American Research Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences

Xiaochen Zhang

As a typical form of multi-modal discourse, children’s picture books are an important resource for children’s early language and cultural education. It generally adopts multi-dimensional narrative form and combines images and texts to achieve the purpose of disseminating knowledge of learning language. This paper is mainly based on Kress and van Leeuwen’s social semiotic analysis and Hallidayan systemic functional linguistics, and attempts to employ a multi-modal analysis of a picture book in order to research how the image and text components create meaning of “death”. The study found that image mode and text mode in picture books complete with each other to express meanings, and in order to adapt to the cognitive level of children, the image mode have larger sizes, which are in line with children’s cognitive level

Edirisingha Arachchige Gamini Fonseka

Along with the late 20thCentury’s great boom in information technology, emerged knowledge societies that pivot on the common practice of research. Knowledge is considered the power whose capacity depends on the amount of research involved in its attainment. Research-based knowledge production has already become part and parcel of academia in the rational world, and individuals and institutions claim patents and copyrights for the intellectual products they release to society in terms of ideas or commodities of technical and commercial value. Thus, knowledge being a market item and knowledge production, a lucrative industry, very often the ethical norms of research are violated by individuals affected by corruption. Ethics in research help maintain the patents and copyrights of such knowledge-based products, to safeguard their inventors or discoverers against issues of plagiarism, corruption, exploitation, disreputation, defamation, and moral and intellectual deterioration that tend to become the ruination of the individuals as well as the institutions concerned. It can be resolved only by replacing grotesque materialistic and existentialist defilements with sublime moral and spiritual integrity and conscience as humans. Against this background, this paper attempts to promote integrity and conscience as part of research ethics with an overview of the threats and dangers that corruption would impose on society. The paper thus proposes a way to connect research ethics that has a legal foundation with integrity and conscience as humans that have a moral and spiritual foundation, with a focus on developing a society working with lofty ideals far from mundane materialistic expectations. 

Wen-Yi Fan

In the curriculum of current Chinese higher education for tourism management major, Tour Guiding is a basic course for undergraduate students. The teaching objective of this course is to teach students how to understand the job responsibilities a qualified tour guide should hold in an ever-changing dynamic international tourism industry. Therefore, the teaching contents mainly focus on tour guiding work procedures and operational business knowledge in the workflow of tour guide in international context. This article analyzes the characteristics and problems concerning the teaching contents in the course in a new environment after the COVID-19 pandemic. Highlighting three current typical problems in teaching contents of Tour Guiding course, this study promotes strategies for the construction of a more effective teaching content system. A vertical-horizontal analysis based teaching content framework builds up a clear workflow logic in teaching chapters. A ‘tour guiding business+ tourism English’ teaching model with multi-dimensional teaching methods can produce positive effects on teaching contents in tour guiding course. Improving teacher’s practical experiences in tourism industry is always a support for the quality of teaching contents in this course.

M. Jafar

Commemoration of World AIDS Day in Indonesia on December 1st, 2013 ago caused controversy. This incident happened when the commemoration which was directed to the campaign to fight the disease caused by HIV infection was accompanied with the National Condomization Week. The controversy arose because the National Condomization Week, which was held from December 1st–7th, 2013, was filled with events for distributing condoms to campuses and schools. This immediately received criticism from several groups. After the author analyzes in various literatures, it turned out that the National Condomization Week, which was launched by the IndonesianMinistry of Health at that time, was motivated by concerns about the increasing number of cases of HIV AIDS transmission and the number of abortions among young people due to pregnancies out of wedlock. The program aims to prevent the development of this dangerous disease and also the very high abortion rate. Viewed from the perspective of sadd al-dhari’ah theory, the condomization week must be stopped forever because it will lead to greater malfeasance, namely free sex behavior among young people or adolescents as well as adults. This is because the distribution of condoms is carried out freely to campuses and schools.

Idoko Fidelis Ugochukwu 

This experimental study examined NCNE Interactive Radio Instruction (IRI)-Radio School in Achieving Literacy, Numeracy and Life Skills among Nomadic Primary One Pupils in North-West, Nigeria. These three subjects form the variables and therefrom drew the objectives to establish differences in mean scores obtained by gender. Test items developed from the radio schoolwere administered. Out of the 30 radio lessons for primary one, six were purposively selected for the experiment in line with the spiral nature of the curriculum and in tandem with learning principle of simple to complex. The outcome in literacy,life skills and numeracy tests established no significant difference in the performance of the two genders suggesting that the programme was gender friendly. The study recommends that the governments should establish an AM Band Station to explore the use of radio to increase access, ensurequality and reduce out of school children in the Northern-West, Nigeria.

Okesoto, J.O.1, Oladiboye, O.O2, Olawale, S.B3, Alabi, J.O4

The paper considers the possibilities of sustaining the use of land in Lagos state using the compact model option with special reference to some selected parts of Mushin Local Government Area of the state. The study combines both qualitative and quantitate research methods. Data was drawn directly from the field using building survey sheet and structured questionnaire. Sample of 125 buildings were taken in a cluster manner across 5 electoral wards from the total of 10 electoral regions in the area. Demography data was collected from a total of 125 households. Expert opinions on compact city model were also gathered using the Focus Group Discussion method. Data obtained from the two sources was descriptively and contextually analyzed. Results obtained were presented graphically. The study finds out that there is generally gross underutilization of land in the study area and in a non- sustainable manner. To address this land use challenge, the state needs to start considering the compact city option. Recommendation made largely revolves around the formulation of appropriate legislative, legal and physical planning frame work capable of enshrining compact city development in the area.

Mingxiao Ma

This paper mainly discusses the great influence of religion in the history of the world and when human civilization reaches a certain level, beliefs and religions will emerge. These religions make people think and lead to the progress of human civilization. A detailed analysis of the history of Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism and the significant influence these religions have had. These influences reshaped the human world, but also affected human civilization.

Jiayu Wu

Background Objective: This study aims to develop and validate a predictivelogistic regression model of household ownership of firearm in the United States.  Methods: Data from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System2017 was used. The list of potential predictor variables is largely based on existing literature on factors associated with gun ownership.Stepwise logistic regression analysis was employed to build the model. The model was then tested using Kolmogorov-Smirnov (KS) statistic and Area under the ROC Curve (AUC) as metrics to measure if the model is a good fit. Results: About 48.8% participants reported having any guns in their families. From stepwise logistic regression analysis, 12 variables out of 14 are selected in the final prediction model. Factors that affect the likelihood of gun ownership include income level, education, veteran status, marital status etc.The resulting model is promising, with 72% percent of accuracy according to the ROC and a KS of 0.35. Conclusion: A predictive model of gun ownership among U.S. households was developed and validated.

Linyi Tan

This paper posits the possibility of COVID as a kind of ”divine plague”, a pandemic with religious origins placed into the human population as punishment for contemporary human behavior, including war, violence, and discrimination, all elements that would incur God’s wrath, as understood by reference to the Old Testament. Our analysis means to show that God is possibly involved, using COVID to restore nature back to its order