Asia's Four Little Tigers: A comparison of the role of education in their development

The economic success of some of the countries within the East Asian region has generated a range of studies which have attempted to identify the sources of that growth. One strand within these analyses has focused on the critical role of schooling in the accumulation of human capital. This paper examines the role which education has played in the rapid development of the four 'Asian Tigers'; namely: Hong Kong, Taiwan, South Korea and Singapore. It is argued that whilst patterns of educational provision displayed some common features there were also significant differences in other areas such as the role of the state, sources of educational funding, the role of technical education and of the school curriculum.     

How an understanding of Bakhtin's theory of the chronotope can assist progression in classroom writing

Our argument in this paper is that the model of literary progression which Bakhtin (1981, 1986) expounds in his writing on the chronotope can generate insight into the processes through which pupils improve their writing. We suggest more generally that there are concepts and clues in Bakhtin's historical model of the development of the European novel and in his theory of dialogue which can be helpful in both the evaluation and teaching of classroom writing.     

Literacy Instruction in Multiple‐Language First‐Grade Classrooms: Linking Student Outcomes to Observed Instructional Practice

This study examined literacy instruction in 14 first‐grade classrooms of English learners (ELs) in three schools in a large urban school district in southern California over a two‐year period. Pre‐ and posttest measures of oral‐reading fluency for 186 first graders, representing 11 native languages, were the outcome data. Reading‐fluency data were examined in reference to ratings of literacy practices using the English Learners Classroom Observation Instrument (ELCOI). Results indicated a moderately strong correlation (r= 0.65) between ELCOI rating and gain in oral‐reading fluency at the end of first grade. We report patterns of ELs who read below the oral‐reading fluency benchmark thresholds and patterns of students who were ultimately labeled with learning disabilities. Instructional practices of teachers rated “high” and “low” are discussed. Educational implications and recommendations for future research are discussed.     

Character N-Gram Tokenization for European Language Text Retrieval

The Cross-Language Evaluation Forum has encouraged research in text retrieval methods for numerous European languages and has developed durable test suites that allow language-specific techniques to be investigated and compared. The labor associated with crafting a retrieval system that takes advantage of sophisticated linguistic methods is daunting. We examine whether language-neutral methods can achieve accuracy comparable to language-specific methods with less concomitant software complexity. Using the CLEF 2002 test set we demonstrate empirically how overlapping character n-gram tokenization can provide retrieval accuracy that rivals the best current language-specific approaches for European languages. We show that n = 4 is a good choice for those languages, and document the increased storage and time requirements of the technique. We report on the benefits of and challenges posed by n-grams, and explain peculiarities attendant to bilingual retrieval. Our findings demonstrate clearly that accuracy using n-gram indexing rivals or exceeds accuracy using unnormalized words, for both monolingual and bilingual retrieval.     

Scholarly communication in the digital environment: what do authors want?

This article reports on a large‐scale international survey of authors' perception and experience of the journals system conducted by ciber in association with National Opinion Polls (NOP). It explores the factors that inform authors' decisions where to publish and, in particular, which groups of readers they perceive to be most important. It probes readership behaviour and the values that underlie authors' attitudes towards copyright and emerging business models, notably open access. It is concluded that many aspects of author behaviour are highly conservative and that a significant shift towards open access is, in the short to medium term, highly unlikely.