Optimizing computer-based spelling exercises

Reitsma, P. [Promotor

Finding a balance between being professional and being personal. Experiences of seven psychotherapists.

The aim of this study was to explore factors psychotherapists believe influence their choice of theory, method, and techniques when doing therapeutic work. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with six certified psychotherapists and one psychotherapist in training. The interviews were analyzed using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA), a qualitative methodology which explores how individuals make sense of their experiences. With the help of that methodology, we identified four main themes: Congruence, Responsibility, Context, and Flexibility. Our results indicated that practical and theoretical knowledge needs to be synchronized with the individual practitioner’s basic personality. This enables the psychotherapists to experience themselves as professionals, as well as being their authentic self. When the professional and personal identity is joined together, a space is created for greater flexibility in the use of methods and techniques. The study also indicated the existence of a habitus among the psychotherapists embodied in a common language, derived from professional training, supervision and collegial discussions. There was also a consensus among the psychotherapists that they, as professionals, need to be independent and autonomous when doing therapeutic work. Permissive and supportive organizations were seen as an important asset, as well as access to colleagues and networks. The participants in the present study characterized their attitudes to clinical work using keywords such as curiosity, presence, and co-creation. It is suggested that therapists constantly walk a fine line between being an expert and at the same time bracketing their professional knowledge to meet the needs of their clients. A main limitation of the present study was that almost all participants belonged to one therapeutic orientation within the field of psychotherapy (family therapy)

A Multi-Layered Corpus of Namibian English

Zähres F. A Multi-Layered Corpus of Namibian English. In: Vandekerckhove R, Fišer D, Hilte L, eds. Proceedings of the 6th Conference on Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC) and Social Media Corpora (CMC-corpora 2018). Antwerpen: University of Antwerp; 2018.English was declared the sole official language in Namibia upon its independence in 1990, although the country has never been under British rule. Even in 2011, only 3.4% of Namibians reported that they speak English as their primary home language (cf. NSA 2012). English does, however, play a major role in official and inter-ethnic communication in Namibia and is favored especially by young Namibians born and raised after independence (cf. Stell 2014a; 2014b; 2016). Research on Namibian English is still in its infancy and until now, the studies are based on questionnaire data, sociolinguistic interviews, and data from experimental research designs (cf. Buschfeld & Kautzsch 2014; Kautzsch & Schröder 2016; Schröder & Schneider fc.). The present investigation adds to this field by providing a data source of naturally-occurring language that is particularly relevant for studying sociophonetic aspects of this emerging variety of English. This project envisions at compiling a multi-layered corpus containing YouTube video data of Namibian YouTubers, which is complemented with written data from the comment sections and further social media accounts of the respective YouTubers as well as qualitative interview data and metadata consisting of basic sociolinguistic variables. This collection of CMC data can, on the one hand, be analyzed using acoustic phonetic methods, but its digital ethnographic nature also allows an approach to qualitative analysis that is driven by key notions of third-wave sociolinguistics (cf. Eckert 2012). Such a corpus therefore combines three fields of study, CMC, sociolinguistics, and phonetics, in a completely new way. Third-wave sociolinguistic studies are usually based on ethnographies conducted in small communities, and the data collected in such settings are most often not usable for studying phonetic and phonological aspects of language production. Researchers working in sociophonetics have usually supplemented ethnographic data with audio-recorded sociolinguistic interviews (cf. e.g. Drager 2009). By incorporating CMC data into a sociolinguistic study, the complete dependence on interview data for sociophonetic investigation can be circumvented and naturally occurring language can be used as an additional data source. Also, by using language data from multiple contexts, both naturally occurring and based on interviews, sociolinguistic ethnography can be expanded to use digital forms of communication. This is especially relevant for the study of Namibian English, as outer and expanding circle varieties of English are generally under-researched compared to inner-circle varieties such as British or American English. We know only little about how language is used in digital contexts by young Namibians, and the combination of CMC research with cutting-edge sociolinguistic approaches will help to shed light on this question. I will present the pilot corpus, which consists of 300 minutes of YouTube videos by 15 self-identified Namibian content creators including orthographic transcriptions of the language used in the videos as well as the comment sections of the respective videos (as of 31st July 2018). I will provide two case studies to test the usability of this database: The first one is a sociophonetic case study, which analyzes the audio layer and investigates whether the NURSE-WORK vowel split described in recent work based on sociolinguistic interviews with Namibians (cf. Kautzsch, Schröder & Zähres 2017) is also found in the CMC data. This is significant because Namibian English has traditionally been aligned with South African Englishes but may now be establishing itself as an independent variety that diverges from South African Englishes. The NURSE-WORK split will be analyzed with acoustic phonetic methods, using standard programs and procedures from that field, in particular Praat (Boersma & Weenink 2018) and R. The second case study will also make use of the other layers of the corpus by investigating features identified as typical for NamE in Kautzsch (in prep.), a study using the online newspaper corpus CNamOn. I will compare the use of bare infinitive constructions containing go and between CNamOn and the various layers of the present corpus. The results confirm previously observed features in naturally-occurring data and the ongoing nativization process of English in Namibia

Risk Assessment for Patients with Chronic Respiratory Conditions in the Context of the SARS-CoV-2 Pandemic Statement of the German Respiratory Society with the Support of the German Association of Chest Physicians

Assessing the risk for specific patient groups to suffer from severe courses of COVID-19 is of major importance in the current SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. This review focusses on the risk for specific patient groups with chronic respiratory conditions, such as patients with asthma, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, cystic fibrosis (CF), sarcoidosis, interstitial lung diseases, lung cancer, sleep apnea, tuberculosis, neuromuscular diseases, a history of pulmonary embolism, and patients with lung transplants. Evidence and recommendations are detailed in exemplary cases. While some patient groups with chronic respiratory conditions have an increased risk for severe courses of COVID-19, an increasing number of studies confirm that asthma is not a risk factor for severe COVID-19. However, other risk factors such as higher age, obesity, male gender, diabetes, cardiovascular diseases, chronic kidney or liver disease, cerebrovascular and neurological disease, and various immunodeficiencies or treatments with immunosuppressants need to be taken into account when assessing the risk for severe COVID-19 in patients with chronic respiratory diseases

Spelling pronunciation and visual preview both facilitate learning to spell irregular word

Spelling pronunciations are hypothesized to be helpful in building up relatively stable phonologically underpinned orthographic representations, particularly for learning words with irregular phoneme-grapheme correspondences. In a four-week computer-based training, the efficacy of spelling pronunciations and previewing the spelling patterns on learning to spell loan words in Dutch, originating from French and English, was examined in skilled and less skilled spellers with varying ages. Reading skills were taken into account. Overall, compared to normal pronunciation, spelling pronunciation facilitated the learning of the correct spelling of irregular words, but it appeared to be no more effective than previewing. Differences between training conditions appeared to fade with older spellers. Less skilled young spellers seemed to profit more from visual examination of the word as compared to practice with spelling pronunciations. The findings appear to indicate that spelling pronunciation and allowing a preview can both be effective ways to learn correct spellings of orthographically unpredictable words, irrespective of age or spelling ability. Copyright © 2006 by The International Dyslexia Association®