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To describe the risk factors for SARS-CoV-2 infection in UK healthcare workers (HCWs).We conducted a prospective sero-epidemiological study of HCWs at a major UK teaching hospital using a SARS-CoV-2 immunoassay. Risk factors for seropositivity were analysed using multivariate logistic regression.410/5,698 (7·2%) staff tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 antibodies. Seroprevalence was higher in those working in designated COVID-19 areas compared with other areas (9·47% versus 6·16%) Healthcare assistants (aOR 2·06 [95%CI 1·14-3·71]; p=0·016) and domestic and portering staff (aOR 3·45 [95% CI 1·07-11·42]; p=0·039) had significantly higher seroprevalence than other staff groups after adjusting for age, sex, ethnicity and COVID-19 working location. Staff working in acute medicine and medical sub-specialities were also at higher risk (aOR 2·07 [95% CI 1·31-3·25]; p0·002). Staff from Black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) backgrounds had an aOR of 1·65 (95% CI 1·32 - 2·07; p0·001) compared to white staff; this increased risk was independent of COVID-19 area working. The only symptoms significantly associated with seropositivity in a multivariable model were loss of sense of taste or smell, fever, and myalgia; 31% of staff testing positive reported no prior symptoms.Risk of SARS-CoV-2 infection amongst HCWs is highly heterogeneous and influenced by COVID-19 working location, role, age and ethnicity. Increased risk amongst BAME staff cannot be accounted for solely by occupational factors.

The severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) spike N-terminal domain (NTD) remains poorly characterized despite enrichment of mutations in this region across variants of concern (VOCs). Here, we examine the contribution of the NTD to infection and cell-cell fusion by constructing chimeric spikes bearing B.1.617 lineage (Delta and Kappa variants) NTDs and generating spike pseudotyped lentivirus. We find that the Delta NTD on a Kappa or wild-type (WT) background increases S1/S2 cleavage efficiency and virus entry, specifically in lung cells and airway organoids, through use of TMPRSS2. Delta exhibits increased cell-cell fusogenicity that could be conferred to WT and Kappa spikes by Delta NTD transfer. However, chimeras of Omicron BA.1 and BA.2 spikes with a Delta NTD do not show more efficient TMPRSS2 use or fusogenicity. We conclude that the NTD allosterically modulates S1/S2 cleavage and spike-mediated functions in a spike context-dependent manner, and allosteric interactions may be lost when combining regions from more distantly related VOCs.

Rapid COVID-19 diagnosis in the hospital is essential, although this is complicated by 30%–50% of nose/throat swabs being negative by SARS-CoV-2 nucleic acid amplification testing (NAAT). Furthermore, the D614G spike mutant dominates the pandemic and it is unclear how serological tests designed to detect anti-spike antibodies perform against this variant. We assess the diagnostic accuracy of combined rapid antibody point of care (POC) and nucleic acid assays for suspected COVID-19 disease due to either wild-type or the D614G spike mutant SARS-CoV-2. The overall detection rate for COVID-19 is 79.2% (95% CI 57.8–92.9) by rapid NAAT alone. The combined point of care antibody test and rapid NAAT is not affected by D614G and results in very high sensitivity for COVID-19 diagnosis with very high specificity., Graphical Abstract, Highlights Combined rapid antibody + nucleic acid detection correctly diagnoses SARS-CoV-2 Rapid antibody tests detect immune responses against SARS-CoV-2 bearing D614G Rapid SARS-CoV-2 antibody tests do not cross-react with antibodies to seasonal CoV False positivity in SARS-CoV-2 finger prick blood antibody tests can be very low, Mlcochova et al. report that combined rapid nucleic acid amplification testing (NAAT) and finger prick blood antibody tests can substantially improve the diagnosis of COVID-19 as compared to NAAT alone and is able to detect the SARS-CoV-2 Spike D614G variant that dominates the pandemic.

Drawing on sociocultural theories, this study considers the multiple resources multilingual children use to communicate mathematically. We engaged with three children and a parent, in order...

In mathematics education research there is growing interest in the bodily basis of cognition and how this might inform the teaching and learning of mathematics. The theoretical support for this perspective comes from research in cultural historical activity theory, cognitive neuroscience and the phenomenology of movement. While distinct traditions of research, each of these approaches acknowledges/locates itself within complexity thinking to understand the emergent and dynamic processes at multiple scales. Drawing on this interdisciplinary theoretical framework and using video-recording and artifact data, I report on a qualitative case study of young children explaining their drawings of a solution to a geometry problem. The analytic focus is on the mathematical reasoning that emerges as the children explain their solutions which are mediated through semiotic resources, both symbolic and material including body gestures, senses, and movement. The findings suggest that as we extend the means by which learners engage with one another and with classroom mathematical activities, we may begin to appreciate how capable children are mathematically.

Reflect and Discuss Learn to listen to your students' interactions to inform your instructional decision making.

In this study we examine how university plagiarism policies interact with international graduate students' academic writing in English as they develop identities as authors and students. The study is informed by the sociocultural theoretical perspective [Vygotsky, L. (1978). Mind in society: The development of higher mental processes. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Wertsch, J. V. (1991). Voices of the mind: A sociocultural approach to mediated action. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.] that foregrounds the crucial role of appropriation in learning, and the Bakhtinian dialogism [Bakhtin, M. M. (1981). The dialogic imagination. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press; Bakhtin, M. M. (1986). Speech genres and other late essays. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.] that highlights intertextuality as a fundamental feature of language use. Relying on multiple data sources including text-based interviews, in-depth interviews with students and disciplinary professors, course syllabi, field notes, and institutional documents, we consider the social discourses that surround students as they interact with prior sources in order to understand how they construct their texts. We discuss how university plagiarism policies frame the professor-student relationship and influence student text production. We conclude by critiquing university plagiarism policies that serve to mystify academic writing, negatively affecting those students who are less familiar with the genre of academic writing.

Recent research on academic writing has established the intersection of writing and identity. However, it is not clear whether writers themselves are aware of this link. In this study, we investigated five ESL graduate students’ awareness of the identities that they constructed through the appropriation of others’ words and ideas in their texts. Moving beyond prevalent moral explanations, we further sought alternative reasons for students’ inappropriate textual borrowing practices, often categorized as plagiarism. Our findings suggest that, depending on their enculturation into disciplinary discourses, students exhibit different levels of awareness of the available and privileged identity options in the social contexts of writing. We argue that student textual plagiarism can best be viewed as an issue of authorial identity construction. The findings indicate that the roots of students’ production of institutionally unacceptable texts lie in their epistemological orientation as well as their authoritative view of source texts. We finally reflect on the implications of the findings for academic writing instruction. Drawing on the notion of students-as-ethnographers, we suggest that writing instruction can raise students’ awareness of the link between writing and self-representation as well as the epistemology underpinning academic authorship, as two important dimensions of successful writing.

This longitudinal case study draws on sociocultural theory to investigate language learning as a socially mediated process through computer-mediated communicative tasks in an international languages class. The study reports on the design, implementation, and outcomes of a thematic, task-based curricular innovation in which paired Korean- and English-speaking peers, each learning the other's language, collaborated on chat homework assignments. Examination of these chat interactions between experts and novices, with the tandem partners fulfilling each role in turn, reveals how on-line collaborative discourse supports knowledge building within this cross-linguistic learning environment. Data from chat exchanges show how these students were able to learn and teach contextually meaningful and appropriate linguistic and cultural behaviour through socially mediated actions, using the meaning-making resources within their own learning community. Specifically, the findings show the ways in which learners appropriated a variety of language practices, developed awareness of self in relation to others, and participated in expert and novice discursive practices in the construction of meaning.

The results of a within-subject cross-language study of text comprehension in adult second language (L2) learners are presented. Text comprehension and sentence reading time measures were obtained for matched narrative and procedural texts in English and French from adult learners of French as a second language (FSL) at two levels of French proficiency. The language of the text and readers' L2 proficiency affected reading times, while text type did not. The recall data, however, were more complex. In general, the participants recalled more information from the texts they read in English and more information from the descriptive narrative texts than from the procedural texts. Analyses of the recall performance suggest that, while linguistic proficiency may limit the representation that an individual can construct of a text, the constructed representation reflects the individual's conceptual base as well as strategic processing. These results are consistent with a multilevel model of text comprehension.

This paper investigates the analogical reasoning of literary academics and writers in order to understand what role analogy plays in literary interpretation. Readers' verbal protocol data were analyzed both quantitatively and qualitatively to examine reasoning operations ( claims, hypotheses, analogies, expectations, questions, evaluations, and meta-statements), the relational links between operations ( condition, elaboration, and reiteration), and the levels of the text at which those operations occur ( fact, local, and global). The results of the quantitative analysis reveal that expert readers generated relatively few analogies. The qualitative analyses suggest that, in spite of the low frequencies, analogies serve an important function in expert readers' literary text descriptions. Analogies may be signaled explicitly by the text or may be generated from the domain-specific expertise of the readers. Analogical comparisons may be constructed at any of the multiple levels of the text descriptions and are also generated in relation to the communicative context. These intertextual references appear to facilitate the elaboration of knowledge schemas and global themes, and permit readers to work with multiple interpretive possibilities. In this way, analogies served as a form of data generation and management for expert readers.

A fundamental issue in validating topic-based tests of language proficiency is the effect of the topic on the test takers’ performance. Topic-based test developers must ensure that test takers are neither advantaged nor disadvantaged in terms of their test results when presented with a given test topic. We have termed this threat a ‘topic effect’ and argue that this topic effect may constitute a source of construct-irrelevant variance (Messick, 1989). We contend that investigating the possibility of a topic effect is a critical step in establishing the validity of all topic-based tests. This research investigates the potential presence of a topic effect for the Canadian Academic English Language (CAEL) Assessment using the mechanism of choice. The principal research question is to determine if test-takers given a choice of topic perform significantly differently than test-takers not given a choice. ESL university applicants ( n = 254) were randomly assigned to one of two conditions: no choice of topic or choice among five topics. Overall Proficiency Level, Reading, Lecture and Essay scores were compared for the two conditions. Ordinal level data were analysed using the Mann Whitney U, Chi-Square and Kolmogorov-Smirnov tests. While the scores for the choice groups were usually higher than the scores for the no-choice groups, the differences were not statistically significant. Despite the lack of significance, we felt that the scores warranted closer examination. For the topic where the difference between the choice and no-choice groups was largest, a textual analysis of the essays was undertaken to look for instances of the use of information not provided in the test. Again, no difference was found between the choice and no-choice groups. The results provide support for the validity of inferences drawn from this test. Because choice is an essential element of the research design, a second focus of the study is to explore the advantages and disadvantages of the use of choice in language testing settings from the perspective of both the tester and the test-taker. The potential value of choice as a testing feature is discussed and a call for further research is made.

(1998). Situated Cognition: Social, Semiotic and Psychological Perspective (Book) Mind, Culture, and Activity: Vol. 5, No. 3, pp. 229-232.

This paper outlines a rationale for the psychological study of literary expertise as a research strategy for investigating some of the conventions and expectations of the literary system. By presenting a comparison with expert-novice research in cognitive science, it identifies some guidelines concerning what constitutes an appropriate expert sample and what constitutes an appropriate task in expertise research. Verbal protocol analysis in conjunction with semantic models of discourse analysis are discussed as a possible data source from which to infer expert performance. Selected results from research using this approach to investigate literary reading are presented.

BACKGROUNDConsumers deserve to know th at health care professionalsnot only are competent as they b egin their careers, but alsothat they are exerting every effort to ensure that they remaincompetent throughout their careers. The fundamental basisfor any health profession’s interaction with the public mustbe demonstrable competence. Health care occurs withina health care system that is continually seeing new advancesin technology and science, as well as changes in health caremanagement and consumer expectations. The critical task ofmaintaining and proving competence at regular intervals willremain a challenge for health care providers for the foresee-able future. According to the Institute of Medicine, theknowledge explosion in medicine is one of the factors thatcan reduce the quality of care to consumers.

This research investigated literary expertise by examining how literary experts and students in English Literature describe a complex narrative conveyed by character dialogue. Performance protocols obtained in this task, were analyzed using a model of text description based on a stratified theory of discourse processing. The model identifies semantic units in subjects’ text description protocols that consist of a set of possible ‘discursive patterns’. Each discursive pattern includes a text unit being described, and a point of reference for the description, that is, a reader. aurhor, or ~exr perspective. Analysis of subjects’ discursive patterns indicated that students closely paraphrased the text, recounting either narrative events or characters’ speech. while experts relied on specific text information to support more inferential statements. Experts commented more extensively on the language used in the text, and their descriptions included references to narrative structure and functions of dialogue in the text as well as references to the author. the reader and the relationship between author and reader. Experts appear to view the text as the result of deliberate linguistic and conceptual choices made by an author. and awareness of these choices appears to have guided their descriptions of specific text structures.

Our understanding of language development and second-language learning has been narrowly conceived and has underestimated the interrelated and dialectical processes involved. Keywords: biliteracy; sociocultural theory; classroom-based research; mediated mind

In our ongoing qualitative classroom research, we adopt a sociocultural perspective to investigate discourse, and its role in how children and teachers make meaning of mathematics in a fifth grade inquiry classroom. Our theoretical perspective draws primarily on Vygotsky (1978, 1986) and Bakhtin (1981, 1986) each of whom examines how social forms of meaning influence individual cognition. The episode described in this paper examines the process whereby individual and group developmental trajectories are constructed, and allows us to explore the relationship between discourse and knowing. We combine a longitudinal design with a case study approach to focus on the collaborative mathematical problem solving. We use video capture to help us listen to children’s discussions in classroom activities and small group interactions. Our analysis of the verbal data recorded on video identifies patterns of interaction, development and change in participants’ use of mathematical language and concepts, and their evolving understanding, through discussion and argument, of an algebraic expression constructed by one of the children. The findings lead us to argue for i) a more generative view of the zone of proximal development as a site of learning and of identity formation, ii) an expanded view of the role of the teacher in inquiry classrooms, and iii) an appreciation for the valuable roles difference and resistance play in knowledge building.

This article explores the complex relationship between L2 writing and identity construction through an examination of ESL learners' journal writing. We adopt a constructivist, sociocultural-historical framework to examine the discourses, texts, and voices of three 8-year-old Muslim girls as they learn English, their third language, in a culturally diverse primary school in urban Montreal, Canada. To understand how writing intersects with identity construction, we draw on Ivanic's (1998) threeway interplay among the writers' life experience, the reality constructed through their writing, and their personal sense of self. Bakhtin's (1986) concept of speaking personality offers a means of conceptualizing children's biliteracy as socioculturally mediated activities and social interactions. By focusing on constructs such as the writers' agency, identity, voice, and reflexivity, we present a multidimensional model that places a child's speaking personality at the center of the language learning process. Writing stories is learning. It's really helpful because you can use your imagination. The more you write, the more you learn how to write. It's like speaking, the more you speak, the more you can learn how to speak. (Heddie, age 9; interview, 1996) I would have them [children learning an L2] look at books and... after they could read, I would tell them to look at all kinds of stories and then pick a little part of this story and a little part of that story. Like a girl that's named Rosie and a girl that's named I don't know, whatever, and then they meet each other. It's like two books connecting each other so they have to use their imaginations. (Heddie, age 6; interview, 1993)