Effects of modified-implement training on fast bowling in cricket

The effects of training with overweight and underweight cricket balls on fast-bowling speed and accuracy were investigated in senior club cricket bowlers randomly assigned to either a traditional (n = 9) or modified-implement training (n = 7) group. Both groups performed bowling training three times a week for 10 weeks. The traditional training group bowled only regulation cricket balls (156 g), whereas the modified-implement training group bowled a combination of overweight (161-181 g), underweight (151-131 g) and regulation cricket balls. A radar gun measured the speed of 18 consecutive deliveries for each bowler before, during and after the training period. Video recordings of the deliveries were also analysed to determine bowling accuracy in terms of first-bounce distance from the stumps. Bowling speed, which was initially 108 +/- 5 km h(-1) (mean +/- standard deviation), increased in the modified-implement training group by 4.0 km x h(-1) and in the traditional training group by 1.3 km x h(-1) (difference, 2.7 km x h(-1); 90% confidence limits, 1.2 to 4.2 km x h(-1)). For a minimum worthwhile change of 5 km x h(-1), the chances that the true effect on bowling speed was practically beneficial/trivial/harmful were 1.0/99/< 0.1%. For bowling accuracy, the chances were 1/48/51%. This modified-implement training programme is not a useful training strategy for club cricketers.     

Making News Today: a tool for adoption of ethics principles using technology‐supported television journalism

There are movements internationally towards curricula that incorporate values and citizenship education. In Australia, this movement has been illustrated with the adoption of a national curriculum in values education. This has arisen from the perceived need for citizens to hold values around the rights and responsibilities of functioning within a democracy. The Making News Today programme has been designed to develop a range of literacies enabling learners, for example, to read the media beyond the interests of the elite. The programme incorporates a journalistic process for television news production for middle school students using laptop and handheld video technologies, with embedded ethics and values education. The article reports on an analysis of the implementation of this programme with middle school students in Australia with reference to student adoption of ethical stances in the journalistic process and the implications for the use of this project in developing ethics, values and citizenship as part of the curriculum process.     

Helping Taiwanese Graduate Students Help Themselves: Applying Corpora to Industrial Management English as a Foreign Language Academic Reading and Writing

Lack of knowledge in the conventional use of vocabulary and multiword patterns in one's respective field of expertise causes Taiwanese students to produce academic writing that is markedly “non-nativelike.” This is because Taiwanese students are first and foremost second language readers and often have difficulty “picking up on” the regularly encountered language patterns found in scholarly texts. As one step in determining a solution to this problem, this article reports on a pilot implementation encouraging graduate Taiwanese students for whom English is a foreign language to use self-editing techniques in their own field-specific academic writing by use of a corpus tool. Classroom interviews, draft comparisons, and individual stimulated recall interviews showed a difference in acceptance and success after using the corpus tool (StringNet Navigator) as an aid to self-editing academic English writing. The corpus tool's functions, results of its use by industrial management graduate students for self-editing academic writing, and pedagogical implications are described.     

Phonological Processing and Word Reading in Typically Developing and Reading Disabled Children: Severity Matters

In this study word reading (WR) fluency was used to dichotomously classify 1,598 Dutch children at different cutoffs, indicating (very) poor or (very) good reading performance. Analysis of variance and receiver operating characteristics were used to investigate the effects of rapid automatized naming (RAN) and phonemic awareness (PA) in predicting group membership. The highest predictive values were found for the combination of RAN and PA, particularly for the poorest readers. Furthermore, results indicate that with the severity of impairment, WR is more dominated by deficient PA, which is interpreted as an enduring problem with sublexical processing. Another main result is that with the increase of reading skill, the contribution of PA diminishes, whereas the contribution of RAN remains fairly constant for the whole reading fluency continuum. These results warrant the conclusion that whereas PA hallmarks reading disability, RAN appears to be the default predictor for above-average or excellent reading proficiency.