A plea for research on lay literacy

This paper distinguishes scribal literacy, the ability to read and write, from lay literacy, the pervasive set of assumptions taken for granted by readers and non-readers who participate in a literate society. The task for the study of literacy is to uncover and examine these assumptions. The route to the discovery of these literate assumptions is through a consideration of the relations between the vernacular and the literate forms of language.     

Best-bet channels for integrated soil fertility management communication and dissemination along the agricultural product value-chain: a comparison of northern Ghana and western Kenya

Purpose: The aim of this paper is to comparatively assess the most suitable channels for dissemination of agricultural innovations along the entire information value chain.

Design/Methodology/Approach: We calculated information scores to measure channel preference from a randomly selected sample of farmers: 285 in Tamale, Ghana and 300 in Kakamega, Kenya. Using t-tests we compared the information score differences of different channels between farmers who adopted Integrated Soil Fertility Management and those who did not.

Findings: The highest information scores were observed for radio along the entire value chain for both locations. However, farmers in Tamale prefered interpersonal channels for processing information. Radio and farmer field days had the highest rankings for production information at both locations. Radio, workshops and interpersonal channels (traders and neighbours/friends/relatives) were best-bet channels for marketing and procesing information.

Practical implication: Extension agents should place more emphasis on channels such as radio, farmer field days, and workshops as they may offer more efficient delivery of information packages at all levels, whilst recognizing the central role of interpersonal channels.

Theoretical implication: The nexus between the uses and gratification, adoption, diffusion of innovations theories and the collaborative communication theory on one hand, and the agricultural product value chain framework on the other, is highlighted. Farmers’ preference for information channels is not predicated on the stage of the value chain.

Originality/Value: In the current context of weak agricultural knowledge and innovation systems in African agriculture, agricultural producers are poorly informed about the current innovations. This study furnishes empirical evidence on the best-bet information channels to be used by extension workers and change agents to disseminate and communicate system innovations.     

The indigenous and the imported: The New Zealand school system

New Zealand (Aotearoa) was colonized from Britain and the colonizers imposed on the indigenous Maori people a foreign view of education. From then on tradition has vied with local adaptations to produce a school system with substantial traces of the Old Country but with many local features. The curriculum for boys continued to dominate, with that for girls struggling to make itself felt. There has been constant debate about basics and frills though these terms have not been clearly defined. More recently there has been more serious consideration of the curriculum but this has been overtaken by a market forces view of schooling. A new administration system comes into operation on 1st October 1989. The future is unclear but it is reasonable to hope that there will continue a dialectic which may one day produce a genuine synthesis suited to the multicultural nature of Aotearoa.

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Zusammenfassung Neuseeland (Aotearoa) wurde von Großbritannien kolonisiert, und die Kolonialherren zwangen dem einheimischen Volk der Maori ein fremdes Erziehungssystem auf. Von da an konkurrierten Tradition und lokale Anpassungsformen. so daß ein Schulsystem mit wesentlichen Merkmalen des Alten Landes, aber trotzdem mit vielen lokalen Grundzügen aufgebaut wurde. Das Curriculum der Jungen dominiert weiterhin das Curriculum der Mädchen, welches nur mühsam zur Geltung kommt. Es wurde ständig über Grundzüge und Extras debattiert, obwohl diese Begriffe nicht klar definiert sind. In letzter Zeit machte man sich ernsthaftere Gedanken über das Curriculum, dies wurde aber von einer marktorientierten Erziehungsauffassung überholt. Am 1. Oktober 1989 wurde ein neues Verwaltungssystem eingeführt. Die Zukunft ist unklar, aber es besteht begründete Hoffnung, daß eine Dialektik fortgeführt wird, die eines Tages eine echte Synthese hervorbringt, die der multikulturellen Kultur Aotearoas gerecht wird.

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Résumé La Nouvelle Zélande a été colonisée par la Grande Bretagne, et les colonisateurs ont imposé un système d'éducation étranger à la population indigène maori. Dès lors, la tradition et les adaptations locales rivalisèrent pour produire un système scolaire comportant des traces substantielles du vieux pays et de nombreuses caractéristiques locales. Le curriculum pour les garçons n'a pas cessé de dominer alors que celui pour les filles lutte toujours pour s'imposer. Il y a un débat permanent sur l'essentiel et le superflu, bien que ces termes n'aient pas été clairement définis. Récemment, on s'est occupé plus sérieusement du curriculum, mais cet intérêt a été dépassé par une vision de l'instruction déterminée par les forces du marché. Un nouveau système administratif entre en vigueur le l^er octobre 1989. Le futur est incertain mais il est raisonnable d'espérer que se poursuivra la dialectique qui pourrait produire un jour une véritable synthèse adaptéc à la nature multiculturelle d'Aotearoa.

     

Teachers’ perceptions of the inclusion of marginalised groups

This paper is based on the concept of inclusion as a process of recognising and minimising the barriers to learning and participation of all children, with teachers as the key players in implementing inclusion in practice. There are two key questions: (1) How do teachers rank different groups of marginalised children? (2) How do teachers see their own role, the role of the marginalised and other children, and their parents in the inclusion process? The groups included in the research were children with special needs, migrants from former Yugoslavia, Roma/Gypsies and children from poor families. In the latter group, it also looked at their counterparts, the children of wealthy parents. Research carried out on a representative sample of primary school teachers in Slovenia showed that children with special needs are among all surveyed groups of children those seen as the most helpless. For these children, teachers are also most likely to lower learning and discipline standards, while at the same time feeling the least qualified to teach them and seeing them also as having the lowest abilities. In the teachers’ opinion, parents of other children have the greatest reservations when their child associates with a Roma/Gypsy child, and teachers also put the least trust in Roma/Gypsy parents.     

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The media are normatively expected to play significant roles in conflictual discussions within national and international communities. As previous research shows, digital platforms make scholars rethink these roles based on media behavior in online communicative environments as well as on the structural limitations of the platforms. At the same time, traditional dichotomies between information dissemination and opinion formation roles, although seemingly universal, also vary across cultures. We look at four recent conflicts of comparable nature in the United States, Germany, France, and Russia to assess the roles that legacy media have performed in the respective ad hoc discussions on Twitter. Our approach differs from previous studies, as we combine content analysis of tweets by the media and journalists with the resulting positions of the media in the discussion graphs. Our findings show that, despite the overall trend of the “elite” and regional media sticking to information dissemination, online-only media and individual journalists vary greatly in their normative strategies, and this is true across countries. We also show that combining performance in content and social network analysis may allow for reconceptualization of media roles in a more flexible way.     

On cross-lingual retrieval with multilingual text encoders

Information Retrieval Journal - Pretrained multilingual text encoders based on neural transformer architectures, such as multilingual BERT (mBERT) and XLM, have recently become a default paradigm...     

Predicting the academic achievement of Puerto Rican and Mexican-American ninth-grade students

The study examines the predictive value of several variabls on ninth-grade grade point average for Mexican-American and Puerto Rican high school students. English and Spanish proficiency in reading, writing, speaking, and understanding the language as well as the use of Spanish or English in the home represented the language variables. The students' immigration status, gender, place of geographic residence, and mother's education were also included. Gender andimmigration status significantly predicted GPA. English proficiency was significantly different for the two groups, and the more English-proficient Mexican-Americans did more poorly in high school. No other language variables were significant predictors of the students' GPA in the study.