal component analysis and confirmatory factor analysis supported a six-factor model comprising professional preparation, teacher competencies, challenge management, instructional aids use, professional needs, and Slovak language use outside kindergarten. Latent profile analysis identified three readiness profiles (low, moderate, and high), reflecting differences in overall preparedness. Background characteristics, particularly age, teaching experience, and language-related factors, were significantly associated with higher readiness. Teachers who used Slovak more frequently in everyday contexts showed higher readiness. Mediation analysis indicated that language proficiency and preferred language use did not mediate the relationship between teaching experience and teachers’ readiness, but functioned as independent predictors. These findings highlight the joint importance of professional and language-related factors in shaping teachers’ readiness and offer implications for teacher education and policy in bilingual early childhood settings. Full article

With the increasing demand for enhanced security and surveillance, the integration of multimodal AI has shown significant promise. We developed and fine-tuned a transformer-based model, the Large Language and Vision Assistant–OneVision, tailored for human event and action recognition. By utilizing a multimodal approach, we identified specific human actions, including eating, running, fighting, sitting, and sleeping, within diverse real-world settings. Through knowledge distillation and Low-Rank Adaptation, the model’s performance was optimized in demonstrating substantial improvements in context-aware recognition and response generation. Evaluation results showed recall-oriented understudy for obtaining evaluation (ROUGE)-1 score of 0.6844, ROUGE-2 score of 0.5751, ROUGE-L score of 0.6520, and the bilingual evaluation understudy score of 68.20, demonstrating significant gains in accuracy and interpretability. The model’s success highlights its potential for real-time applications in surveillance, healthcare, and interactive AI systems, providing reliable, efficient, and context-sensitive human action detection. Full article

This study explores how incorporating generative artificial intelligence into the Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL) framework can enhance internationalisation for home and social entrepreneurship education in multilingual settings. A four-week AI-supported COIL programme was conducted with 30 postgraduate students from Russian and Spanish programmes. Students collaborated in intercultural teams to develop bilingual social innovation projects. Data were collected before and after the intervention using validated scales measuring intercultural competence, social entrepreneurship skills, AI literacy and ethics, and linguistic self-efficacy. Repeated-measures ANOVA indicated statistically significant improvements across all domains, with moderate-to-large effect sizes. The most pronounced gains were observed in mixed intercultural groups, which may suggest a potential synergistic effect between authentic intercultural exchanges and AI-mediated language support. Additionally, notable improvements were observed in ethical awareness of AI use and linguistic self-efficacy. Overall, these findings suggest that the AI-COIL model may represent a practical and potentially scalable approach for integrating language learning, intercultural competence, social innovation, and responsible AI use to advance internationalisation in higher education. Full article

Background: Parental practices that support autonomy, provide structure, and foster warm relationships are associated with greater satisfaction of students’ basic psychological needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness. In minority educational contexts, however, students’ psychological need satisfaction is also shaped by broader sociocultural conditions that may create additional pressures and sources of chronic stress. Within such environments, parental support may function as a protective factor that helps students cope with educational and cultural demands. Objective: The aim of this study was to explore how parental support contributes to the satisfaction of students’ basic psychological needs within a minority educational context where students from the Greek minority attend a bilingual school operating within a Turkish educational framework. Methods: A qualitative design was employed using three focus groups conducted in a minority school located in Gökçeada, Türkiye: one with parents (N = 5), one with lower secondary school students (N = 6), and one with upper secondary school students (N = 6). Interview questions were developed on the basis of Basic Psychological Needs Theory. Data were analyzed thematically by five members of the research team. Results: Findings indicated that parental support influenced students’ need satisfaction through practices related to autonomy (e.g., trust, space for mistakes), competence (e.g., encouragement, comparison), and relatedness (e.g., emotional presence, empathy). However, these practices were not experienced in a uniform way. Rather, their meaning and impact were shaped by contextual conditions associated with minority status, including bilingual educational demands, limited resources, and close-knit community dynamics. Conclusions: The study suggests that in minority school settings, parental support operates not simply as a general interpersonal resource but as a contextually mediated protective process. By showing how sociocultural and institutional conditions shape the enactment and experience of autonomy, competence, and relatedness, the findings extend existing BPNT research beyond majority settings and offer a more context-sensitive understanding of students’ psychological need satisfaction. Full article

Extra-curricular activities (EAs) have become a billion-dollar industry in Asia, and many parents in Singapore enroll their children in enrichment classes to improve English and mother tongue language performance. Despite the heavy investment, it remains unclear how much children could benefit from such exposure. The present study examines this issue with 123 English–Mandarin bilingual children aged four to five. The number of hours children spent in language-related EAs, together with a set of internal factors (e.g., nonverbal intelligence) and external factors (e.g., home input), were used to predict children’s receptive vocabulary and word-reading skills in both languages using path models. Results show that 36% of the children attended English or Mandarin enrichment classes. Participation in English enrichment classes was not significantly associated with children’s English receptive vocabulary or English word-reading skills. In contrast, Mandarin enrichment classes were significantly associated with better Mandarin word-reading performance. The differential effects of enrichment classes may reflect the bilingual context of Singapore, where English dominates daily communication while Mandarin is mainly learned as a subject in preschool and receives relatively limited exposure outside school. The findings highlight the importance of considering sociolinguistic context when evaluating the effectiveness of language enrichment programs. Full article

Background: Family caregivers remain closely involved in communication, care planning, and shared decision-making in long-term care (LTC) facilities. In this context, the quality of the relationship between family caregivers and professional staff may influence trust, collaboration, and satisfaction with care. However, few instruments have been specifically adapted to assess caregiver–staff relationship quality in Taiwanese LTC settings. Objectives: This study aimed to culturally adapt and preliminarily validate the Family Caregiver Relationship Quality (FCRQ) Scale for use in Taiwanese LTC facilities. Methods: A cross-sectional psychometric validation study was conducted with 205 primary family caregivers recruited from 20 LTC facilities in Taiwan. The original Relationship Quality Scale was adapted to the LTC context through contextual revision, expert review, bilingual verification, and pilot testing. Psychometric evaluation included confirmatory factor analysis, internal consistency assessment, convergent validity, and structural equation modelling with Bollen–Stine bootstrap correction to address potential non-normality. Results: The initial 16-item model required refinement, and three items with low standardized factor loadings were removed. The revised 13-item model met the prespecified fit criteria and showed acceptable internal consistency and convergent validity. The retained items reflected three conceptually related domains of relationship quality: trust, commitment, and satisfaction. Overall, the findings provided preliminary psychometric support for the adapted scale in Taiwanese LTC settings. Conclusions: The adapted FCRQ Scale may be a useful tool for assessing caregiver–staff relationship quality in Taiwanese long-term care facilities, particularly in the context of shared decision-making and family-centred care. Nevertheless, the findings should be interpreted as preliminary, and further validation in larger and more diverse samples is needed before broader clinical or research application. Full article

Background/Objectives: Communication decline is a hallmark of dementia, yet speech-language outcomes remain marginal in much of the virtual reality (VR) dementia literature. This evidence review synthesises empirical work on how VR has been used to support, train, or assess communication in dementia, positioning VR as a communication platform rather than only a cognitive tool. Methods: A structured search (2000–2025) across CINAHL, PubMed, PsycINFO, Scopus, and Web of Science was supplemented by reference list checking. Eleven empirical studies met eligibility criteria, spanning immersive and non-immersive VR used with people living with dementia, and VR-based communication training for caregivers, care staff, and clinicians. Findings were synthesised thematically through an explicit communication lens. Results: Evidence most consistently supports VR as a scaffold for communicative engagement and participation. Immersive and shared VR experiences commonly elicited increased verbal involvement, shared attention, and interactional responsiveness during or immediately after sessions, particularly when content was socially meaningful and appropriately paced. A second strand of work uses VR simulation to train communication partners, with participants reporting high acceptability and perceived improvements in confidence and strategy use, although behavioural transfer to real-world care is rarely measured. Assessment-oriented studies and stakeholder perspectives highlight VR’s potential to elicit functional behaviour in context and to complement clinic-based assessment, but communication validity is typically inferred rather than operationalised using standardised measures. Conclusions: VR shows early promise for dementia communication care, especially as an adjunct that structures interaction, supports participation, and scales communication training. Progress now depends on communication-specific intervention design, agreed outcome metrics capturing discourse and functional participation, and implementation studies addressing accessibility, cultural-linguistic diversity, and transfer to everyday care. Full article

In multilingual contexts such as the Basque Autonomous Community, fostering cross-linguistic awareness is essential to support literacy development and overall academic achievement. This study investigates a pedagogical intervention aimed at developing morphological awareness as a foundation for cross-linguistic reflection to enhance reading comprehension. A quasi-experimental design was implemented in a trilingual school with 70 sixth-grade students who were assigned to an experimental group (n = 24) or a control group (n = 46). Over a six-week period, the experimental group received explicit morphological instruction in the curricular languages—Basque, Spanish, and English. Morphological awareness and reading comprehension were assessed in all three languages. Although no statistically significant improvements were observed in reading comprehension, the experimental group demonstrated significantly greater gains in morphological awareness across the three languages. In addition, out-of-school exposure to Basque was positively associated with both morphological awareness and reading comprehension, highlighting the role of linguistic input. A strong association was also found between morphological awareness and reading comprehension, supporting the interdependence of these skills. Overall, the findings underscore the potential of pedagogical translanguaging to foster metalinguistic awareness across languages in multilingual educational contexts. Full article

Our community-based participatory research (CBPR) partnership convened an in-person, bilingual empowerment theory-based community forum to disseminate and translate findings from our trial of Nuestra Comunidad Saludable (Our Healthy Community), a multilevel intervention designed to improve uptake of COVID-19 testing and vaccination among Spanish-speaking Latine communities in North Carolina. The forum brought together community members, healthcare providers, organizational representatives, and academic researchers from across North Carolina. Drawing on findings from the intervention trial, participants engaged in facilitated, structured dialogue to identify community priorities and generate recommendations to advance health equity among Latine communities. Thirty-six participants identified eight priorities: (1) reducing health service gaps and inequities exposed by COVID-19; (2) expanding access to bilingual, culturally responsive mental health services; (3) improving understanding of HIV prevention and treatment; (4) strengthening services for children with disabilities; (5) protecting immigrant rights and ensuring safe access to services; (6) increasing political and social support for Latine health; (7) improving access to trusted, culturally responsive providers and community organizations; and (8) addressing social determinants of health, including employment, housing, and food security. The empowerment-based forum identified community priorities, challenges, and recommendations that can inform practice, intervention, policy, and research, and advance health equity for Spanish-speaking Latine communities. Full article