Who is not multilingual now?

What is the relationship between research into multilingualism and research concerned more generally with language and communication in mathematics education? Diversity in linguistic practices is universal in modern society and poses problems for teaching and learning even in apparently monolingual contexts. Research in multilingualism and mathematics education offers constructs and insights that can inform research and pedagogy more widely.     

College and university planning in an era of contraction

Drawing from published case studies of U.S. institutions and from case studies conducted in the U.K., the author assesses the causes and characteristics of decline among institutions of higher education and the various types of institutional planning responses. Planning under conditions of instability and decline is held to be significantly different from planning under conditions of growth in that the politics of planning are more intensive and highly defensive. Changes in the standards for organizational consensus in planning under decline are also discussed. The problems and advantages inherent in developing strategic contingency plans as opposed to developing strategic planning policies are noted.The author concludes with a summarization of the contrasting planning styles characteristic of U.S. institutions, U.K. polytechnics and U.K. universities, noting that the model and success of recent University Grants Committee selective cuts among many institutions is more likely to be transferred to the polytechnic sector than across the Atlantic to U.S. institutions.     

Horizontal Solidarities and Molten Capitalism: The subject,intersubjectivity, self and the other in late modernity

Friendship is a generative topic because it covers questions about the self and the social, so encompassing the political, public, personal and interpersonal negotiation of difference. Friends can embody the resistance as well as the enactment of 'fixing' positions as shown within recent ethnographic work on friendship as identity work (Hey, 1997 , 'The Company She Keeps' , Open University Press). Theorised as a practice about making up and breaking up--about coming to understandings and mis/understandings--friendship has been taken as a metaphor as well as a statement about the im/possibilities of citizenship (Hey, 2001, 'Dancing Round Hanbags', University of Lisbon). This collection of Discourse articles on re-theorising friendship is exceptionally timely as the authors contribute to debates about the regulation of childhood as well as new times social theory. They reveal friendship as the site of reflexivity and tradition and in so doing show it as one of the few social and interpersonal relations in which young children can exercise any form of social control. These accounts might then be said to provide a particularly useful reality check upon the competing versions of 'the private (subject)' found in contrasting accounts of late modernity. In this article I seek to set this work on relationship cultures against a brief discussion of the current provenance of the subject in recent social theory. In scanning high abstraction I argue for more modest explorations in the making of inter- and intra-subjectivity associated with feminist poststructuralist work on class, gender and social difference.     

Impact of sustained professional development in STEM on outcome measures in a diverse urban district

Sustained professional development can support STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) reform. The authors describe a 3-year study of sustained professional development for 3 diverse urban schools across the salient factors of fidelity of implementation of project-based learning, development of professional learning communities, and student achievement. Qualitative and quantitative data were collected. The students who experienced the greatest fidelity of implementation exhibited the greatest gains (d = 1.41–2.03) on standardized test scores, while those with the lowest fidelity of implementation exhibited negative gains (d = –0.16 to –0.08). Qualitative data indicated teachers perceived there were multiple benefits from the implementation of project-based learning.     

Nonsense passage reading as a diagnostic aid in the study of adult familial dyslexia

We examined Nonsense-Passage oral reading in adults, using data derived from new and previously published studies (Finucci et al 1976, Gross-Glenn et al 1985). Time-scores and error-frequency data are presented for five samples of non-dyslexic readers with a minimum of a high-school education and no childhood history of dyslexia (N=127). Considerable uniformity is demonstrated across these samples, and reading performance of non-dyslexic individuals contrasts sharply with that observed in four samples of adult familial dyslexics. Both affected and compensated-affected dyslexic subjects read the passages significantly more slowly and with more errors than did nondyslexic readers. Results are discussed in relation to the cognitive and neural processes that may underlie this specific reading difficulty in dyslexics. We have found Nonsense-Passage reading to be especially useful in family studies of inherited dyslexia as a means of quantifying oral reading deficits in adults who have learned to compensate for their children reading difficulties.     

What does Social Semiotics have to Offer Mathematics Education Research?

Social Semiotics, based on the work of the linguist Michael Halliday, emphasises the ways in which language functions in our construction and representation of our experience and of our social identities and relationships. In this paper, I provide an introduction to the theory and its analytic tools, considering how they can be applied in the field of mathematics education. Some research questions that may be raised and addressed from this perspective are identified. An illustrative example is offered, demonstrating a social semiotic approach to addressing questions related to construction of the nature of school mathematical activity in writing produced by secondary school students.     

Vocabulary Use by Low, Moderate, and High ASL-Proficient Writers Compared to Hearing ESL and Monolingual Speakers

The written English vocabulary of 72 deaf elementary school students of various proficiency levels in American Sign Language (ASL) was compared with the performance of 60 hearing English-as-a-second-language (ESL) speakers and 61 hearing monolingual speakers of English, all of similar age. Students were asked to retell "The Tortoise and the Hare" story (previously viewed on video) in a writing activity. Writing samples were later scored for total number of words, use of words known to be highly frequent in children's writing, redundancy in writing, and use of English function words. All deaf writers showed significantly lower use of function words as compared to their hearing peers. Low-ASL-proficient students demonstrated a highly formulaic writing style, drawing mostly on high-frequency words and repetitive use of a limited range of function words. The moderate- and high-ASL-proficient deaf students' writing was not formulaic and incorporated novel, low-frequency vocabulary to communicate their thoughts. The moderate- and high-ASL students' performance revealed a departure from findings one might expect based on previous studies with deaf writers and their vocabulary use. The writing of the deaf writers also differed from the writing of hearing ESL speakers. Implications for deaf education and literacy instruction are discussed, with special attention to the fact that ASL-proficient, deaf second-language learners of English may be approaching English vocabulary acquisition in ways that are different from hearing ESL learners.     

Grammar and phonology predict spelling in middle childhood

We report the findings of a follow-up study of 34 9-year-old children who had participated in a longitudinal study of phonological and literacy development between the ages of 4 and 6 years. In a series of concurrent and longitudinal analyses, measures of phoneme awareness proved to be better predictors of spelling than measures of rime awareness. Children's awareness of grammatical relations influenced their orthographic skills in spelling. Although we were able to demonstrate that later orthographic knowledge is influenced by earlier phonological processes, our results are also consistent with the view that awareness of grammatical rules has an important role in determining orthographic proficiency as children get older.