Current Developments in Research on the Teaching of Grammar

With the rise of communicative methodology in the late 1970s, the role of grammar instruction in second language learning was downplayed, and it was even suggested that teaching grammar was not only unhelpful but might actually be detrimental. However, recent research has demonstrated the need for formal instruction for learners to attain high levels of accuracy. This has led to a resurgence of grammar teaching, and its role in second language acquisition has become the focus of much current investigation. In this     

The 2005 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Computer and Cognitive Science presented to Aravind Joshi

The Franklin Institute, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, awarded the 2005 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Computer and Cognitive Science to Aravind Joshi for his fundamental contributions to natural language processing technology and to cognitive science, including particularly the development of the Tree Adjoining Grammar (TAG) family of formalisms and tractable polynomial time algorithms that analyze the complex, varied surface word orders of human languages while simultaneously recovering local elementary syntactic domains corresponding to meaning. In addition, Joshi has been a major collaborator on a new theory of discourse coherence that has influenced all subsequent work on anaphora resolution, and is currently applying TAG to address modeling problems in the life sciences.     

Early Integration and Other Outcomes for Community College Transfer Students

The purpose of this study was to explore academic and social integration and other outcomes for community college transfer students. The study used Tinto’s (Leaving college: Rethinking the causes and cures of student attrition, 1993) Longitudinal Model of Institutional Departure and Deil-Amen’s (J Higher Educ, 82:54–91, 2011) concept of “socio-academic integrative moments” to inform the selection and organization of potential predictors. We developed regression models for relationships between demographic and background variables of interest and perceived academic and social integration following the first six weeks at the receiving university. We also included these perceived integration scores in regression models for six outcomes (first and second semester grade point average, first and second semester earned hours ratios, and second and third semester persistence). Academic and previous college background explained the greatest amount of variance in predicting early integration and academic outcomes.     

Children using Facebook: teachers’ discursive constructions of childhood

Conceptualizations of childhood are powerful determinants of adults’ interactions with children, and technology and social networking systems are affecting the nature of teachers’ knowledge of childhood. We analyzed questionnaire responses from 57 elementary-level teachers from Quebec regarding children’s use of Facebook. Through discourse analyses, we found four common images of childhood (child as innocent, evil, future adult, and agent) present in the teachers’ responses; however, the context of social media brought to fore questions about adult surveillance at a time of generational pliability and teachers’ self-understanding in relation to their knowledge of children.     

Lexical and sublexical orthographic knowledge: relationships in an orthography of intermediate depth

It is widely accepted that orthographic knowledge comprises two components: word-specific orthographic knowledge, also termed lexical orthographic knowledge, and general orthographic knowledge, or sublexical orthographic knowledge. Until now, the study of the relationship between these components throughout literacy development has been somehow neglected. In this study, we examined how they are related at an early stage of literacy development in European Portuguese, an orthography of intermediate depth. Children followed from Grade 2–3 performed two of the most common tasks of orthographic knowledge—the Orthographic Choice Task and the Orthographic Awareness Task. Crossed-lagged structural equation modeling showed significant mutual contributions between the two components of orthographic knowledge, providing thus preliminary evidence of bidirectional relations over time. Results are discussed in the context of theories of reading development taking into account the influence of orthography consistency.

     

Leadership in online learning in higher education: Why instructional designers for online learning should lead the way

With the increase in demand for online education at the university level has also come the “recognition that in order to be effective, such programs cannot simply be on‐line replicas of the instruction delivered in classrooms” (Reiser, 2001, p. 64). An environment of collaboration with a shared vision is needed to bring faculty expertise together with online learning design and technological expertise. This article addresses why and how instructional designers should lead the way.