Culturally and Linguistically Relevant Readalouds

The teacher readaloud is an instructional tool established in its ability to foster children's language and literacy development. Increasing cultural and linguistic diversity and changing standards place pressure on teachers to provide literacy and language instruction relevant to children's everyday lives and learning. This article presents a framework for conducting culturally and linguistically relevant readalouds within two essential components, talk and text, in terms of developing cultural competence, maintaining high academic expectations, and fostering a critical stance. Particular attention is given to the interactive nature of these readalouds and how they can be used to promote children's active co-construction of textually-based meaning.     

On Searching for the Latin American Sportswoman and Finding an Argentine Sports Historian

Abstract

This paper is a personal account of the author’s interest in the field of sports history and its emergence in Argentina. It explores several prejudices and misunderstandings that have contributed to a limited and partial vision of this scholarly discipline.     

Children's experiences of fun and enjoyment during a season of sport education

This paper reports on a 16-week sport education (SE) unit with just over 70 year 5 students (M age = 10.04 years) in one United Kingdom school during the spring and summer terms and discusses students' SE experiences. Student interviews were conducted throughout the season and a questionnaire on different motivation aspects was administered prior to and before completing the SE season. We report and examine the data in relation to hypothesized influences on fun and enjoyment, including being part of a team, autonomy, and improving game play. The principal reasons SE may be more enjoyable than previous physical education lessons include the greater opportunities for autonomy, affiliation, and competition, plus perceived learning.     

Psychometric evaluation of the exercise identity scale among Greek adults and cross-cultural validity

The present study reported on translating the Exercise Identity Scale (EIS: Anderson & Cychosz, 1994) into Greek and examining its psychometric properties and cross-cultural validity based on U.S. individuals' EIS responses. Using four samples comprising 33, 103, and 647 Greek individuals, including exercisers and nonexercisers, and a similar sample comprising 800 U.S. individuals, the concurrent validity, factor structure, internal reliability, test-retest reliability, external validity, gender invariance, and cross-cultural validity of the EIS responses were examined using confirmatory factor analytical procedures. The results supported the concurrent validity, an adequate unidimensional factor structure for the translated EIS and the internal reliability and test-retest reliability over a 6-week interval. Further, cross-gender configural, partial metric, partial strong factorial, and partial strict factorial invariance and cross-cultural configural and partial metric invariance supported the cross-cultural equivalence of the EIS versions. Moreover, the external validity of the translated EIS responses was also supported. Overall, the findings supported the validity of the exercise identity construct outside North American boundaries and the EIS items' equivalence, providing initial evidence for its cross-cultural applicability.     

Adjacency matrix concepts for the analysis of the interconnection of networks

A mathematical theory is developed for an imagined device termed a “junctor”. A junctor could be used to interconnect two n-terminal networks giving rise to another n-terminal network. Actually a junctor is itself a simple network with three banks of n-terminals internally connected in some fashion by perfectly conducting wires. Adjacency matrices are formulated to analyze various junctors and their current flows. The main problem treated concerns conditions which would ensure that the junctor operation is associative.