Early communication strategies: using video analysis to support teachers working with preverbal pupils

Carolyn Anderson is a speech and language therapist who is currently working as a senior lecturer at the University of Strathclyde. In this article she provides an early account of her ongoing research into communication between teachers and pupils with severe and complex learning disabilities. Video recordings were made of teacher-pupil interactions. The recordings were then analysed in terms of the numbers of turns taken by pupils and teachers; the strategies teachers and pupils used to initiate and respond in interactions; and the numbers of information carrying words teachers used with pupils with different levels of language comprehension. Carolyn Anderson's findings will help teachers who want to develop their own awareness of the role they play in communicating with pupils. This research will also support staff who are trying to encourage pupils with learning difficulties to become more actively involved in interactions and teaching and learning opportunities.     

Riding the iceberg: exploiting the Internet to promote one's organisation

An analysis of the electronic marketing options available to publishers, including Institute of Physics Publishing's experience of the effectiveness of some of those options. Particular emphasis is placed on Usenet and E-Mail and what is deemed to be acceptable and unacceptable practice.     

The News Session in Infants and Primary School Classrooms

This paper presents an analysis of the social organisation of news sessions in infants and primary classrooms. We argue that these events are essentially occasions for the initiation of pupils into aspects of school knowledge and culture, although they are ostensibly spaces in the school day where children may introduce their own topics and interests. We show, through a detailed conversational analysis of varieties of morning news events, how these activities are stage‐managed, what the nature of the children's contributions are, and how these are organised to legitimise school knowledge and to define pupil‐teacher relationships, especially the teacher as primary receiver and announcer of news. The transformation of children into pupils is seen to occur in news sessions as much as in any other classroom activity. The distinctive feature of news sessions in the first years of schooling is that these are early instruction in how the private/personal realm can be fitted to the contours of the public/official curriculum, how everyday life interests are subordinated to and appropriated by the culture of the school.