The views of Irish primary teachers towards the in-class versus the withdrawal models of support when working with children with dyslexia

This article focuses on the perspectives of primary school teachers on the current provision for students with dyslexia in the mainstream classroom. Five themes emerged from this research and these were (1) Diagnosis, (2) Inclusion, (3) Effective classroom practice, (4) Difficulties encountered in the classroom and (5) Teacher education. The focus of this article is on the theme of Inclusion. The data collected explores the perspectives of twelve primary teachers towards the in-class versus withdrawal models to support children with dyslexia in the mainstream classroom. As the concept of inclusive education has evolved in recent years, the objective of this research was to identify the most effective means of addressing the needs of the dyslexic student in the mainstream classroom. The insights provided by the teachers signify the need for in-class support, as much as possible, to support inclusion for students with dyslexia in the mainstream classroom.     

Beyond Hegemony: Classical Propaganda Theory and Presidential Communication Strategy After the Invasion of Iraq

The “hegemonic” tradition argues that the president enjoys unparalleled power to manage news and opinion during war. This approach has dominated political communication literature on war and the media for over a generation. The war with Iraq, however, provides a major challenge to conventional wisdom. We believe that classical propaganda theory provides a useful corrective to the hegemonic perspective and offers a better way to understand the Bush administration's propaganda strategy and its impact on public opinion. Using a combination of content analysis, opinion data, and analysis of the administration's Iraq-related public addresses, we argue that the president neither dominated war news nor managed public opinion in the manner predicted by hegemonic theories.     

‘We learnt that last week’: reading into the language practices of teachers

The messages teachers convey to their students through their use of language can often go unconsidered, yet such practices can have a significant impact on students and their schooling, and in the creation of learning difficulties. In this paper we employ a discursive and ideological approach to analysing teachers’ language practices and suggest that such systematic examination is warranted given the centrality of ‘teacher talk’ to students’ schooling. We draw attention to these concerns through an analysis of a spoken text between a teacher and student in the context of ‘show and tell’; a dialogue drawn from a larger body of data of interviews with and observations of teachers in six Australian primary schools. The analysis attempts to uncover the meanings conveyed to the student in question, Sam, through his teacher’s language practices and to demonstrate the potentially detrimental effects of these practices on his schooling. Generally, we propose that teachers frequently employ linguistic techniques to refashion students in various ways, according to the norms of schooling; norms that often do not account very well for student difference and which position them as ‘difficult’. Specifically, we argue that Sam’s teacher seems more interested in moulding Sam’s behaviour to conform to the interests of the school than in valuing his heritage and contributions.     

Grammar for writing? An investigation of the effects of contextualised grammar teaching on students’ writing

The role of grammar instruction in the teaching of writing is contested in most Anglophone countries, with several robust meta-analyses finding no evidence of any beneficial effect. However, existing research is limited in that it only considers isolated grammar instruction and offers no theorisation of an instructional relationship between grammar and writing. This study, drawing on a theorised understanding of grammar as a meaning-making resource for writing development, set out to investigate the impact of contextualised grammar instruction on students’ writing performance. The study adopted a mixed-methods approach, with a randomised controlled trial and a complementary qualitative study. The statistical analyses indicate a positive effect on writing performance for the intervention group (e = 0.21; p < 0.001); but the study also indicates that the intervention impact differentially on different sub-groups, benefiting able writers more than weaker writers. The study is significant in being the first to supply rigorous, theorised evidence for the potential benefits of teaching grammar to support development in writing.     

Discourse-aware rumour stance classification in social media using sequential classifiers

Rumour stance classification, defined as classifying the stance of specific social media posts into one of supporting, denying, querying or commenting on an earlier post, is becoming of increasing interest to researchers. While most previous work has focused on using individual tweets as classifier inputs, here we report on the performance of sequential classifiers that exploit the discourse features inherent in social media interactions or ‘conversational threads’. Testing the effectiveness of four sequential classifiers – Hawkes Processes, Linear-Chain Conditional Random Fields (Linear CRF), Tree-Structured Conditional Random Fields (Tree CRF) and Long Short Term Memory networks (LSTM) – on eight datasets associated with breaking news stories, and looking at different types of local and contextual features, our work sheds new light on the development of accurate stance classifiers. We show that sequential classifiers that exploit the use of discourse properties in social media conversations while using only local features, outperform non-sequential classifiers. Furthermore, we show that LSTM using a reduced set of features can outperform the other sequential classifiers; this performance is consistent across datasets and across types of stances. To conclude, our work also analyses the different features under study, identifying those that best help characterise and distinguish between stances, such as supporting tweets being more likely to be accompanied by evidence than denying tweets. We also set forth a number of directions for future research.