Rabies is a notoriously underreported and neglected disease of low-income countries. This study aims to estimate the public health and economic burden of rabies circulating in domestic dog ...populations, globally and on a country-by-country basis, allowing an objective assessment of how much this preventable disease costs endemic countries.
We established relationships between rabies mortality and rabies prevention and control measures, which we incorporated into a model framework. We used data derived from extensive literature searches and questionnaires on disease incidence, control interventions and preventative measures within this framework to estimate the disease burden. The burden of rabies impacts on public health sector budgets, local communities and livestock economies, with the highest risk of rabies in the poorest regions of the world. This study estimates that globally canine rabies causes approximately 59,000 (95% Confidence Intervals: 25-159,000) human deaths, over 3.7 million (95% CIs: 1.6-10.4 million) disability-adjusted life years (DALYs) and 8.6 billion USD (95% CIs: 2.9-21.5 billion) economic losses annually. The largest component of the economic burden is due to premature death (55%), followed by direct costs of post-exposure prophylaxis (PEP, 20%) and lost income whilst seeking PEP (15.5%), with only limited costs to the veterinary sector due to dog vaccination (1.5%), and additional costs to communities from livestock losses (6%).
This study demonstrates that investment in dog vaccination, the single most effective way of reducing the disease burden, has been inadequate and that the availability and affordability of PEP needs improving. Collaborative investments by medical and veterinary sectors could dramatically reduce the current large, and unnecessary, burden of rabies on affected communities. Improved surveillance is needed to reduce uncertainty in burden estimates and to monitor the impacts of control efforts.
Drawing on Hyland's (2005) metadiscourse framework, the researchers investigated how two English as a second or foreign language instructors constructed their identity in a teaching philosophy ...statement written for a master's in TESOL (MATESOL) course. Analyses revealed that both instructors employed almost all metadiscourse resources in the model to construct the identity of a competent graduate student and that of a knowledgeable and reflective teacher. In addition, their identity construction reinforced the writing conventions associated with the imagined community (Norton, 2013) of graduate student teachers while also affording them the opportunity to exercise some degree of teacher agency. Findings offer insights into how linguistic resources can be mobilized to construct a strong and unique teaching philosophy statement.
In light of an urgency to examine how codes of ethics influence codes of practice of researchers, coupled with a growing focus on ethical issues in applied linguistic ethnographic work, the author ...examines how ethical decisions were made when conducting a critical ethnographic study in an English-medium secondary school in Singapore.
Language policies generally seek to establish, regulate, and conform linguistic practices – whether explicit or implicit – that occur within an ‘authorized’ domain. While there are multiple levels ...(societal, institutional, and interpersonal) at which such policies are enacted (Hornberger & Johnson, 2007), academic institutions are often significant policy arbiters as they serve as crucial switchboards (Blommaert, 2010; De Costa, 2010) that connect policies at the societal and interpersonal levels. In particular, English medium of instruction (EMI) policies that mandate English as the primary means of academic content delivery have played a pivotal role in enabling universities in countries such as Bangladesh (Rahman & Mehar Singh, 2019), China (e.g., Hu, 2009; Song, 2019; Zhang, 2018), Saudi Arabia (Barnawi, 2018; Phan & Barnawi, 2015), and Vietnam (Phan, 2018) to establish themselves on the world stage and engage with the global community. Even though several scholars (e.g., Coleman, 2006; Jenkins, 2019a; Knight, 2013, 2016; Macaro et al., 2018) have investigated EMI policies across different contexts, the following central question concerning these policies still persists: in what ways has the implementation of EMI policies transformed the higher education sector, and subsequently affected primary social actors, such as students, teachers, and administrators embedded within these shifting contexts? These concerns, we posit, are amplified by the transnational movements of people and institutions (Duff, 2015) and the ever-increasing speed and agility with which TESOL as a field has to respond to the shifting tides of globalization (Barnawi, 2020). Given this conspicuous gap in an ever-evolving English language policy landscape, we set out to critically review previous works that have examined the implementation of EMI policies within a
transnational higher education
(TNHE) context. TNHE is characterized by the transformation of higher education across the globe (Knight, 2013; Kosmützky & Putty, 2016) as Western-based universities export models – driven by a neoliberal agenda to maximize financial profit – through the establishment of overseas branch campuses. In reviewing works that examine TNHE, we aim to stimulate dialogue on this contemporary phenomenon.
Because the current literature on teachers’ emotion labor (EL) mainly focuses on strategies and how EL correlates with relevant factors in the educational context, EL is generally treated as static ...and synchronic. The purpose of this study is to explore two veteran English lecturers’ dynamic and diachronic EL development over the span of nearly two decades of their professional careers in China. Based on qualitative data that included multiple interviews, class observations, teacher reflective notes, student feedback, and institutional documents, the 18-month longitudinal study found that (1) veteran college English lecturers have mixed emotions and pervasive EL throughout their professional development experience, (2) the teachers’ EL habitus has been shaped and reshaped by their life history in personal, relational, institutional, and sociohistorical contexts, and (3) their previous EL experiences have influenced their present EL practice, which in turn tends to predict their future EL preferences. In addition, our findings revealed that effective EL effort, especially in the form of actions combined with deep acting and genuine expression, is critical to the virtuous circle of EL and sustainable professional development of college English teachers. By contrast, ineffective EL effort, particularly the long-term surface acting of depressing negative emotions without eradicating the root causes or changing the unfavorable conditions, can impede the long-term sustainability of teacher development. Based on these findings, we conceptualize teachers’ EL as a contextual and dynamic process that takes the form of spiral circles that teachers encounter throughout their professional life. These spiral circles, we add, can be virtuous or vicious in nature, and can thus either facilitate or undermine, respectively, the sustainability of their professional development. Research implications, limitations, and future directions are also discussed.
By examining how a student from Vietnam used English to interact with her peers in an English-medium secondary school in Singapore, this paper argues for an examination of language and literacy ...development through a cosmopolitan lens. Building on earlier research on cosmopolitanism (e.g., Campano & Ghiso, 2011; Canagarajah, 2013a, 2013b, 2013c; Hansen, 2010; Hull & Stornaiuolo, 2010), I illustrate how a broader understanding of cosmopolitanism in language and literacy education is timely in the wake of contemporary transcultural flows that characterize globalization, the emergence of a neoliberal order in education, and a pressing need to address educational inequities encountered by the growing number of immigrant learners whose home languages may not be valued in classrooms. The data in this paper, which include political speeches, school documents, and classroom interactions, are part of a larger, yearlong critical ethnographic study and are subjected to microethnographic discourse analysis (Bloome & Carter, 2014). Through investigating how local interactional events are linked to broader events in wider Singapore society, I demonstrate how my Vietnamese focal student and her Singaporean peers were able to enact and develop a cosmopolitan outlook. Implications on language and literacy development are also discussed.
Scholarship on language teacher autonomy and agency has demonstrated that both constructs are central components of teacher identity and, hence, teacher performance. However, few studies have ...examined the role of these constructs in language teacher identity, particularly how power mediates their co-constitutive implications for identity construction. Grounded in a poststructural standpoint, this study reports on how institutional power was a key factor in shaping Iranian English language teachers’ autonomy, agency, and identity construction. Drawing on data from narrative frames and semi-structured interviews, we show how institutional power discursively shaped the teachers’ professional performance in three major areas: (1) power as a normative impetus; (2) policies as hierarchical forces; and (3) power as weakening the nexus between autonomy and agency. Our findings reveal that in the space between power and practice, the teachers viewed institutional power as discursively constraining their own personalized understandings and performances. However, the teachers considered the overarching discourse that power bore as positive in helping establish systemic organization. The article closes with implications for teachers, teacher educators, and policymakers in establishing context-specific discourses that positively contribute to institutional and teacher growth.
Educational reforms often precipitate teacher tensions that subsequently impact teacher identity (re)construction. Adopting a community of practice (CoP) framework to examine identity-, belief- and ...emotion-inflected tensions, and drawing on data from five rounds of interviews, our longitudinal case study traced the identity reformation of an English teacher, Lee, as he negotiated an English for Academic Purposes (EAP) reform in China. We found that Lee’s constant teacher identity conflicts were intertwined with tensions that arose as he negotiated his (1) beliefs about students’ needs and acknowledgment of their language incompetency, and (2) reform-positive emotions and self-negative emotions. Our findings revealed, however, that these tensions were mediated through the assistance afforded by his CoP, which, on the one hand, effectively scaffolded community members’ teaching practices and helped ease the tensions that emerged but, on the other hand, created space for multiple voices to coexist, make adjustments, and thus subsequently achieve reconciliation. Highlighting the role of CoP in teacher development, our findings help advance the teacher identity research agenda by taking a holistic view on work-related tensions, and thus bear implications for educational reformers, teacher educators, and university administrators.
In this interview piece, Peter De Costa and Matt Coss invite Constant Leung, LAQ co-editor (2017-2021) and active member of the LAQ editorial team since its inception in 2004, to highlight key ...milestones within the field of language assessment in general, and as they relate to major accomplishments of the journal. In addition, readers will also gain insight into anticipated developments within language assessment that extend contemporary trends, and thus advance the language assessment research agenda.
A limited ability to pursue postsecondary education often leaves English language learners (ELLs) with a gamut of negative emotional experiences. Using an emotionally oriented framework to guide our ...study, this article focuses on the experiences of two female South Asian students who graduated from different U.S. high schools. We explored what emotions they encountered during their college preparation process and what factors shaped such emotions. Findings from our in-depth interviews revealed that our participants encountered negative emotions such as worry, discouragement, indignation, envy, confusion, and intimidation that were related to their ELL identity. We also demonstrate that it is not only their limited proficiency in English that hinders the ELLs from attending four-year colleges but also their families' economic status, a lack of awareness of college preparation courses, and a lack of assistance with their test preparation that contribute to the emergence of negative emotions.
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