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Students with learning and behavioral problems often face enormous barriers to successful school performance. When the language of instruction is not the students' first language and they are already in secondary school, this is compounded by additional challenges, especially with regard to vocabulary and reading -- subjects that are fundamental to obtaining equal educational opportunities. In addition, difficulties in the language of instruction are often accompanied by declining student motivation. Direct word recognition and vocabulary acquisition are of great importance in language learning contexts. To address these areas, multimodal intervention approaches have proven useful. For this reason, a multimodal storytelling intervention was developed to help this group of students, in particular, to improve significantly in the aforementioned areas. Specifically, a multiple-baseline design across participants (N = 4) was applied to train the sight-word reading and vocabulary of adolescent students with learning and behavioral problems who spoke German as a second language. The training occurred three times a week over a period of five weeks. Results were promising for both variables in a short period of time, suggesting that the storytelling intervention in this form is an appropriate tool for teaching second-language German.

Self-lubricating coatings can be used to increase the service life of machine parts which are subjected to high mechanical loads. The present work is concerned with the combination of nitriding and a subsequent Ti-doped MoS2 coating. The focus of the investigations is on the impact of the compound layer on the wear behavior of the coating since the changes in the surface topography due to compound layer growth and pore formation inside the compound layers are expected to have an impact of the adhesion strength and the wear behavior. For this purpose, compound layers with varying thickness and porosity were formed in the surface area of the material EN31CrMoV9 by gas nitriding. A MoS2:Ti PVD monolayer was applied directly on the compound layers. The wear behavior was evaluated using the pin-on-disc test. The MoS2:Ti solid lubricant coatings show good adhesion on the compound layers without any interlayer. Compared with the nitrided reference state, the coating significantly improved the wear behavior of the surface treated material. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]