Suprasegmental Phonology Development and Reading Acquisition: A Longitudinal Study

Previous studies implicate suprasegmental phonology in reading acquisition. However, little is known about how suprasegmental sensitivity develops or how it contributes to reading. Here, 130 Spanish primary-school children participated in this 2-year longitudinal study. Nonlinguistic rhythm, lexical-stress sensitivity and metrical-stress sensitivity, along with phonological awareness, vocabulary, nonverbal intelligence, and reading aloud, were assessed on five occasions. Results suggest that prosody abilities have different developmental trajectories and that prosody explains unique variance in reading beyond that explained by other factors. There was some evidence that the contribution of each prosody skill occurred at different phases in reading development. Nonlinguistic rhythm, lexical-stress sensitivity, and metrical-stress sensitivity assessed at the end of kindergarten, the start of Grade 1, and the end of Grade 1, respectively, predicted reading performance 6 months later. Nevertheless, sample size and reliability temper the conclusions that can be made. The implications of prosody skills for literacy development are discussed.     

Teaching About Electricity in Primary School Multimodality and Variation Theory as Analytical Lenses

Research in Science Education - Primary school topics involving abstract concepts are challenging to teach. Electric circuits can be simply constructed but complex to explain. New approaches in...     

Grade 7 Students Reading Graphic Novels: ‘You Need To Do a Lot of Thinking’

A multifaceted, classroom‐based research project explored how developing Grade 7 students’ knowledge of literary and illustrative elements affects their understanding, interpretation and analysis of picturebooks and graphic novels, and their subsequent creation of their own print texts. Analysis of two sources of data, the students’ written responses to Amulet ( Kibuishi 2008 ), one of the graphic novels read and discussed during the study, and the students’ opinions about the knowledge that is required to read and understand a graphic novel, indicated how the instruction about various graphic novel conventions had impacted the students’ awareness of and knowledge about the structural design of these multimodal texts.     

Richard Meister 80 Jahre

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

Book Reviews

Serial Publications: Guidelines for Good Practice in Publishing Printed and Electronic Journals, 2nd edition, by Diane Brown, Elaine Stott and Anthony Watkinson Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers 2003, £27 (members), £30 (non‐members), 108 pp., paperback. ISBN 0‐907341‐22‐5. Available from http://www.alpsp.org/pub3.htm The Case for Institutional Repositories: A SPARC Position Paper prepared by Raym Crow, SPARC Senior Consultant Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, Washington DC. Release 1.0, 2002. Available at: www.arl.org/sparc The Case for Institutional Repositories: A SPARC Position Paper prepared by Raym Crow, SPARC Senior Consultant Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, Washington, DC. Release 1.0, 2002. Available at: www.arl.org/sparc Internet Law: Text and Materials by Chris Reed Butterworths Tolley, 2000, £24.95, paperback. ISBN 0406981418 Intellectual Property Law by Lionel Bently and Brad Sherman Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2001, £32.99 (paperback), 1136 pp. ISBN 0‐19‐876343‐3 Clearing the Way: Copyright Clearance in UK Libraries by Elizabeth Gadd LISU Occasional Paper no. 31, Library & Information Statistics Unit (LISU), Department of Information Science, Loughborough University. ISBN 1 901786 51 X Electronic Journals and User Behaviour: Learning for the Future from the SuperJournal Project by David Pullinger and Christine Baldwin Deedot Press, 2002, £14.95. ISBN 0‐954‐2924‐0‐5 Electronic Ecology: A Case Study of Electronic Journals in Context by Karla L. Hahn Association of Research Libraries, 79 pp., 2001, $45. ISBN 0‐918006‐46‐1 The Transition from Paper: Where Are We Going and How Will We Get There edited by R. Stephen Berry and Anne Simon Moffat American Academy of Arts and Sciences, published online (2001): www.amacad.org/publications/trans.htm The Transition from Paper: Where Are We Going and How Will We Get There edited by R. Stephen Berry and Anne Simon Moffat American Academy of Arts and Sciences, published online (2001): www.amacad.org/publications/trans.htm E‐Serials, Publishers, Libraries, Users and Standards, 2nd edn, edited by Wayne Jones The Haworth Press Inc., 2003, 294 pp. paperback ISBN 0789012294     

Supplemental Reading Instruction for Students at Risk for Reading Disabilities: Improve Reading 30 Minutes at a Time

Supplemental reading instruction provides a way to improve the reading outcomes of students at risk for reading difficulties and to meet the challenges produced by increases in student diversity in today’s classrooms. The research–based intervention described in this article includes intensive, explicit, and systematic reading instruction in five areas: fluency, phonemic awareness, instructional–level reading with an emphasis on comprehension, word analysis, and spelling. This intervention was effective in improving the reading skills of low SES, second–grade English monolingual and English–language learners.     

Characteristics of SAT Quantitative Items Showing Improvement After Coaching Among Black Students From Low-Income Families: An Exploratory Study

The present exploratory investigation is an extension of a 1985 study that evaluated a Scholastic Aptitude Test preparation program involving black urban students. The present study was conducted to determine if there are identifiable characteristics of quantitative items associated with a susceptibility to coaching. Items showing p-value improvements of. 10 after coaching were compared with items not showing such improvements; comparisons were made in terms of the content, type. format, level of cognitive requirement, and position of the items. Items showing improvement were found across content areas, formats, and type. Findings are discussed in relation to the usefulness and improvement of well-designed supplemental instructional programs that have the potential to affect criterion performance in mathematics     

Who determines teacher work: The teacher,the organization,or both?

This paper examines how teachers responded when some organizational constraints on their work were loosened and why they responded as they did. It first reviews the sociological literature on teacher work to identify the main determinants studied. It then presents results of an ethnographic study of teachers in an urban school. The literature tends to portray teacher work as overly determined and may remove more responsibility from teachers for determining their own work than is warranted.