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This paper presents findings from an investigation of nature-based practices, from the perspectives of 10 academics/educators from six nations. Participants engaged in a focus group exploring the prevalence and inclusion of nature in social work practice and education. While the study focused on individual members' experiences and perspectives, the findings highlight important context-specific factors for including nature within social work to reconnect humans with nature for health, well-being, healing, and justice. An Integrative Environmental Model for social work is proposed to assist future practice and education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This corpus-based study examines the widely-used discourse marker well in Chinese-speaking learners' speech and compares its frequencies in native speaker data and Swedish learners. While Swedish learners overuse well, Chinese-speaking learners (predominantly at the upper-intermediate level) significantly underuse it. The positions and functions of well are further examined using a functional framework. One-fourth of the Chinese-speaking learners who use well manipulate its positions in utterances in a similar way to native speakers. In terms of functions, well is employed for speech management much more frequently than for attitudinal purposes. The greater use of the former does not generally create negative effects, but the under-representation of the latter may suggest that Chinese-speaking learners sound too direct in certain contexts. The paper concludes by considering pedagogical implications for different first languages and proficiency levels and their possible applications to the instruction of well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Undergraduate research paper has long been a tradition in US freshman composition programs, although whether the research paper should or can be taught in the English department continues to be debated. In many of the English departments in Taiwan, students are also required to compose a research paper for their composition class. However, there has been little research conducted on the writing process and on the student perceptions of this specific genre in an EFL learning context. This qualitative study, involving one American instructor and seven Taiwanese college students majoring in English, traced a research writing project, carried out as part of the writing curriculum, from start to finish. Three semi-structured interviews were conducted with each of the students in the beginning, middle and end of the research project. The findings indicate that the students saw information arrangement and display as the main purpose of the research paper. For various reasons, the students perceived the research project as beneficial, although during the implementation of the project they encountered difficulties such as time and resource constraints, problems with using sources in Chinese, difficulties with synthesizing information from multiple sources, among others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]