The acquisition of Mandarin Chinese, one of the most important and widely spoken languages in the world today, is the focus of this innovative study. It describes the rise of Chinese as a global language and the many challenges and opportunities associated with learning it. The collaborative, multiple-case study and cross-case analysis is presented from three distinct but complementary theoretical and analytic perspectives: linguistic, sociocultural, and narrative. The book reveals fascinating dimensions of Chinese language learning based on vivid first-person accounts (with autobiographical narratives included in the book) of adults negotiating not only their own and others' language and literacy learning, but also their identities, communities, and trajectories as users of Chinese.
Almost half a century ago, policy leaders issued the Declaration of Alma Ata and embraced the promise of health for all through primary health care (PHC). That vision has inspired generations. Countries throughout the world—rich and poor—have struggled to build health systems anchored in strong PHC where they were needed most. The world has waited long enough for high-performing PHC to become more than an aspiration; it is now time to deliver. The COVID-19 (Coronavirus) pandemic has facilitated the reckoning for that shared failure—but it has also created a once-in-a-generation opportunity for transformational health system changes. The pandemic has shown policy makers and ordinary citizens why health systems matter and what happens when they fail. Bold reforms now can prepare health systems for future crises and bring goals such as universal health coverage within reach. PHC holds the key to these transformations. To fulfill that promise, however, the walk has to finally match the talk. Walking the Talk: Reimagining Primary Health Care after COVID-19 outlines how to get there. It charts an agenda to reimagined, fit-for-purpose PHC. It asks three questions about health systems reform built around PHC: Why? What? How? The characteristics of high-performing PHC are precisely those that are most critical for managing the pressures coming to bear on health systems in the post-COVID world. The challenges include future outbreaks and other emergent threats, as well as long-term structural trends that are reshaping the environments in which systems operate in noncrisis times. Walking the Talk highlights three sets of megatrends that will increasingly affect health systems in the coming decades: • Demographic and epidemiological shifts • Changes in technology • Citizens’ evolving expectations for health care. Reimagined PHC systems will be equipped through optimized system design, financing, and delivery to ensure high-quality services, care to address patients’ needs, fairness and accountability, and resilient systems.
This Element demonstrates how and why the alignment method can advance measurement fairness in developmental science. It explains its application to multi-category items in an accessible way, offering sample code and demonstrating an R package that facilitates interpretation of such items' multiple thresholds. It features the implications for group mean differences when differences in the thresholds between categories are ignored because items are treated as continuous, using an example of intersectional groups defined by assigned sex and race/ethnicity. It demonstrates the interpretation of item-level partial non-invariance results and their implications for group-level differences and encourages substantive theorizing regarding measurement fairness.
Although there are several measures of fiscal transparency, none provides satisfactory information on certain issues of macroeconomic relevance, including whether fiscal data are available for all of general government, whether the government reports a balance sheet, and whether spending and revenue are reported on a cash or accrual basis. Drawing on government finance statistics reported to the IMF, this paper presents a new database of fiscal transparency for 186 countries in 2003–13 and derives from it indices of the overall comprehensiveness of fiscal statistics as well as specific indices of the coverage of public institutions, fiscal flows, and fiscal stocks, respectively. It finds evidence of gradual improvement, most notably in the coverage of institutions, but most countries’ reporting remains far from comprehensive
Wang Zhaojun was one of four women in ancient China who were famous for their beauty. She lived in the Han Dynasty and was sent to live in the capital as a possible future wife for the emperor. However, instead of marrying the emperor, she was made a princess so that she could marry the king of the Xiongnu People to bring peace between the two countries. The Xiongnu People were a nomadic people to the north of China, famous for their horsemanship. Her life was very difficult and after her husband died, she asked permission to return to China. However, she was denied and told to stay in the Xiongnu country to marry one of the King's male relatives. She once again got married and kept the peace between the two countries. Since her death there have been hundreds of poems written about her and there's a big tomb and statue of her near Hohhot, Inner Mongolia today.
School principals are charged with complex responsibilities that can include developing a school vision and culture, supporting teacher effectiveness, managing challenges and crises, communicating with the greater community, and more. However, recent research and surveys of school administrators indicate that principal preparation programs do not adequately prepare graduates to cope with school realities. In response to concerns about the state of initial principal preparation, The Wallace Foundation established the University Principal Preparation Initiative (UPPI), a four-year effort to redesign seven universities' principal preparation programs according to evidence-based principles and practices. Each university collaborates on the redesign with high-need school districts and a state partner, and is supported by a mentor program. The report summarized in this document focuses on the implementation of UPPI in its first year, from fall 2016 to fall 2017. The authors report on UPPI progress and identify cross-cutting themes in the UPPI implementation effort that can help other university principal preparation programs and their partners undertake their own principal preparation system improvement efforts.
With this seventh O'Neil Ford Monograph the O'Neil Ford Chair in Architecture at The University of Texas at Austin is finally placing a key example of modern architecture to its rightful position in history. This volume includes essays, reproductions of archival material belonging to the Eileen Gray Archive of the National Museum of Ireland and the Eileen Gray Archive of the Victoria & Albert Museum, some published for the first time, photographs and numerous scale drawings of reconstructed designs of items in E.1027. The compact white elongated vacation residence cryptically called E.1027 is perched on the rocky coast of the Côte d'Azur. To this day, it draws the views of passers-by along the Moyenne Corniche, the narrow and winding coastal road along the Mediterranean Sea. The Anglo-Irish designer Eileen Gray (1878-1976) bought the site, paid for the construction and, as her first foray into architecture, designed it with assistance of her close friend at the time, Jean Badovici, to whom Gray gave the site, building and contents. E.1027 was a manifesto, the kernel of Gray's subsequent social and architectural projects for vacation and cultural centers. For Gray E.1027 was an experiment with entirely new concepts of both compact and expansive spatial relations, and not simply the more well-known aspects of furniture design such as the legendary eponymous circular adjustable occasional table.
A young New Yorker teaches English to a Chinese dissident in this “heartbreaking and uplifting” novel of love, loss, and language (Publishers Weekly). Aysha is a twenty-two-year-old plagued by guilt and anxiety ever since her parents’ divorce. But after suffering severe symptoms, she’s now focused on recovering and on teaching her English as a Second Language students. Then a young man named Da Ge joins her ESL class. A dissident with a painful past, he has fled China after the Tianenmen Square massacre, and Aysha finds herself falling irresistibly in love, in spite of the language barrier—and often, the emotional barrier—between them. When he asks her to marry him for the sake of a visa, she cannot say no. It is a relationship that will bring both great joy and great sorrow—and will take Aysha to places she never imagined. A winner of the ForeWord Magazine Book of the Year Award, this is an insightful and emotional novel by the author of Big Girl Small and the memoir Foreign Babes in Beijing. “Her writing gleams with beautifully realized descriptions of people, places, and encounters.” —Time Out
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