We propose five research tasks targeting grammar teaching and learning, focusing on extending previous research and exploring under-studied features and contexts. The first two tasks outline replications and extensions of seminal studies on pedagogical grammar, Toth (2008) and Samuda (2001), designed to advance our understanding of the teacher role in providing rich practice opportunities. Another task examines how features of peer interaction during oral communication might encourage attention to grammar among young second language (L2) classroom learners in school-based foreign language programs, a common yet under-studied context. A fourth task investigates the unique properties of spoken grammar across languages and effective approaches for its teaching and learning, and the fifth explores the (re)design and use of corpus-based tools to enhance accessibility and learner autonomy in data-driven grammar learning. Each task is designed to be feasible across a variety of classroom contexts and target languages. We highlight concrete implications for language pedagogy and include suggestions for capturing both learning outcomes and participants’ perspectives on their learning and teaching, using a range of quantitative and qualitative methodologies. We end with some thoughts on repetitive practice for learning certain features of grammar, and recommendations for collaborative research that would encourage greater replication of future studies.

On the continental shelf of the Antarctic the major disturbance to benthic ecosystems is from iceberg scouring; however, this is based on observations from the Peninsula region. We combine observation and experimentation in the McMurdo Sound region of the Ross Sea to determine if community recovery patterns there are similar to those in better-studied Antarctic regions, and if local immigration is an important factor in recovery dynamics. We found that regardless of habitat differences in depth, substrate, and oceanographic setting, iceberg disturbance strongly impacted benthic communities in McMurdo Sound. Notably, in shallow water (<30 m) where anchor ice is an annual disturbance, both the benthic communities and recovery processes were more variable than at deeper locations. A manipulative experiment performed in a shallow area indicated that recruitment might be more important than immigration to infaunal community recovery. We conclude that whilst disturbance frequency influences dominant epifauna, recovery from iceberg disturbance is a slow ecological progression that is dependent on the extremely inconsistent recruitment processes of the high Antarctic benthic ecosystem.

The logarithmic helicospiral has been the most widely accepted model of regularly coiled molluscan form since it was proposed by Moseley and popularized by Thompson and Raup. It is based on an explicit assumption that shells are isometric and grow exponentially, and an implicit assumption that the external form of the shell follows the internal shape, which implies that the parameters of the spiral could be reconstructed from the external whorl profile. In this contribution, we show that these assumptions fail on all 25 gastropod species we examine. Using a dataset of 176 fossil and modern gastropod shells, we construct an empirical morphospace of coiling using the parameters of whorl expansion rate, translation rate, and rate of increasing distance from coiling axis, plus rate of aperture shape change, from their best-fit models. We present a case study of change in shell form through geologic time in the austral family Struthiolariidae to demonstrate the utility of our approach for evolutionary paleobiology. We fit various functions to the shell-coiling parameters to demonstrate that the best morphological model is not the same for each parameter. We present a set of R routines that will calculate helicospiral parameters from sagittal sections through coiled shells and allow workers to compare models and choose appropriate sets of parameters for their own datasets. Shell-form parameters in the Struthiolariidae highlight a hitherto neglected hypothesis of relationship between Antarctic Perissodonta and the enigmatic Australian genus Tylospira that fits the biogeographic and stratigraphic distribution of both genera.

Female genital mutilation (FGM) is very pervasive in Africa, with significant regional variations in the prevalence of this traditional practice. This study examined the linkages between FGM and multiple sexual partnership in Mali and Sierra Leone – two African countries with a high prevalence of FGM. Data were from the 2018 Mali and 2013 Sierra Leone Demographic and Health Surveys, and the study sample comprised 4750 women from Mali and 16,614 from Sierra Leone. Multilevel logistic regression was used for the data analysis, with reported adjusted odds ratios (aOR) and associated 95% confidence intervals. In Mali, women who had not undergone FGM were less likely to have multiple sexual partners (aOR=0.60, CI=0.38–0.96) compared with those who had undergone FGM. In Sierra Leone, women who had undergone FGM (aOR=1.15, CI=1.02–1.30) were more likely to have multiple sexual partners compared with those who had not undergone FGM. Age, level of education, wealth quintile, sex of household head, community socioeconomic status, mass media exposure, and community literacy level were found to be associated with the likelihood of multiple sexual partnership among women in Mali and Sierra Leone. Comprehensive, age-group-based risk-reduction strategies, such as abstinence education and decision-making skills (assertiveness) training, are needed to reduce girls’ and young women’s engagement in multiple sexual partnerships. Policy interventions, such as anti-FGM legislation and initiatives like the ‘Schooling for the Female Child’ initiative aimed at reducing social inequality among girls and women, might help decrease FGM and the likelihood of health-compromising behaviours like multiple sexual partnership.

Utilization of antenatal care (ANC) services, as part of reproductive health care, presents a lifesaving chance for health promotion and the early diagnosis and treatment of illnesses throughout pregnancy. This study examines the factors associated with the number and timing of ANC visits among married women in Cameroon using data from the 2018 Cameroon Demographic and Health Survey. The outcome variables were number of ANC visits, categorized as <8 visits or ≥8 visits, and the timing of first ANC visit, categorized as ≤3 months (early) or >3 months (late) (as per the new 2016 WHO recommendations). Descriptive statistics and binary logistic regression were used to analyse the data. Crude odds ratios (cOR) and adjusted odds ratios (aOR) and p-values with significance at <0.05 were used to interpret the results. The proportions of women who had ≥8 ANC visits and first ANC visit at ≤3 months gestation were 6.3% and 35.6% respectively. Women aged 35–39 at childbirth (aOR=3.99, 95% CI=1.30–12.23), middle wealth quintile women (aOR=3.22, 95% CI=1.01–10.27), women whose husbands had secondary (aOR=7.00, 95% CI=2.26–21.71) or higher (aOR=16.93, 95% CI=4.91–58.34) education were more likely to have ≥8 ANC visits. Early timing of first ANC visit was low among women with birth order 3–4 (aOR=0.63, 95% CI=0.46–0.85). Conversely, the likelihood of having early ANC visits was high among women whose pregnancies were intended (aOR=1.32, 95% CI=1.01–1.74), the richest women (aOR=3.89, 95% CI=2.30–6.57) and women whose husbands had secondary (aOR=2.41, 95% CI=1.70–3.64) or higher (aOR=3.12, 95% CI=2.40–7.46) education. The study highlights that age at childbirth, wealth, husband’s educational attainment, birth order and pregnancy intention could influence the utilization of ANC services among married women in Cameroon. Hence, to improve attendance and early initiation of ANC, interventions should be targeted at empowering women financially and removing all financial barriers associated with accessing ANC, improving ANC education among women and encouraging male involvement in ANC education.

When a liberal-democratic state signs a treaty or wages a war, does its whole polity do those things? In this article, we approach this question via the recent social ontological literature on collective agency. We provide arguments that it does and that it does not. The arguments are presented via three considerations: the polity's control over what the state does; the polity's unity; and the influence of individual polity members. We suggest that the answer to our question differs for different liberal-democratic states and depends on two underlying considerations: (1) the amount of discretion held by the state's officeholders; (2) the extent to which the democratic procedure is deliberative rather than aggregative.

Among 353 healthcare personnel in a longitudinal cohort in four hospitals in Atlanta, GA (May-June 2020), 23 (6.5%) had SARS-CoV-2 antibodies. Spending >50% of a typical shift at bedside (OR 3.4, 95% CI: 1.2–10.5) and Black race (OR 8.4, 95% CI: 2.7–27.4) were associated with SARS-CoV-2 seropositivity.

Despite broad evidence suggesting that adversity-exposed youth experience an impaired ability to recognize emotion in others, the underlying biological mechanisms remains elusive. This study uses a multimethod approach to target the neurological substrates of this phenomenon in a well-phenotyped sample of youth meeting diagnostic criteria for posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Twenty-one PTSD-afflicted youth and 23 typically developing (TD) controls completed clinical interview schedules, an emotion recognition task with eye-tracking, and an implicit emotion processing task during functional magnetic resonance imaging )fMRI). PTSD was associated with decreased accuracy in identification of angry, disgust, and neutral faces as compared to TD youth. Of note, these impairments occurred despite the normal deployment of visual attention in youth with PTSD relative to TD youth. Correlation with a related fMRI task revealed a group by accuracy interaction for amygdala–hippocampus functional connectivity (FC) for angry expressions, where TD youth showed a positive relationship between anger accuracy and amygdala–hippocampus FC; this relationship was reversed in youth with PTSD. These findings are a novel characterization of impaired threat recognition within a well-phenotyped population of severe pediatric PTSD. Further, the differential amygdala–hippocampus FC identified in youth with PTSD may imply aberrant efficiency of emotional contextualization circuits.