Evidence of repeated access to immediate verbal memory during handwriting

Writing is a relatively slow process. A certain degree of overlapping must therefore be assumed to exist between motor activities and more «central» processes involved in the production of language. The present experiment was based on the assumption that these management processes must leave some traces at the level of execution. Subjects were asked to read and memorize a sequence of three words (examples: «parachute parapluie paramètre», «taximètre décimètre paramètre»); and write them down on a graphic tablet. The results are consistent with the following ideas:

1. the same motor program was used for the three occurrences of repeated morphemes
2. Non-repeated morphemes were recovered from verbal memory while the preceding repeated morpheme was being written.

     

Modes of differentiation in children’s writing construction

In this paper we aim at analyzing the modes of differentiation in children’s writing development during the presyllabic phase that, in the theoretical framework developed by Ferreiro and Teberosky, comes before the discovery of sound correspondance. Seventeen Italian children were interviewed seven times during the implementation of research on «Educational Continuity» between «scuola materna» and primary school. We first examine how minimum quantity and internal variation rules appear in Italian children as organizing principles for controlling quantity and quality of writing, and as necessary conditions for the differentiation process. Starting from this, it is possible to find two differentiation modes in writing; aformal one, and a mode in which some type ofexternal referent is used (meaning or object features). For most children the two modes are alternatives, and passing from one to another is a possible but not necessary step. The external group (which is older) has significantly less quantity repertoire than the formal one: this can explain why looking for an external point of reference can be an outcome of the child’s formal research for differentiating writings.     

Metalinguistic skills in children: what develops?

Abstract

The aim of this study is to test developmental changes in metalinguistic skills in primary school children, using the distinction proposed by Bialystock (1986) between «analyzed knowledge» and «executive control», as two components of metalinguistic awareness involved in different tasks. 60 first, second and third grade children were individually interviewed on two tasks. In the first task (guided word substitution) children were asked to substitute an underlined word with five alternatives, thus producing new sentences to be judged on their semantic and/or morpho-syntactical acceptability. In the second task (free word substitution), children have to find out the word that can be cancelled and substituted with a new one. In both tasks children have to express an acceptability judgement, giving reasons for it. Each subject receives two scores for each task. Results from two-way Anova show that the «control» component does not change much, while the «analyzed knowledge» changes significantly, although also third grade children are more aware of semantic than of morpho-syntactic features of language.     

Le contrat didactique: un cadre interprétatif pour comprendre les savoirs manifestés par les elèves en mathématique

This article describes the dynamic inherant in the didactic relation involving the teacher, the pupil and knowledge. Its purpose is to demonstrate the pertinance of analysing pupils’ actualizations of knowledge using the concept of «didactic contracts». In order to specify the nature of didactic contract, this concept is compared to the notion of exerimental contract between an experimenter, a subject and scholastic knowledge. This analysis draws on empirical examples from experimental situations organized either in the classroom (where the pupils are placed in the familiar situation of written tests) or outside the classrom (where each pupil is placed in a face-to-face relation with an experimenter). The actualizations of knowledge elaborated by pupils when they are asked to resolve an elementary written addition problem are therefore dealt with in the cognitive and social dimensions inherant in these situations of questioning.     

The language of written language: an introduction to the special issue

This special issue includes five articles dealing with selected aspects of writing disorders, crafted by key contributors to the literature on written language. Articles addressing definitional issues and diagnostic questions, assessment strategies, selected neurodevelopmental components of written expression, the manifestation of writing problems in children and young adults, direct intervention, training for elementary teachers in the early grades in the area of literacy, and brain-behavior linkages are presented. This introduction provides an overview of these articles tied to specific issues confronting the field of written language. Some thoughts and directions for the future are articulated.     

Examining Elementary Students’ Development of Oral and Written Argumentation Practices Through Argument-Based Inquiry

Argumentation, and the production of scientific arguments are critical elements of inquiry that are necessary for helping students become scientifically literate through engaging them in constructing and critiquing ideas. This case study employed a mixed methods research design to examine the development in 5th grade students’ practices of oral and written argumentation from one unit to another over 16 weeks utilizing the science writing heuristic approach. Data sources included five rounds of whole-class discussion focused on group presentations of arguments that occurred over eleven class periods; students’ group writings; interviews with six target students and the teacher; and the researcher’s field notes. The results revealed five salient trends in students’ development of oral and written argumentative practices over time: (1) Students came to use more critique components as they participated in more rounds of whole-class discussion focused on group presentations of arguments; (2) by challenging each other’s arguments, students came to focus on the coherence of the argument and the quality of evidence; (3) students came to use evidence to defend, support, and reject arguments; (4) the quality of students’ writing continuously improved over time; and (5) students connected oral argument skills to written argument skills as they had opportunities to revise their writing after debating and developed awareness of the usefulness of critique from peers. Given the development in oral argumentative practices and the quality of written arguments over time, this study indicates that students’ development of oral and written argumentative practices is positively related to each other. This study suggests that argumentative practices should be framed through both a social and epistemic understanding of argument-utilizing talk and writing as vehicles to create norms of these complex practices.     

A Conversation with Posy Simmonds

In this article David Lewis talks to Posy Simmonds about her career in illustration, cartooning and the writing and illustration of picturebooks. Together they discuss her early experience of working as an illustrator for newspapers and magazines; her first attempt at creating a weekly adult cartoon strip and her subsequent career as a regular contributor to the Guardian newspaper. They consider her approach to writing and drawing picturebooks; the balance of realism and fantasy in her work; her mastery of colour effects; her liking for drawing cats and her attempts to capture the truth of a situation in pictures and words. David Lewis has been a teacher in primary and secondary schools, an educational researcher, and lecturer in education at Goldsmiths’ College, London and the University of Exeter. He has written a number of articles about children’s picturebooks and is the author of Reading Contemporary Picturebooks: Picturing Text. He is a member of the UK editorial committee of Children’s Literature in Education.     

Comprehending instructions for using pharmaceutical products in rural Kenya

This paper reports two studies on comprehension of pharmaceutical texta containing pictorial and written instructions by mothers in rural Kenya. The subjects were asked to read and recall instructions for preparing and administering a solution for the treatment of dehydration due to diarrheal disease in children. A set of pictures describing the preparation procedure, together with written text instructions under two conditions, (a) original, as in the commercial product, and (b) revised, to include familiar terminology and explanations of some procedures, were presented to two groups of Kenyan mothers. The verbal protocols generated were transcribed and analyzed using propositional representation of instructional procedures.The results showed that mothers recalled the procedures for the preparation as in the pictures but not those presented in the written instructions. The written instructions were generally found to be difficult, with the original text being more difficult than the revised text. Any conflicting information between the written and pictorial instructions was resolved by selecting the familiar procedure. The information recalled from the revised text that was recalled was that which supported the procedures in the pictures. The results have implications for writing adequate pharmaceutical texts for users such that little room is left for misinterpretation.     

Written language abilities in deaf Italians

Written texts produced by 10 Italian deaf native signers in four different writing tasks were analyzed. Data analysis focused on linguistic and orthographic nonstandard forms. The written production of deaf subjects with deaf parents (DD) was compared to the written production in two control groups: a group of 10 hearing subjects with deaf parents (HD) and a group of 10 subjects who have had no contact with deaf people or sign language (HH). The results duplicate findings from previous studies. Deaf subjects display a pattern of selective difficulty with Italian grammatical morphology, especially with free-standing function words. The four different writing tasks used in the present study yield results indicating that text type does influence our assessment of deaf writing abilities. A comparison of the texts written by deaf native signers with those of two hearing groups confirms the view that difficulties in the acquisition of written Italian are best explained by deafness itself, not by the influence of a previously acquired Sign Language, and that the specific difficulties with grammatical morphology displayed by our deaf subjects cannot be attributed solely to their limited experience with written Italian.     

Peer interaction effects in the activation of categorical concepts

This study was aimed at investigating the effects of social interaction in a task involving the utilization of categorical concepts by 7- and 9-year-olds from two contrasting socio-economic backgrounds (upper class and lower class). The task, presented as a guessing game, was performed under two experimental conditions: an individual condition (one subject alone asked his/her partner questions) and a dyadic condition (two subjects formulated questions together to ask two other partners). In both experimental conditions, the «questioned» subjects answered «yes» or «no» to their partner’s (or partners’) questions. Two pre-test and post-test tasks (a nonmember task and a similarity task) involving the same categorical concepts as the training tasks were set up to assess the effects of training condition and socio-economic background on progress. An untrained group of subjects served as the control group. The results showed that the experimental setup was very beneficial for all subjects, regardless of what kind of training they had undergone (individual or dyadic) and what background they came from. These findings provide evidence of the effectiveness of the social regulation at work in both of these experimental conditions (yes/no feedback) for a task where the socially-defined goal to be attained by the subjects is represented in an unambiguous manner.     

电影大批判:发动与运作

电影大批判是大批判中最重要的领域,它由上下两种力量推动,上边是以江青为首的激进派及各单位的写作组,下边是以知识分子为主体的群众造反组织。写作组最早出现在上海,"文革"中推广至全国。写作组与媒体密切配合,由领导确定选题规划、重点稿件由写作组负责,配合性稿件由媒体安排。群众造反组织搞大批判花样繁多,主要的批判方式是出版报刊和编印图书。与群众造反组织的牵强附会、胡编乱造式的批判不同,写作组重视资料和文本,用激进派的观点剪裁事实,重新解释历史是其特征。     

Keep it short Note-taking for learners of English as a first and second language

One of the most important and central components of any course on study skills is undoubtedly note-taking. The teaching of note-taking is closely linked to the teaching of listening, reading and writing. Materials for listening comprehension and practice in efficient reading may be used to teach note-taking while note-taking, itself, can be used as a basis for practice in written work. In addition, the teaching of note-taking involves the teaching of such grammatical features as linking, reference, substitution and omission, and thus will include considerable work on connectives, nouns, pronouns, determiners and auxiliaries. A course in note-taking, therefore, is synonymous to a large extent with a comprehensive course in English.     

Writing: importance, development, and instruction

In this article, we examine why writing is important, how it develops, and effective writing practices. We situate the 5 articles in this special issue of Reading and Writing in this literature, providing a context for the contribution of each paper.     

Constructing and understanding of place value in numerical notation

The purpose of this study was to investigate how children aged five to nine gradually build up an understanding of the characteristics of place-value inherent in the written number system. The task consisted in presenting collections of chips, asking children to produce the corresponding two-digit numerals, and then questioning them in a structured clinical interview about the possible numerical meaning (in terms of correspondence to a number of chips) of each of the digits in the numeral. Results show that the idea that parts of the notation must correspond to mutually exclusive parts of the collection is but slowly built up, and that subsequently it is fleshed out by the use of knowledge concerning oral numeration_— written numeration correspondences. Intuitions concerning «groups of ten» arise later. A fair proportion of eight-year-olds and all nine-years-olds saw the two-digits as corresponding to, on the one hand, a number of units, and on the other, a number of groups of units.     

Developmental relationships in the acquisition of English syntax: writing vs. speech

The acquisition of English morpho-syntactic elements was studied in five adult L2 learners, all native speakers of Spanish, while they were enrolled in a pre-university intensive English program. Data were elicited through a variety of paired oral and written tasks over a three and a half month semester. Samples were analyzed to determine whether speech or writing served as the primary source of morpho-syntactic innovation. The five subjects demonstrated notable differences in their patterns of language development across both modalities. In general, however, writing appeared to be the preferred medium for the emergence of new morpho-syntactic forms and for the development of grammatical accuracy.     

Writing through retellings: an exploratory study of language-impaired and dyslexic populations

This study was designed to examine differences and similarities in the writing of 15 language-impaired, 17 dyslexic and 15 typically developing control subjects matched on chronological age. Subjects ranging in age from 11 to 21 years were required to produce a written language sample using an expository text-retell procedure. The writing of these groups was compared on eight variables across discourse, T-unit, sentence, and word levels. Control subjects performed better than language-impaired and dyslexic subjects on all writing variables. Dyslexic subjects showed better performance than the language-impaired subjects on several variables including, (a) number of T-units, (b) number of ideas, (c) total number of words, and (4) number of different words while showing comparable performance on percentage of spelling and production of grammatically correct sentences. These findings support Bishop and Snowling’s [Psychol. Bull. 130 (2004) 858] position that the differences between these two clinical populations exist in the non-phonological dimensions of language.     

远程英语写作书面反馈模式与生态链构建

写作反馈是读者向作者的输入,其目的是为作者修改文章提供信息,它具有评价、知识传递、促进学习的功能。写作反馈的理论基础主要包括语言输出假设、语言输入假设和二语习得整合理论。纵观国内近20年二语写作反馈研究成果,主要集中在书面反馈模式、反馈效果、影响反馈效果的因素三个方面。反馈模式主要有教师反馈、同伴反馈、教师与同伴反馈相结合模式、电子智能反馈模式四种。制约和影响反馈效果的因素主要有反馈接收者、反馈发出者和反馈方式三个方面。反馈效果是反馈研究最为关注的核心问题,反馈的最终目的在于使学生能够内化反馈的知识点。在远程教学中,由于教与学时空分离、学生基础薄弱、师生比例太大,这给远程写作教学带来新的挑战。构建一种"写作-反馈-内化"的写作反馈生态链是应对这一挑战的新思路。生态链中的"写作"不断输出学习者对语言知识的假设,"反馈"不断发现和修正学习者在语言学习过程中的错误假设,"内化"则不断地运用已有知识吸收语言知识的正确假设。通过不断循环,能够保证远程学习者语言学能和写作能力的不断提高。     

网络聊天中的特殊礼貌策略研究

根据Brown和Levinson的面子理论,分析了88个网络聊天活动中的476个礼貌策略实例,得出在网络聊天室中聊天双方会使用一种特殊的表情符号礼貌策略,这种礼貌策略既可以修复听话人的正面子也可以修复听话人的负面子,它的表现形式主要包括图画、标点符号组合构成的图画、标点符号加英文字母和标点符号加数字。