Monash

Since the 1970s disability advocates have called for a more inclusive on-screen representation of intellectual disability. But despite these initiatives, broadcast media continues to resort to the stereotypical representations of triumph or tragedy. This research analyses recent representations of intellectual disability on screen and identifies a broadcast model of intellectual disability that still uses these stereotypes. In response to this model and informed by insights from visual anthropology, the studio research employs poetic documentary as a framework to produce videos for the Kew Cottages History Project and the What Next? documentary projects. It is argued that the poetic mode of documentary emphasises the sensual qualities of the image, evoking the lives of the subjects instead of speaking for them. The production methodology involved in the applied research has relevance to the role and purpose of video documentary in health and social research.

This study examines the effect of contextual clues on the use of strategies (inferencing and ignoring) and knowledge sources (semantics, morphology, world knowledge, and others) for processing unfamiliar words in listening comprehension. Three types of words were investigated: words with local co-text clues, global co-text clues and extra-textual clues. Data were collected from 20 participants using the procedures of immediate retrospection without recall support and of stimulated recall. The results indicate that contextual clues are an important factor in learners’ treatment of unfamiliar words in listening comprehension. Contrary to what some theories of inference generation predict, this study reveals that learners use the inferencing strategy more frequently for words with global co-text clues and words with extratextual clues than for words with local co-text clues. In terms of the use of knowledge sources for inferring word meaning, the learners in this study use the knowledg...

This paper establishes vector autoregressive moving average (VARMA) models for Malaysian monetary policy analysis by efficiently identifying and simultaneously estimating the model parameters using full information maximum likelihood. The monetary literature is largely dominated by vector autoregressive (VAR) and structural vector autoregressive (SVAR).models, and to the best of our knowledge, this is the first paper to use VARMA modelling to investigate monetary policy. Malaysia is an interesting small open economy to study because of the capital control measures imposed by the government following the 1997 Asian financial crisis. A comparison of the impulse responses generated by these three models for the pre- and post-crisis periods indicates that the VARMA model impulse responses are consistent with prior expectations based on economic theories and policies pursued by the Malaysian government, particularly in the post-crisis period. Furthermore, uncovering the way in which vari...

While clarity and explicitness in responding to a request are highly desirable, there are conventionally indirect strategies people use when responding. This indirectness cannot be deemed as always indicating impoliteness as different people have different strategies in giving a response; it is determined by the cultural norms and values in which they are brought up. In this paper, we will look at the strategies Indonesians use when responding to a request at times when their circumstances pressure them to make refusals. The study reported here found that apart from giving refusals, in which indirect refusal strategies are preferred, in situations where the ranking of imposition of a request is high, they tend to accept the request. It appears that their strategies of responding are closely related to their strong willingness to maintain the (existing) harmony between them and their interlocutors.