Context Cues in Early Reading

An investigation was carried out to examine any significant differences in the use of four types of context cues by good and poor readers in the early stages of their reading development. Sentences incorporating proactive and retroactive syntactic, and proactive and retroactive semantic cues were presented in the form of deletions at three levels of difficulty. Sixty-four subjects, 32 of each sex, were drawn equally from the six to seven and seven to eight year age levels and subdivided into groups of good and poor readers. Results indicated that all groups other than the youngest poor readers found the proactive semantic cues the most useful and made miscues displaying semantic associations across cue types. Implications for an understanding of strategies employed in early reading and approaches for instruction are discussed.     

Mappaemundi,Maps and the Romantic Aesthetic in Children’s Books

This article considers the extent to which medieval mappaemundi are an important precedent for literary cartographies in fiction for children. It connects the notion of embeddedness to Peta Mitchell’s (2011) suggestion that mappaemundi refused to entertain the later, post-Enlightenment cartographic distinction between subject and environment, positing instead the “absorption” of the medieval subject into the religious medieval world space. The article documents some of the visual conventions that maps in children’s literature have appropriated from mappaemundi. In doing so, it articulates the contradictions inherent both to ecological rhetoric and cartographic space and the visual lexicon of maps included with children’s books, which contribute to a rhetoric of ecomimesis. The article argues that maps in children’s literature are invested in a rhetoric of ecomimesis, that we are, as Timothy Morton (2009) has it, “embedded” in Nature, and that this embeddedness conceit threatens to forestall critique in that it reproduces the related oppositions of culture/Nature, subject/object and subject/environment even as it appears to collapse their respective terms. In the process, it considers maps in Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (2007/1719), the Alderley Edge books of Alan Garner, Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons (2012/1930), and Rosemary Sutcliff’s Outcast (1998/1955).     

Can parents and teachers provide a reliable and valid report of behavioral inhibition?

Reliability and validity of parent and teacher report of behavioral inhibition (BI) was examined among children aged 3 to 5 years. Confirmatory factor analysis supported 6 correlated factors reflecting specific BI contexts, each loading on a single, higher order factor of BI. Internal consistency was acceptable, with moderate stability over 1 year and strong correlation with a brief inhibition subscale from a temperament questionnaire. Children who were rated by mothers and teachers as high BI took longer to initiate contact with a stranger, spoke less often and for shorter periods, and required more prompting to elicit speech compared with low-BI peers in a simulated stranger interaction task. Father report of BI was significantly associated with mean duration of speech and eye gaze.     

Teachers and Issues of Sexual Orientation

This exploratory paper seeks to examine some of the effects of a differing sexual orientation on teachers’ daily lives in the staffroom and classroom. The data analysed were mainly collected in interviews with gay and lesbian teachers. It is hoped that by opening up some of the issues surrounding teachers and sexual orientations, this paper will help to lessen the stigma so typically attached to gays and lesbians who work in occupations that deal with young children or in jobs that entail moral responsibility.     

The Practical Feasibility of Diary Studies for INSET

Although diary studies have previously been employed for research purposes on INSET courses, the value and effectiveness of log‐keeping from the perspective of the consumer, i.e. the course participants and institution, have not beenfully investigated. This study focused on the use of the diary on intensive inservice courses as a means of formalising participant response to teaching input from the dual perspective of pedagogy and evaluation. The practical implications of introducing diaries as a formai component of INSET are examined and ways explored of adapting the journal to this context.     

Planning for student involvement in a program of supplemental instruction

Implementing a program of supplemental instruction (SI) in the present climate of transition in South Africa requires attention to involving students in planning and conducting the new program. Involved in this process are political opportunities and constraints. This paper recounts the steps (and missteps) taken in beginning an SI program in high risk courses in two academic departments at Border Technikon: Accounting and Management. It documents the steps taken to enlist support of the Student Representative Council (SRC) in setting policy, selecting tutors, and maintaining the program's funding base. We maintain that a successful SI program must draw upon the energies of tertiary level students, both in roles as learners in the high risk courses and as student leaders at an advanced level. Some students may experience both roles. For this process to be more than an imposition from the outside, the program must be a partnership with faculty and students sharing a stake in the outcomes. Both groups must see that they benefit from the smooth working of the SI system. Our results to date indicate that such a joint ownership is occurring. During 1996, he served as the Director of the Academic Development Centre at Border Technikon, East London, South Africa, under the Educators for Africa Program of the International Foundation of Education and Self-Help.     

Masterclass Pedagogy for Multimedia Applications in Teacher Education

This paper describes an elective unit in the application of new technologies for pre‐service teachers which employed a metaphor of masterclasses in its design to engage the students in value‐added interactions around their individual multimedia projects. A masterclass involves the class group auditing an individual’s detailed consultation with a “master” on work in progress. In this way, general points are demonstrated and iteratively developed through worked examples. By sharing a range of projects, the class group developed explicit understandings of pedagogical design based around the concepts of metaphor, productive redundancy, hypertextual links, and information architecture. The design of this unit’s pedagogy of pedagogies is explicated through Christie’s theorisation of curriculum macrogenre and Bernstein’s rules of recognition and realisation to show how the pre‐service teachers moved from being consumers and “natives” of digital environments to become analysts and designers of such environments.     

The influence of teachers’ interests,personalities and life experiences in intercultural languages teaching

This paper reports on a study that investigated teachers’ perceptions about the significance of intercultural understanding (IU) in the modern foreign languages (MFL) curriculum. The research was conducted in the wake of a National Curriculum revision in 2007 in England that for the first time listed ‘IU’ as one of the four key concepts underpinning the study of languages in the Programme of Study. In contrast to other writers who frequently explain MFL teachers’ attention to intercultural learning as a consequence of their (lack of) knowledge about intercultural languages theory or pedagogy, or as the result of contextual factors, our findings suggest that the significance attached to IU seems to be profoundly affected by the interests, personalities and life experiences of individuals. This finding emerged from a qualitative study involving semi-structured interviews conducted with 18 teachers in 13 secondary schools in the North-West of England between May 2008 and June 2009. We illustrate our point by mapping the narratives of four teachers, conveyed through pen-portraits, with an adapted version of Kelchtermans’s personal interpretive framework, and thus draw on narrative inquiry as our research approach. We claim that our hitherto relatively unnoticed finding, i.e. the central influence of the teacher as an individual on intercultural language teaching, has important implications for MFL teacher education. We suggest that the stories of the four teachers could be used as a professional development tool to identify motivators and inhibitors in developing IU that may resonate with practitioners’ own beliefs and practice, and that parallel to this, our adapted Kelchtermans’s framework may be used as a blank template to scaffold self analysis. Whilst this article considers teacher development in intercultural languages education, it also seeks to make a contribution to the literature on the usefulness of teacher narrative as a professional development tool.     

Changing Epistemological Beliefs in Pre-service Teacher Education Students

A teaching programme designed to foster the reflection on and development of more sophisticated epistemological beliefs was implemented with 29 pre-service graduate teacher education students at the Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia. As part of the year-long teaching programme, students were required to reflect in journal entries on the content of an educational psychology unit in relation to their epistemological beliefs. The students engaged in this teaching programme (the research group) were interviewed in relation to their beliefs at the beginning (Time 1) and conclusion (Time 2) of the teaching programme. Students in a comparison group were not encouraged to explicitly reflect on their epistemological beliefs. They were asked to complete written statements about their beliefs about knowing at the beginning (Time 1) and end (Time 2) of the year-long unit. Schommer's (1988, 1990) epistemological beliefs questionnaire was administered to both the comparison and research groups at Time 1 and Time 2. This questionnaire measured beliefs about knowing. The results of both the quantitative and qualitative data analysis indicated that the group of students engaged in the teaching programme experienced more growth in sophisticated epistemological beliefs. The success of the teaching programme has implications for how teacher educators develop learning environments.