Predictive and concurrent relations between literacy skills in Grades 1 and 3: A longitudinal study of Italian children

A sample of 170 Italian children was assessed for reading accuracy, reading speed, text comprehension and spelling in Grades 1 and 3 in order to investigate the concurrent and longitudinal relationships among literacy skills. Main results from multivariate analyses (regression, discriminant and path analyses) indicated that reading speed was the best predictor of later literacy and that spelling was the most stable measure and influenced text comprehension and reading speed. An asymmetry was also observed in the longitudinal relationship between reading and spelling errors, with reading errors predicting later spelling errors and a non-significant result in the opposite direction.     

Funga Alafia 1 : Toward Welcoming,Understanding, and Respecting African American Speakers' Bilingualism and Biliteracy

This article focuses on the development and experiences of two African American Language speakers who are on the precipice of biliteracy and bilingualism. Using a composite counterstory that integrates samples of the girls' language during daily routines as a critical race theoretical analytic tool, we examine their language virtuosity as well as their positive perceptions about AAL. Contrary to pervasive deficit perspectives and narratives about AAL, the counterstory reveals that the girls sometimes viewed Standard English (SE) as bothersome and tedious, and they actively resisted it. At other times, they embraced it when they determined using AAL instead of SE made sense. We capture aspects of their emergent biliteracy and bilingualism as they navigate between two literacies and languages. We demonstrate their transliterate and translingual confidence and proficiency. Implications for educators are included.     

Disambiguated query suggestions and personalized content-similarity and novelty ranking of clustered results to optimize web searches

In this paper, we face the so called “ranked list problem” of Web searches, that occurs when users submit short requests to search engines. Generally, as a consequence of terms’ ambiguity and polysemy, users engage long cycles of query reformulation in an attempt to capture relevant information in the top ranked results.     

Personalised Indexing and Retrieval of Heterogeneous Structured Documents

In this paper the problem of indexing heterogeneous structured documents and of retrieving semi-structured documents is considered. We propose a flexible paradigm for both indexing such documents and formulating user queries specifying soft constraints on both documents structure and content. At the indexing level we propose a model that achieves flexibility by constructing personalised document representations based on users views of the documents. This is obtained by allowing users to specify their preferences on the documents sections that they estimate to bear the most interesting information, as well as to linguistically quantify the number of sections which determine the global potential interest of the documents. At the query language level, a flexible query language for expressing soft selection conditions on both the documents structure and content is proposed.