Cooking the books

This article is the text of a talk given to the Summer School in Children's Literature held at Worcester in July, 1992.Adèle Geras has been writing books for children and young adults since 1976. She lives in Manchester.     

Communicative Antecedents of Political Persuasion: Political Discussion,Citizen News Creation,and the Moderating Role of Strength of Partisanship

Although much attention has been paid to how media use and interpersonal discussion motivate people to engage in political persuasion, and despite recent efforts to study the role of digital media technologies, less is known about the creation of news and public affairs content online. This study sheds light on how online content creation works alongside other communicative behaviors, such as news use and political discussion, to affect attempted political persuasion. Using two-wave panel survey data, we find that political discussion and citizen news creation mediate the relationships between online and traditional news use, on one hand, and attempted persuasion, on the other. Furthermore, strength of partisanship moderates the relationship between content creation and attempted persuasion. Findings are discussed in light of their implications for the political communication and public sphere processes.     

Sport and Civilisation: Violence Mastered. From the Lack of a Definition for Violence to the Illusory Pacifying Role of Modern Sports

Following the seminal works of Norbert Elias, with regard to the ‘civilising process’, modern sports are generally considered by the scientific community as being, on the one hand, a privileged means that has long facilitated and contributed to ‘the control and learning of the self-control of impulses’ and, on the other, as a political device, which has facilitated, by penetrating into the private sphere in a restrained and play-oriented fashion, the state's monopoly of violence. They are also considered to have facilitated the socio-genesis of modern states. But is this link so evident that this ‘new’ social configuration can be considered a new tool at the service of violence control? Acceptance is so strong that one can almost forget the contradictions, at least the questions, which can and should emerge from this proposition. It should in fact face up to criticism on a certain number of concrete points: definition of violence, rejection of the long-term view, sport be strictly considered in the light of the pacification of habits and social control, hooliganism, etc. This introductory article presents a series of reflections which aim to enrich Elias's theory by underlining both its accuracy and its weak points.     

Structures of argumentative discourse: Effects of type of referential space

Written argumentative texts were collected from 7 to 14 year-old-children in two situations: one in which a scientific-like issue was to be debated (formal discourse: FD) and one in which an opinion was to be defended (natural discourse: ND). The structure of the supporting arguments advanced in the individual protocols were analyzed. Various structural indices were defined and calculated for each protocol, and then input into a factorial correspondence analysis. In both the FD and ND conditions, the main factorial axis opposes long protocols to short ones. This finding held true even though the other indices were weighted to compensate for protocol length. The length variable thus appears to be a discourse characteristic as such. Furthermore, long FD protocols were associated with embedded structures and a substantial amount of rewording. Long ND protocols had a low degree of embedding, and contained many accumulated arguments and thematic breaks. The second axis opposes sequential chaining of arguments to argument coordination in FD. In ND, it opposes the absence of structure and many rewordings to a variety of more or less highly organized structures, but without sequential chaining. These analyses revealed some interesting differences between formal and natural discourse: the key role played by sequential chaining in FD versus the insignificance of this type of structure in ND, and the important but different role of rewording in FD and ND. Protocol length was found to be strongly linked to subject age: older subjects have more arguments at their disposal. But in addition to acquiring the ability to write longer texts, older children are able to use different structures for argumentation, depending on the type of referential space involved.     

Analyses de séances en classe et stabilité des pratiques d’enseignants de mathématiques expérimentés du second degré

In this paper we tackle the issue of an eventual stability of teachers’ activity in the classroom. First we explain what kind of stability is searched and how we look for the chosen characteristics: we analyse the mathematical activity the teacher organises for students during classroom sessions and the way he manages the relationship between students and mathematical tasks. We analyse three one-hour sessions for different groups of 11 year old students on the same content and with the same teacher, and two other sessions for 14 year old and 15 year old students, on analogous contents, with the same teacher (another one). Actually it appears in these two examples that the main stabilities are tied with the precise management of the tasks, at a scale of some minutes, and with some subtle characteristic touches of the teacher’s discourse. We present then a discussion and suggest some inferences of these results.

Phonological decoding enhances orthographic facilitation of vocabulary learning in first graders

Reading and Writing - An experiment examined orthographic facilitation of vocabulary learning, that is, whether showing students spellings of novel words during learning helps them remember the...     

New Insights on Picasso’s Blue Period Painting La famille Soler

The study of La Famille Soler using non-invasive imaging, molecular, structural, and elemental analysis allowed the re-examination of changes of the work. Considered as the earliest of Picasso’s versions of Le déjeuner sur l’herbe by E. Manet, evidence suggests that an underlying landscape painted by Vidal in 1903 also referred to Manet’s masterpiece. On the other hand, new results suggest that the cubist sketch undertaken by Picasso in 1912, prior to the current blue background, could be an uncompleted transformation of Vidal’s landscape into synthetic cubism. Through study the main pigments used in the underlying compositions were successfully identified.