The Simple View of Reading in Bilingual Language-Minority Children Acquiring a Highly Transparent Second Language

The present study evaluated which components within the simple view of reading model better predicted reading comprehension in a sample of bilingual language-minority children exposed to Italian, a highly transparent language, as a second language. The sample included 260 typically developing bilingual children who were attending either the first 2 years (n = 95) or the last 3 years (n = 165) of primary school and who had Italian as an instructional language. Children were administered a comprehensive battery for the assessment of decoding skills, listening comprehension, and reading comprehension latent variables. Results showed that, in both groups, listening comprehension was the most powerful predictor of reading comprehension, followed, only for younger children, by reading accuracy. Reading speed was not a significant predictor. These results confirmed the primary role of listening comprehension in predicting reading comprehension in bilinguals and added important evidence regarding the role of reading accuracy as a predictor of reading comprehension.     

Defining Excellence

The following excerpts are from Chapter Two of Mario D. Fantini's 1986 Regaining Excellence in Education, reprinted by permission of Merrill Publishing Company.     

Children's Early Decontextualized Talk Predicts Academic Language Proficiency in Midadolescence

This study examines whether children's decontextualized talk—talk about nonpresent events, explanations, or pretend—at 30 months predicts seventh-grade academic language proficiency (age 12). Academic language (AL) refers to the language of school texts. AL proficiency has been identified as an important predictor of adolescent text comprehension. Yet research on precursors to AL proficiency is scarce. Child decontextualized talk is known to be a predictor of early discourse development, but its relation to later language outcomes remains unclear. Forty-two children and their caregivers participated in this study. The proportion of child talk that was decontextualized emerged as a significant predictor of seventh-grade AL proficiency, even after controlling for socioeconomic status, parent decontextualized talk, child total words, child vocabulary, and child syntactic comprehension.     

The role of cross-disciplinary academic language skills in disciplinary,source-based writing: investigating the role of core academic language skills in science summarization for middle grade writers

Reading and Writing - Learning to use language in order to complete source-based writing tasks is a challenge for middle grade writers worthy of additional study, especially given that these tasks...     

Voices of children and parents from elsewhere: a glance at integration in Italian primary schools

This study involves 35 research participants: 20 immigrant parents (primarily mothers from South America, North Africa, Eastern Europe and the Middle East) and 15 primary school children, aged 10–11. These children were born outside Italy and primary school was their first encounter with the Italian educational system. We observed their processes of integration through their stories and those of their parents. Our investigation aims to identify factors that support or inhibit their school integration. We adopt an ecological research paradigm, proposing a vision of knowledge as rooted in natural life contexts, focusing on subjectivity. Analysis of the data led to identification of core categories concerning these families’ experiences and their children's encounters with Italian schools. This paper focuses on the children's perspectives of their experiences with school.     

Effects of simultaneous auditory feedback on reading accuracy during reading development

Five groups of twelve right-handed male children from the second to the sixth grade with normal reading efficiency were tested under three conditions of simultaneous amplified auditory feedback, binaurally, to the left and to the right ear, on reading aboud two separate classes of words, nouns and nonwords. Lateralized feedback was supposed to shift auditory attention towards the source of input and modify as a consequence, the functionality of the contralateral hemisphere. Right ear feedback improved reading accuracy with respect to the control (binaural) or left ear condition in the first three grades. No effect was observed in the fifth grade whereas in the sixth grade, the condition of left ear feedback improved only the reading of nouns. Changes in reading accuracy are interpreted according to an hypothesis of a decrement of the left hemisphere involvement during the course of reading development. These changes are discussed in relation to Frith's (1985) psycholinguistic model of reading acquisition.     

The Italian adaptation of courage measure

International Journal for Educational and Vocational Guidance - This project developed and examined the psychometric properties of an Italian version of the Courage Measure, the reduced version...     

Children in residential care: How to evaluate behavioural change

This article reports the results of an observational longitudinal study carried out on four children who lived in a residential community because of their multiproblem families. The aim of this study was to apply the evaluative methodology proposed by Le Poultier (1990) in order to assess I) the processes of change in the children over time and II) the relations between educational practices and observed changes. The findings confirm I) the existence of processes of change in the children; II) the presence of correlations between the displayed behaviour of the children and adult practices. In addition, what emerges is the existence of a dimension (transgression versus co-operation and autonomy) underlying the educational project designed by the adults. The data refer to observations of the behaviour of each staff member on a weekly basis for a six-month period and, at the same time, to the self-observations of each adult regarding the behaviour adopted towards each child. The data were analysed using: I) correlational coefficients to check the relation between the children's behaviour and the social work; II) Correspondence Analysis to permit a simultaneous representation of the developmental changes observed in the four children with respect to social work.     

Activity theory: A framework for design and reporting on research projects based on ICT

We propose using activity theory as a basis for designing and reporting on research projects that focus on information and communication technology (ICT) as a means to support educational processes. Adopting the theory, we describe teaching/learning activities mediated by ICT using a three level analysis: epistemological, methodological, social assistance. The analysis has been applied to the design and reporting of projects in both mathematics education at primary school level and training in technical innovation in commercial enterprises.