Anglo-Western international school teachers as global middle class: portraits of three families

ABSTRACT

This exploratory study on the global middle class (GMC) examines three representative experiences of the tens of thousands of Anglo-Western international schoolteachers (ISTs), who teach in private, K-12, English-immersion international schools for extended periods of time. The notion of GMC provokes consideration of social class making and forms of belonging of professional and managerial service workers who are ‘middling actors’ in the flows of transnational migration. We ground our analysis by examining three IST families as a unique group within the GMC. We find that ISTs, oriented by pre-sojourn middle-class histories, differentially (re)fashion their social class locations in the more elite transnational milieu of the international schools. These families accumulate and exchange economic, cultural and social capital under their transnational routes, connections and returns. Their children’s access to an elite international education as a condition of their international employment represents a unique form of school choice.     

Can Bilingualism Mitigate Set-Shifting Difficulties in Children With Autism Spectrum Disorders?

This study investigated the effects of bilingualism on set-shifting and working memory in children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). Bilinguals with ASD were predicted to display a specific bilingual advantage in set-shifting, but not working memory, relative to monolinguals with ASD. Forty 6- to 9-year-old children participated (20 ASD, 20 typically-developing). Set-shifting was measured using a computerized dimensional change card sort (DCCS) task, and by parent report of executive functioning in daily life. Results showed an advantage for bilingual relative to monolingual children with ASD on the DCCS task, but not for set-shifting in daily life. Working memory was similar for bilinguals and monolinguals with ASD. These findings suggest that bilingualism may mitigate some set-shifting difficulties in children with ASD.     

Revisiting the scrambling complexity hypothesis in sentence processing: a self-paced reading study on anomaly detection and scrambling in Hindi

The scrambling complexity hypothesis based on working memory or locality accounts as well as syntactic accounts have proposed that processing a scrambled structure is difficult. However, the locus of this difficulty in sentence processing remains debatable. Several studies on multiple languages have explored the effect of scrambling on sentence processing and not all languages have shown an advantage for the canonical word order. Using a self-paced reading paradigm, we studied the effect of scrambling on semantic anomaly detection in Hindi sentence comprehension employing three word order types. Reading times on critical verbs, judgment latency, and error rates showed significant effect of word order type. The results further revealed significant interactions between word order and anomaly type. The patterns of results suggest that the canonical word order does not necessarily have a processing advantage in terms of speed and accuracy over non-canonical orders and do not provide support to sentence processing accounts that assume an advantage for canonical structures. The results indicate that processing speed depends on the distance between the subject and the verb, thus supporting a locality dependent working memory based model of sentence processing. The results provide evidence for the role of specific cognitive processes in Hindi sentence processing with further implications for language and literacy acquisition in Hindi.     

Letter to the Editor: Physics for Women: The Last Frontier

Journal of Science Education and Technology -