(Re)constructing career education as a socially just practice: An antipodean reflection

The author contends that career education has lost its way, and needs to be (re)located within a critical social justice framework if it is to effectively prepare young people to engage with the social, political and economic discourses that inform the shaping of ‘career(s)’. Relating to the New Zealand context, differing versions of social justice are outlined, the challenges for career education explored, and the potential for change discussed.     

The Media as a Judicial and Police Resource

Abstract

This article examines how media reports of police court trials played an important discursive role in the workings of summary justice and the emergence of the policed society in Scotland in the first half of the nineteenth century. It argues that the dominant messages that trial coverage conveyed were laden with middle-class social and cultural assumptions concerning the accessibility, usefulness and fairness of the courts, and the character and guilt of the accused. Above all, the reports spoke to the intrinsic value of lay magistrates as paternal agents of community conflict resolution and police courts and, more subtly, the police as firm but trustworthy levers of urban discipline.     

Was Humpty Dumpty Right? An Exploratory Study of Semantic Priming and Lexical Access

This study investigates the way subjects gain access to their internal lexicon and assesses the effects of context on this process. The focus is on ambiguous words that are homographic but pronounced differently. A total of 35 adult subjects read aloud from word lists containing the same target homographs. In two conditions the targets were primed by words calculated to influence subjects either towards a regular or irregular pronunciation; a third condition without primers provided a baseline check. The influence of primers on subjects’ pronunciations was recorded and calculated. Results confirmed a significant influence of primers on pronunciation for a majority of target words. Further analysis showed groups of subjects were significantly (p<0.001) influenced by semantic primers. However, results are interpreted cautiously and proposals are made for a more rigorous study using this exploratory work as a basis. Finally, the potential of semantic priming studies for future research is outlined.     

Reading and Comprehension: a longitudinal study of ex‐Reading Recovery students

The paper reports the results of a longitudinal case study conducted in Australia and New Zealand. The study compares the reading and comprehension age of children in their fifth and sixth years in school. Reading and comprehension ages of 121 children who had Reading Recovery intervention at age 6 were compared with those of a Comparison group of 121 children, drawn from the same classes who, at age 6 years, had been better performers in literacy. Reading and comprehension assessment was conducted with the use of the Neale Analysis of Reading and analysed by means of a t‐test. Results show that the mean reading age of ex‐Reading Recovery children was nearly 12 months superior to that of the Comparison group and that the mean comprehension age was nearly 13 months superior at very highly significant levels. The results strongly suggest that Reading Recovery tuition at age 6 years enabled the 121 ex‐Reading Recovery children to make greater progress in literacy than children in the Comparison group.     

Children's Memory and Comprehension of Two Science Programmes

A total of 111 children, 55 aged 8 to 9 years and 56 aged 14 to 15 years of age, watched one of two single‐topic prime‐time science programmes. Recall and comprehension scores following the viewing of the programmes were assessed. In addition, a number of demographic factors including age, sex, linguistic fluency, prior television viewing and reading habits were investigated as possible predictors of learning from television. It was found that age was a significant factor in both recall and comprehension, but even more important was general knowledge. Sex and linguistic fluency was neither systematically nor frequently associated with good performance. Prior viewing habits concerning science programmes on television and reading behaviour were found to have particular effects but were not major predictors of performance. Knowledge growth (defined as differences in performance between pre‐ and post‐test performance on key, repeated, items specifically addressed by the viewed programme) was consistently observed. This major finding indicated clearly that children can learn prime‐time television science information.     

Plausibility and the construal of grammatical relations in illocutionary sentences by deaf and hearing children.

Groups of deaf and hearing children who had not fully mastered the rules for the assignment of the subject of the dependent verb for sentences of the form: Noun Phrase ₁ (NP₁) + Illocutionary Verb + Noun Phrase ₂ (NP₂) + to + Infinitive Verb were tested for the influence of four kinds of plausibility cues. In three sets the social power relations holding between the occupants of the respective NP's were used to construct plausible, neutral and implausible frames as judged by the tendency to construe NP₂ as the subject of the dependent verb. In the fourth, implausible verb (IV), the dependent verb referred to an action difficult for others to control, and so was neutral for regular illocutionary verbs requiring NP₂ as subject, but positive for NP₁ construals appropriate to the irregular illocutionaly verb, promise. The hearing children proved sensitive to the plausibility cues, showing much larger differences in success with the regular and exceptional verb for the plausible than for the implausible set, with the neutral and IV sets occupying intervening positions. Deaf children did not respond to the plausibility variable. It was concluded that although it had been demonstrated that the referential meaning of individual words can influence the construal of meaning of word combinations, the strategy might not be successful with the deaf unless preceded by further training in the denotative and connotative meanings of individual words.