No abstract

The study investigated the perceptions of students learning French as a foreign language in a Malaysian public university. The specific objectives were to examine: (1) the self-reported French language proficiency level; and (2) their perceptions of their listening, speaking, reading and writing skills in French. Questionnaire data were collected from 80 undergraduates enrolled in French Levels 1 and 2 courses. The analysis showed that language learners from Level 1 and Level 2 rated themselves as having fair proficiency level when they made their rating without comparing themselves to a French native speaker. However, when they compared themselves with a native French speaker, more of them rated their proficiency as poor. The results showed that the relative difficulty of mastering language skills in French, from the most difficult to the easiest, are writing, speaking, reading and listening. Similar results were found for Level 1 and Level 2 French but the undergraduates struggled with writing and speaking at Level 2 more than at Level 1 because of an increased vocabulary range, greater grammatical complexity and longer texts. The results suggest that the difficulties are not much in comprehension of the language but more towards expressing themselves whether in speaking or writing.

The study examined the impact of the national language policy on the language use of three main ethnic groups in the Malaysian state of Sarawak. The data analyzed was based on a sociolinguistic survey on language use in six domains that involved 937 Malay, Chinese and Iban adolescents from three major towns in Sarawak. The results showed that the use of Bahasa Malaysia exceeded English usage for all three ethnic groups, showing the success of compulsory education in the national language. However, the language planning has greater impact on the Iban than on the Chinese who are shifting away from the ethnic languages of the Chinese sub-groups to Mandarin Chinese. The availability of an alternative standard language with international standing which also functions as a symbol of cultural solidarity compromises the impact of the national language policy.

The study examined the modes of value transfer from the founder to successors in Chinese family businesses. A case study was conducted involving interview with 19 members of 12 family businesses in business sectors including trading, shipping, timber, newspaper printing, entertainment, and construction. The results showed that value transfer begins even before the founder's descendants start full-time work in the family business, leading to internalization of values. When the founder's descendants begin working in the family business, explicit teaching and modeling of values occur, which reinforces values observed earlier. In some cases, values are reinforced through management policies that document the founder's values and best practices in conducting business. In most cases, the successors are scaffolded into how values guide business decisions when they work full-time in the family business. The findings offer novel information on the modes of value transfer in the Chinese family business.

The phase field model has become increasingly popular due to its underlying physics for describing two-phase interface dynamics. In this case, several lattice Boltzmann multiphase models have been constructed from the perspective of the phase field theory. All these models are composed of two distribution functions: one is used to solve the interface tracking equation and the other is adopted to solve the Navier-Stokes equations. It has been reported that to match the target equation, an additional interfacial force should be included in these models, but the scale of this force is found to be contradictory with the theoretical analysis. To solve this problem, in this paper an improved lattice Boltzmann model based on the Cahn-Hilliard phase-field theory is proposed for simulating two-phase flows. By introducing a novel and simple force distribution function, the improved model solves the problem that the scale of an additional interfacial force is not consistent with the theoretical one. The Chapman-Enskog analysis shows that the present model can accurately recover the Cahn-Hilliard equation for interface capturing and the incompressible Navier-Stokes equations, and the calculation of macroscopic velocity is also more efficient. A series of classic two-phase flow examples, including static drop test, droplets emerge, spinodal decomposition and Rayleigh-Taylor instability is simulated numerically. It is found that the numerical solutions agree well with the analytical solutions or the existing results, which verifies the accuracy and feasibility of the proposed model. In addition, the Rayleigh-Taylor instability with the imposed random perturbation is also simulated, where the influence of the Reynolds number on the evolution of the phase interface is analyzed. It is found that for the case of the high Reynolds number, a row of “mushroom” shape appears at the fluid interface in the early stages of evolution. At the later stages of evolution, the fluid interface presents a very complex chaotic topology. Unlike the case of the high Reynolds number, the fluid interface becomes relatively smooth at low Reynolds numbers, and no chaotic topology is observed at any of the later stages of evolution.