This study investigates how meaning is constructed through embodied cognitive processes when EFL learners engage with The Old Man and the Sea. Grounded in Barsalou’s Embodied Cognition Theory (1999, 2008), which conceptualizes language comprehension as the reactivation of perceptual, motor, bodily, and affective systems rather than abstract symbol manipulation, the study examines reader responses to a literary text characterized by narrative restraint and minimal explicit emotional description. The participants were undergraduate students from the English Literature Study Program at Universitas Negeri Makassar enrolled in the History of English Language and Literature course (2024 cohort). 142 students across five intact classes (A–E), 57 students (40.1%) selected The Old Man and the Sea as their preferred final-test novel and constituted the focal participant group. Data were collected through an open-ended reflective questionnaire eliciting emotional reactions, imagined experiences, reflective pauses, and lingering thoughts after reading. The data were analyzed using thematic analysis with theory-driven coding, guided by embodied cognition categories including sensorimotor imagery, bodily state, action simulation, and affective response. The findings reveal that students consistently relied on embodied simulation to construct meaning, reporting strong experiences of empathy, loneliness, sadness, and admiration derived from imagining Santiago’s physical struggle, pain, fatigue, and isolation. Meaning emerged through experiential inference, as understanding developed from felt bodily and affective engagement rather than explicit textual cues. The study demonstrates the pedagogical potential of literary reading in EFL contexts to foster affective engagement, empathy development, and reader-centred meaning construction, while extending embodied cognition research to authentic classroom-based literary experiences.
Aims: Interbody fusion stabilizes the spine by promoting bony growth between vertebrae. Large animal models have physiological and biomechanical similarities to human spines that can provide safety and efficacy data before human use. Sheep models are well validated and are the model of choice to improve understanding of fusion processes by allowing post-mortem analyses of tissues unavailable in human studies. They should be consistently designed to allow appropriate translation of the results into clinical practice. This paper investigates the methodological rigour of ovine lumbar interbody fusion (LIF) studies, and proposes recommendations for researchers designing future studies. Methods: PubMed and the Cochrane library were searched up to 20 December 2024. The search terms were 1) lumbar AND ("in vivo" OR "animal model") AND "fusion" AND (interbody OR cage OR anterior) and 2) (lumbar AND ("in vivo" OR "animal model") AND (spine OR intervertebral disc) AND (sheep OR ovine) AND fusion). Results: A total of 323 papers were identified; 48 studies were included after rejection of non-spinal references, duplicates, and non-English-language papers. Data regarding 993 animals and 1,668 fusion levels were examined. Animal ages varied from six months to nine years. Cages were used in 88% of studies, with a wide range of sizes. The commonest assessments included radiography, histology, and mechanical testing. The in-life phase of the studies varied from one week to three years. High risk of bias was evident in all papers, especially considering 1) treatment allocation sequences, 2) housing randomization, 3) blinding of caregivers, and 4) outcome assessment randomization. Conclusion: This review demonstrates variability in the design of ovine LIF studies, highlights features likely to limit the translatability of results into clinical practice (sheep age and interbody cage size), shows high risk of bias in the published literature, and makes recommendations for future studies. Cite this article: Bone Joint Res 2026;15(1):58–72.
The study aimed to find out the influence of Quizizz as a learning media towards student learning motivation in English learning among tenth grade students at MAN 1 Surakarta during the 2023/2024 academic year. A quantitative method was used with a One Group PretestPosttest design, with 26 students selected through random sampling method. Data was collected through pre-test, post-test, and questionnaire. The researcher used a paired sample t-test formula and SPSS 16 application to analyze the data. The results showed a significant influence of Quizizz on student motivation in English learning. The t-test resulted in a tcount value of 37,787, which was greater than the ttable at a 5% significance level of 2,060. Therefore, the null hypothesis (Ho) was rejected and the alternative hypothesis (Ha) was accepted. The study highlights the importance of using Quizizz as a learning media for English learning among tenth grade students. Keywords: Quizizz, Learning Media, Learning Motivation, Learning English.
Al Bhed is a fictional language featured as part of a minigame within Square Enix’s video game Final Fantasy X (2001). By collecting items scattered throughout the game world, players gradually learn to decipher sentences written and spoken in Al Bhed. Like all other textual content in Final Fantasy X, the Al Bhed language had to be translated when the game was released internationally in English, French, German, Italian, and Spanish, and later in Chinese and Korean. However, because the Al Bhed system was not designed with multilingual translation in mind, players who were neither English‑ nor Japanese‑speaking could not experience the mechanic as originally intended. Their ability to fully understand both narrative and gameplay elements was therefore diminished. This article examines how the Al Bhed mechanic functions and why it was bound to encounter difficulties in a multilingual context—especially in languages that are neither alphabetic nor syllabic, such as Chinese and Korean. Localizing Al Bhed required altering, or “cheating,” the rules underlying the original mechanic. Acknowledging this dilemma, the article proposes ways to improve such mechanics and argues that localization into multiple languages should be integrated from the very start of the game design process. Localization doesn’t solely concern game content but also game mechanics.
Abstract Multilingual classrooms are a common reality in Indian schools, where students often learn in a language different from their home tongue. With rising internal migration and the aspirational value of English, many schools have adopted an immersion model where English (Language 2) becomes the primary instructional medium. This shift has raised concerns about students' conceptual understanding, especially in mathematics, a subject demanding high cognitive engagement. To address this, the study explores a bilingual mathematics instruction model integrating Kannada (Language 1) and English (Language 2) within the Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) framework, adapted for the Indian context. Researchers developed an innovative five-pillar pedagogical model comprising: (1) Dual Language Input, (2) Visual and Multimodal Support, (3) Contextualized Vocabulary Instruction, (4) Collaborative Meaning-Making, and (5) Reflective Assessment Cycles. This approach aims to offer both cognitive scaffolds and linguistic support to foster deeper conceptual understanding. An experimental study was conducted in six schools across three districts in Karnataka, involving 240 middle school students. The intervention featured bilingual instruction using the proposed model. Results showed a statistically significant improvement in students’ conceptual understanding compared to monolingual English instruction. This study adds to the growing evidence supporting bilingual education in content areas. It emphasizes leveraging students' linguistic resources, aligns with NEP 2020's focus on mother tongue-based multilingual education, and presents a replicable model for bilingual mathematics instruction.
Are adult L2 learners sensitive to grammatical gender during L2 processing? Most previous research has examined learners of L2s like Spanish with L1 English, a language lacking grammatical gender. Less is known about how sensitivity to grammatical gender develops in L2 learners with a gendered L1. This study investigates how L1 Polish learners of L2 German process grammatical gender within the noun phrase, focusing on the role of congruency factors and L2 proficiency. Polish and German both have a three-gender system (masculine, feminine, neuter) but differ in lexical gender congruency. Furthermore, while both languages mark gender on adjectives (structurally congruent), only German marks it on prenominal articles (structurally incongruent).
Two primed lexical decision tasks were conducted. Experiment 1 tested correctly vs. incorrectly gender-marked adjectives and manipulated the semantic congruency of adjective-noun pairs. Experiment 2 tested correctly vs. incorrectly inflected articles and manipulated lexical gender congruency. The results showed clear sensitivity to structurally congruent gender marking (adjectives) but not to incongruent marking (articles), regardless of semantic congruency, lexical gender congruency, or L2 proficiency. These findings suggest that structural congruency with L1 plays a primary role in shaping L2 learners’ sensitivity to grammatical gender, while lexical and semantic factors are less influential.
When, in 1926, the renowned Edwardian poet and novelist Vita Sackville-West (1892-1962) travelled to Iran to visit her husband, Harold Nicolson, who was then serving as a diplomat in Teheran, she could not have imagined how disconnected her image of Persia was from reality. Despite her surprise and disappointment regarding some aspects of the country, Sackville-West’s Passenger to Teheran conveys a fantasized image of Persia. This paper aims to show that her text is influenced by inherited prejudices that are responsible for her picturing Persia as a land of exotic and romantic adventures. Instead of relying on historical facts, she deliberately invites fiction into her travelogue. Hence, despite the linear structure of the travelogue, the writer’s Edwardian representation of Persia is constantly shifted and pushed aside by the reality of life there. Building on Edward Said’s theories, this paper argues that Sackville-West’s subjective approach to her travelogue and her use of fictional elements contribute to the persistence of a mythical image of Persia despite the emergence of shifting lines and reliable information about the country.
Siddig Ibrahim Abdelwahab, Manal Mohamed Elhassan Taha, Abdalbasit Adam Mariod
et al.
Research on camel milk and urine (CMUR) has gained significant attention because of its nutritional and medicinal applications. The aim of this study was to conduct a bibliometric analysis of the CMUR from 1947 to 2023. Following PRISMA rules, the Scopus database was used to extract 1338 English-language studies, which were analyzed using Scopus Analytics, Bibliometrix, and VOSviewer. The findings indicated that 7.78% of studies focused on camel urine within the CMUR domain. The analysis showed a steady increase in the number of publications over 77 years (R-squared = 0.8308). The CMUR encompasses a wide range of research disciplines, with particular emphasis on the agricultural and medical fields. Saudi Arabia is the top producer of CMUR, with the Journal of Camel Practice and Research being the most prolific source. King Saud University contributed 103 documents to the CMUR, making it the most prolific institution globally. The co-word analysis identified seven prominent research themes within the CMUR, which can be further categorized into four distinct clusters. Notably, ‘Probiotics’, ‘Anti-inflammatory’, and ‘Diabetes’ emerged as trending subjects. The analysis of the CMUR yielded significant insights into the present research trends, identified gaps in the existing knowledge, and provided valuable recommendations for future investigations.
Over the last decade, analyses of Scotland’s historic global diasporas have incorporated more pronounced conversations on how Scotland’s current political, social, and economic contexts are rooted in the legacies of the British Empire. While this has produced narratives highlighting Scotland’s key role in imperial expansion, the resonance of this in establishing and perpetuating systems of white oppression are less widely addressed in Scotland’s consciousness of its own identity. Through consideration of how architecture’s cultural analogies reflect and represent Imperial ideologies, this paper will explore the resonance of architectural urban discourse funded by the outputs of the British Empire. It will discuss how an architecturally focused reading of our built environment can clearly recognise the systemic legacies of colonialism and imperialism within our urban realm, and further enhance inclusive narratives of Scotland’s heritage. This will highlight how a more nuanced approach to reading the historic built environment is necessary to challenge established current authorised heritage discourse of white male histories. It will demonstrate the function of the built environment in telling stories of Scotland’s prominent role in Empire and how this supports a human-rights based approach to heritage analysis.
History (General) and history of Europe, English language
Kedir Hussein Abegaz, Dube Jara, Trhas Tadesse
et al.
Background Maternal morbidity and mortality remain critical public health challenges in Ethiopia with limited evidence on the effectiveness of interventions and health promotion strategies. A scoping review of the existing literature on maternal morbidity and mortality interventions and health promotion in Ethiopia can provide a comprehensive overview of the current evidence, identify research gaps and establish a framework for successful maternal morbidity and mortality interventions.Objective The systematic review seeks to assess the existing literature on maternal morbidity and mortality interventions in Ethiopia to develop an evidence-based framework for effective interventions.Method The methodology for this study adheres to the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis Protocols guidelines for systematic review protocol. A comprehensive search strategy will be devised, in compliance with the highly sensitive search guidelines of Cochrane, which will involve using both snowball methods to identify relevant articles and searching electronic databases using specific key search terms. The following databases will be searched for studies to be included in the systematic review: MEDLINE (via PubMed), Embase, Scopus, Google Scholar, Web of Science, Science Direct and African Journals Online (AJOL).The search will be restricted to English language publications starting from January 2010 to May 2023. In a comprehensive review process, independent reviewers will meticulously assess titles, abstracts and full texts of studies, ensuring alignment with predetermined inclusion and exclusion criteria at each stage of selection.Quality evaluation instruments appropriate for each research design will be used to assess the quality of the selected studies. The findings from the included studies will be analysed and summarised using a narrative synthesis approach.Ethics and dissemination Since this systematic review is based on the reviewing of existing literature and will not involve the collection of primary data, ethical approval is not required. The results will be disseminated through peer-reviewed publication and conference presentations.PROSPERO registration number CRD42023420990.
Darius Luke Lameire MD, Hassaan Abdel Khalik MMI, MD, Christopher Del Balso MBBS, MSc, FRCSC
et al.
Background: There is currently a scarcity of information and consensus for transportal (arthroscopic or fluoroscopic) joint preparation during tibiotalocalcaneal (TTC) fusion, and therefore this review aims to summarize the available techniques and to evaluate the outcomes after this procedure. Methods: A systematic electronic search of MEDLINE, EMBASE, and Web of Science was performed for all English-language studies published from their inception to April 4, 2022. All articles addressing arthroscopy in TTC nailing were eligible for inclusion. The PRISMA Checklist guided the reporting and data abstraction. Descriptive statistics are presented. Result: A total of 5 studies with 65 patients were included for analysis. All studies used arthroscopic portals for tibiotalar and subtalar joint preparation (in 4 studies) prior to TTC nailing, with 4 studies using an arthroscope and 1 study using fluoroscopy. The overall major complication rate was 13.8%; however, there was only 1 instance of deep wound infection (1.5%) and 4 instances of surgical site infections (6.2%). Full fusion was achieved in 86% of patients with an average time to fusion of 12.9 weeks. The mean American Orthopaedic Foot & Ankle Society (AOFAS) ankle-hindfoot score preoperatively was 34.0 and postoperatively was 70.5. Conclusion: Although limited by the number of studies, transportal joint preparation during TTC nail ankle fusion is associated with good rates of complications and successful fusion. Level of Evidence: Level III, systematic review of Level III-IV studies.
Classroom-based language assessment (CBLA) in the Indonesian context has become more significant since the shift of the assessment model from summative based assessment (Ujian Nasional or the final exam) to formative-based assessment (Asesmen Kompetensi Minimum (AKM); therefore, teachers need to develop their classroom-based language assessment literacy (CBLAL). The model places a greater emphasis on students' learning outcomes in class rather than final test scores. This study aims to examine the CBLAL level of experienced and novice EFL teachers, their perceptions of CBLAL, and their needs for CBLAL training. Quantitative and qualitative data were used in conjunction with a case study research design. The CBLAL questionnaire, adopted from Lan and Fan's work (2019), collected quantitative data from 55 EFL teachers. Meanwhile, the qualitative data were collected from four of them (novice and experienced) in the interview sessions. The CBLAL levels of 55 teachers are between functional and procedural-conceptual literacy levels. Both experienced (ETs) and novice teachers (NTs) could grasp fundamental principles in language assessment and can use them in the classroom. Although the ETs have higher levels, there is no significant difference in CBLAL levels between ETs and NTs. The study also revealed that the teachers' understandings of technical skills and language pedagogy were among the highest compared to their knowledge of theories and principles on language assessments. However, they indicated that still require professional development (PD) in CBLAL, despite their functional and procedural-conceptual literacy. The current study has pedagogical implications for both ETs and NTs. They should actively participate in various professional development activities, focusing on classroom evaluation.
Special aspects of education, Language. Linguistic theory. Comparative grammar
In “Introduction to these paintings” and “Art and Morality,” Lawrence suggests that, when looking at visual art, our tendency to what he calls “kodak-vision” (one indicator of dominant mental consciousness), prevents our appreciation of new perspectives, leading us to condemn the art rather than change our viewpoint. In looking at Lawrence’s response to Cézanne’s apples this paper will consider the role visual art can play in developing a greater reverence towards the non-human, and will also look at some examples of Lawrence’s prose and poetry that shows the same intent. This will lead to the suggestion that Lawrence’s ideas about the non-human can be seen as a prototype for what we now recognise as ecological thinking.
This article reports on an empirical investigation into language-specific factors and strategies pertaining to syntactic asymmetry in English>Arabic simultaneous interpreting. It discusses the disparity between subject-verb-object (S-initial) and verb-subject-object (V-initial) structures when complicated by long and/or complex initial subjects in the source language (SL). These types of complex initial structures in the subject position significantly delay the verb that is normally needed to start sentences in Arabic. I hypothesise that professionals are more likely to follow SL structures to cope with complex initial subjects and avoid memory overload, information loss or failure. I propose that they do so using what I refer to as the strategy of not waiting for the verb, utilising Arabic word-order flexibility which offers nominal clause structures similar to the English S-initial structure. Three English speeches from real-life conference settings were analysed. The analysis focused on English sentences with complex initial subjects and their different renditions in multiple authentic Arabic simultaneous interpretations. The results of the analysis and fidelity assessment supported my hypothesis in relation to strategy and “language-pair specificity”, indicating a preference for “form-based processing”. The analysis also supported the difficulty of interpreting complex initial subjects. The strategy of not waiting for the verb was found to contribute to greater completeness and accuracy, albeit the latter to a lesser extent. It can be proposed as a complementary strategy to ‘waiting’, ‘lagging’, ‘restructuring’, ‘anticipation’, and so on. This approach could enhance (would-be) interpreters’ repertoire of potentially useful options, particularly when other approaches may lead to memory overload, omission or information failure.
This two-part research project analyzes U.S. foreign policy during the Ukraine Crisis from the viewpoint of loyalty to democracy. By applying the standard expected of loyal opposition parties to the U.S., the foreign policy approach taken is shown to have been disloyal to Ukraine’s fragile democracy, as it contributed to an undemocratic transition of power in the form of a coup d'état. Ultimately, the failure of the U.S. to remain loyal to Ukraine’s democratic process (the way a “loyal opposition state” would have) is explained by the Obama administration’s liberal imperialist approach to foreign policy, whose first loyalty was to U.S. interests, not Ukrainian political sovereignty.
Machine translation, which will be used widely in human-computer interaction services to Internet of Things (IoT), is a key technology in artificial intelligence field. This paper presents a minimum Bayes-risk (MBR) phrase table pruning method for pivot-based statistical machine translation (SMT). The SMT system requires a great amount of bilingual data to build a high-performance translation model. For some language pairs, such as Chinese-English, massive bilingual data are available on the web. However, for most language pairs, large-scale bilingual data are hard to obtain. Pivot-based SMT is proposed to solve the data scarcity problem: it introduces a pivot language to bridge the source language and the target language. Therefore, a source-target translation model based on well-trained source-pivot and pivot-target translation models can be derived with the pivot-based approach. However, due to the ambiguities of the pivot language, source and target phrases with different meanings may be wrongly matched. Consequently, the derived source-target phrase table may contain incorrect phrase pairs. To alleviate this problem, we apply the MBR method to prune the phrase table. The MBR pruning method removes the phrase pairs with the lowest risk from the phrase table. Experimental results on Europarl data show that the proposed method can both reduce the size of phrase tables and improve the performance of translations. This study also gives a useful reference to many IoT research field and smart web services.
Abstract Background Recent studies have indicated an association between hypoxia inducible factor-1 alpha (HIF-1α) expression and poor prognosis in patients with oral squamous cell carcinoma (OSCC); however, definitive evidence of this association is yet to be obtained. We performed a meta-analysis to evaluate the association of HIF-1α expression with clinicopathological characteristics and overall survival (OS) of patients with OSCC. Methods A literature search for relevant studies published in English language as of February 05, 2016, was performed on PubMed, Web of Science, and EMBASE databases. Eighteen studies with a combined study population of 1474 patients with OSCC are included in the meta-analysis. Odds ratio (OR) or hazard ratio (HR) with 95% confidence interval (CI) was calculated using random-effects model or fixed-effects model. Results HIF-1α overexpression was significantly associated with larger tumor size (OR = 2.28, 95% CI = 1.49–3.50, P = 0.017), advanced TNM stage (OR = 2.29, 95% CI = 1.50–3.49, P = 0.158), and lymph node metastasis (OR = 2.05, 95% CI = 1.19–3.53, P < 0.001), but not with poor differentiation (OR = 1.21, 95% CI = 0.55–2.64, P = 0.024). These results demonstrated an association between HIF-1α expression and biological behavior of OSCC. On pooled analyses, high expression of HIF-1α was associated with worse OS (HR = 1.70, 95% CI = 1.10–2.61, P < 0.001). On subgroup analyses, overexpression of HIF-1α was significantly associated with poor prognosis in Asian population (HR = 2.33, 95% CI = 1.72–3.15, P = 0.862). Conclusions Our findings demonstrate an association of HIF-1α overexpression with tumor size, tumor stage, lymph node metastasis, and overall survival. HIF-1α could be an independent prognostic marker in patients with OSCC.
Surgery, Neoplasms. Tumors. Oncology. Including cancer and carcinogens