Building Bridges in Early Literacy

This paper reports on a case study of two teachers teaching reading in the child's first year of school. The researcher analysed the largely spontaneous, literacy related responses made by teachers to children and the comments these teachers made about their thoughts and actions in interviews after the teaching sessions. Very little direct teaching was observed and teachers seemed to be reacting more often than working in a proactive way. This has been termed ‘crisis management’ by some, but it is argued here that this ‘reaction’ was, in reality, purposeful interaction.

These teachers worked at building bridges between children's experience and their literacy learning. Analysis of the interactions suggested ways in which teachers may adopt procedures that go some way towards compensating for the differences between home and school learning. The writer argues that demands for an organisational structure that reduces individualisation could be counter‐productive for the youngest children in school.     

Brokers on the boundary: Academy-industry liaison in Canadian universities

As scientific research has taken on increasingeconomic significance so research managementhas become a priority for universities and theState. Over the last two decades,Industry-Liaison Offices have become anestablished part of the infrastructure ofCanadian universities. The managers of theseoffices are the quintessential boundary workerswho are charged with translating academicscience into intellectual property. Someuniversities operate with an `internal' modelwhere the office is fully integrated into theuniversity's structure. Other universitiesoperate with an `external' model where theoffice operates outside the university eitheras a non-profit or a for-profit corporation.This article traces the institutionalization ofthese offices and commercialization in Canadianuniversities. Using documentary analysis andinterviews we document the key issues for thesemanagers in four `case' study universities, asthey attempt to commercialize universityresearch. We describe how these managers`capture the benefits' of discoveries generatedby researchers – the process of identifying,protecting, and exploiting intellectualproperty. Finally, we identify four majorthemes: intellectual property policy; cultureconflict; boundary work; and the public good. We end by raising the question about what islost when `capital' is allowed to enteruniversity culture in such a direct manner.     

How Much Does a Shared Name Make Things Similar? Linguistic Labels, Similarity, and the Development of Inductive Inference

This article examines the development of inductive generalization, and presents a model of young children's induction and two experiments testing the model. The model specifies contribution of linguistic labels and perceptual similarity to young children's induction and predicts a correspondence between similarity judgment and induction of young children. In Experiment 1, 4- to 5-year-olds, 7- to 8-year-olds, and 11- to 12-year-olds were presented with triads of schematic faces (a Target and two Test stimuli), which varied in perceptual similarity, with one of the Test stimuli sharing a linguistic label with the Target, and another having a different label. Participants were taught an unobservable biological property about the Target and asked to generalize the property to one of the Test stimuli. Although 4- to 5-year-olds' proportions of label-based inductive generalizations varied with the degree of perceptual similarity among the compared stimuli, 11- to 12-year-olds relied exclusively on labels, and 7- to 8-year-olds appeared to be a transitional group. In Experiment 2 these findings were replicated using naturalistic stimuli (i.e., photographs of animals), with perceptual similarity manipulated by "morphing" naturalistic pictures into each other in a fixed number of steps. Overall results support predictions of the model and point to a developmental shift from treating linguistic labels as an attribute contributing to similarity to treating them as markers of a common category-a shift that appears to occur between 8 and 11 years of age.     

Television and Language Development

Educational television is widely used in British primary schools to aid language development. In the light of current theories of language acquisition and development, this paper considers the characteristics of the medium which may militate against effective language learning. It is argued that further research is needed to ascertain whether language development is in fact promoted by television programmes and, if so, which programmes and what type of format are best suited for the purposes. Work already carried out in the USA and suggestions for future work in Britain are discussed.