Language delays, reading delays, and learning difficulties: interactive elements requiring multidimensional programming

Researchers have hypothesized four levels of instructional dialogue and claimed that teachers can improve children's language development by incorporating these dialogue levels in their classrooms. It has also been hypothesized that enhancing children's early language development enhances children's later reading development. This quasi-experimental research study investigated both of these hypotheses using a collaborative service delivery model for Grade 1 children with language difficulties from a socially and economically disadvantaged urban community in Australia. Comparing the end-of-year reading achievement scores for the 57 children who received the language intervention with those of the 59 children in the comparison group, the findings from this research are supportive of both hypotheses. The interrelationships between learning difficulties, reading difficulties, and language difficulties are discussed along with children's development in vocabulary, use of memory strategies and verbal reasoning, and the need for multidimensional programming.     

Young children's idiosyncratic written algorithms for addition

The research reported in this paper is concerned with the natural written algorithms created by nine- and ten-year olds when solving simple addition problems. It was undertaken with one hundred and seventeen children in Year 5 (Grade 4), who, because of their involvement in the Calculator Aware Number Curriculum (CAN) Project, had not been taught traditional pencil-and-paper algorithms for the basic operations. This provided an opportunity to investigate their responses when asked to solve a selection of additive word problems on paper without the use of calculators. The children's solutions were analyzed in terms of directionality of working and the emergence or otherwise of standard or idiosyncratic written algorithms. A preference for a horizontal layout and for working from left to right was shown to exist, and the children produced a wide variety of original and creative written algorithms.     

When summative computer-aided assessments go wrong: disaster recovery after a major failure

This case study outlines the events of a recent summative computer‐aided assessment (CAA) failure involving 280 first‐year undergraduate students. Post‐test analysis found that the central server had become unexpectedly overloaded, thereby causing the CAA to be abandoned. Practical advice on just what to do in the event of a summative CAA failure is virtually non‐existent in the related literature. In response, this paper provides a detailed account of the post‐failure analysis and recovery activities from a practitioner's (ie, academic) viewpoint. Supported by empirical evidence, the research shows how the concept of “optional substitution” was developed as a pragmatic, equitable, and broadly acceptable solution to the problem.     

Using query logs to establish vocabularies in distributed information retrieval

Users of search engines express their needs as queries, typically consisting of a small number of terms. The resulting search engine query logs are valuable resources that can be used to predict how people interact with the search system. In this paper, we introduce two novel applications of query logs, in the context of distributed information retrieval. First, we use query log terms to guide sampling from uncooperative distributed collections. We show that while our sampling strategy is at least as efficient as current methods, it consistently performs better. Second, we propose and evaluate a pruning strategy that uses query log information to eliminate terms. Our experiments show that our proposed pruning method maintains the accuracy achieved by complete indexes, while decreasing the index size by up to 60%. While such pruning may not always be desirable in practice, it provides a useful benchmark against which other pruning strategies can be measured.     

The Fish and Chip Club

This autobiographical narrative explores how close childhood friendship can be destroyed by the perniciously divisive nature of the 11-plus exam. It describes an irretrievable situation in which all children are victims.     

Language,discipline and ‘teaching like a champion’

This article presents an analysis of various language policy mechanisms currently circulating in secondary schools in England, with a particular focus on those that intermingle ‘language’, ‘standard English’ and ‘discipline’. Although the connections between language, ideology and behaviour are well established within critical educational linguistics, this has not been explored in relation to current education policy in England, which is characterised by an overt focus on standardised English and behaviour ‘management’. In a grounded approach, I explore how the disciplining of language correlates with the disciplining of the body, based on ethnographic-orientated fieldwork undertaken in a London secondary school and drawing on a broad range of policy mechanisms such as curricula, textbooks, classroom artefacts and Doug Lemov’s Teach Like a Champion industry. I show how the current linguistic conservatism found within government policy gets reproduced in school-level policies, pedagogies and classroom interactions, and highlight these relations within a network of policy actors and key terms associated with so-called ‘zero-tolerance’ and ‘no-excuses’ schools. I show how teachers are positioned as language policy managers who work within a system of surveillance, compliance, coercion and control. As such, this article contributes to current thinking within critical language policy and the sociology of education by offering an expanded view of language ideologies in schools, whereby connections between language and discipline are explicitly illustrated and critiqued.