Shakespeare in the Curriculum: direction by content

The results of a survey of secondary English Shakespeare teaching in one local education authority are reported. Centralised control of curriculum content in English is discussed in relation to findings about how much Shakespeare teaching is done and which plays teachers selected. The suggestion is made that recent controversy about content direction has deflected attention from the more important issues of methods of teaching and in‐service education.     

Making Meaningful Choices: an investigation into young children's intonation patterns in storytelling

Abstract This paper investigates the meaningful choices in intonation made by young children. A category system for classifying choices is outlined and an experiment is reported in which randomly selected groups of 41/2‐5 year‐olds heard and retold stories in different situations. Results indicate that all groups distinguished narrative from other forms of discourse and drew upon intonation resources appropriately. Differences were found between recalling a story with pictures and one without, suggesting that these are different cognitive tasks and that children make different selections from choices available to them.     

Was Humpty Dumpty Right? An Exploratory Study of Semantic Priming and Lexical Access

This study investigates the way subjects gain access to their internal lexicon and assesses the effects of context on this process. The focus is on ambiguous words that are homographic but pronounced differently. A total of 35 adult subjects read aloud from word lists containing the same target homographs. In two conditions the targets were primed by words calculated to influence subjects either towards a regular or irregular pronunciation; a third condition without primers provided a baseline check. The influence of primers on subjects’ pronunciations was recorded and calculated. Results confirmed a significant influence of primers on pronunciation for a majority of target words. Further analysis showed groups of subjects were significantly (p<0.001) influenced by semantic primers. However, results are interpreted cautiously and proposals are made for a more rigorous study using this exploratory work as a basis. Finally, the potential of semantic priming studies for future research is outlined.     

The rise of the machines: Artificial intelligence meets scholarly content

Key points

• New forms of human/machine dialogue are emerging as robots understand vast amounts of content rather than simply indexing content as strings of characters.
• Recognizing strings of characters as entities (e.g. = names = authors) allows for meaningful associations between entities and reasoning over these relationships.
• Web‐scale adoption of the Semantic Web approach has been slow because it is too complex to implement and does not scale.
• User intent, discovered through conversational models of human–computer interaction, allows for a deeper understanding of exactly what researchers are looking for.
• Personal agents hold the promise of finding information that we will find useful before we have started to look for it.
• Publishers can use Academic Knowledge APIs to interpret academic user queries and find rich information from the Microsoft Academic Graph.

     

The Role of Rural Public Libraries in Small Business Development

Like all public libraries, rural public libraries in the Appalachian region can play a significant role in the economic development of their communities. Economic development in rural communities potentially benefit from many of the same resources and services all enjoy at public libraries, including free and public Internet access, space, education, question answering, and materials on many business-related subjects. This article reports survey findings of current activities that rural public libraries perform in one state, namely the state of Tennessee, as a case study to apply the lessons and insights to other parts of the United States. The discussion includes assessment of activities and some recommendations to streamline and stimulate all public libraries in conducting this assistance efficiently.     

Spelling errors as a window on variations in phonological deficits among students with dyslexia

Characteristics of spelling development and spelling error patterns were examined in 100 schoolchildren (aged 7 to 15 years) previously identified as dyslexic with specific phonological weaknesses. Within a severely restricted range, spelling development generally followed a normal course despite wide individual variation. The group was divided using two different spelling criteria: (1) global spelling stage, and (2) a split based on the number of spelling confusions involving phonetically similar consonants. Comparisons using either criterion led to the conclusion that better spellers are also better readers and are more skilled in phoneme manipulation. Regression analyses suggested that measures of phonemic segmenting and manipulation make independent contributions to the acquisition of word reading. Phoneme segmenting explained significant variance only when students were subdivided according to errors in coding confusable consonants. Implications for instruction are considered.