Developing a comprehensive model of risk and protective factors that can predict spelling at age seven: findings from a community sample of Victorian children

The paper reports on a study designed to develop a risk model that can best predict single-word spelling in seven-year-old children when they were aged 4 and 5. Test measures, personal characteristics and environmental influences were all considered as variables from a community sample of 971 children. Strong concurrent correlations were found between single-word spelling and single-word reading while expressive language and, to a lesser extent, receptive language were less strongly correlated. Predictors of single-word spelling at ages 4 and 5 were dominated by child-related factors such as letter knowledge, a history of speech impairment and expressive language along with maternal word reading ability. Based on the strength of the predictive factors identified at both age 4 and 5, our results provide initial support for using a targeted model for screening pre-schoolers at risk of not mastering spelling in a timely manner.     

Getting in,getting on,going further: Exploring the role of employers in the degree apprentice to graduate transition

Transitions from education into work, or as part of career change and development, are increasingly central to policy debate and academic inquiry. However, the role that employers play in shaping transition is often overlooked. In this paper, we examine this issue through the experiences of a graduating cohort of ‘degree apprentices’. We present original analysis of new empirical data from what we believe to be the first substantive qualitative longitudinal research conducted with those experiencing this new vocational pathway in the English Apprenticeships system. Through analysis of repeat semi-structured interviews with 22 degree apprenticeship graduates (44 interviews in total), we provide early empirical insights into experiences of this new pathway and add to existing theoretical conceptualisations of transition within the educational literature and the employer's role within it. We show that the degree apprentice to graduate transition can be broken down into three key stages: ‘getting in’, ‘getting on’ and ‘going further’, and that employers—at both strategic and relational levels—shape experiences at each stage.     

Distinction on the box: Cultural capital and the social space of broadcasting

The literature on cultural capital has had relatively little to say about television viewing, except insofar as television has served as a negative point of reference in relation to which other cultural practices register their distinctiveness. This article, by contrast, examines the respects in which practices of distinction are operative within the space of broadcast television. Looking first at the ‘internal economy’ of television as expressed in the relations between genre, programme and channel preferences, it then examines how these preferences are related to occupational class, gender, level of education and ethnicity. While showing that divisions within the space of broadcasting are most powerfully articulated in terms of age and gender, the article also shows that occupational class and level of education play important roles in stratifying television audiences along traditional ‘high’/‘low’ lines. A closer analysis of the relations between these variables reveals more complex patterns of distinction, particularly in the place occupied by ‘new drama’ and ‘new comedy’ in the preferences of younger, well-educated viewers.     

‘Personal’and‘critical’? Exam criteria,engagement with texts,and real readers’ responses

This article explores how exam criteria require pupils to engage with texts at once 'personally' and 'critically'. It theorises this dichotomy, suggesting problems it presents in a classroom. Observing that dwindling opportunities for creative writing impede personal engagement, it considers the possibilities suggested by the imaginative writings of two pupils for resolving the dichotomy.     

Neuroimaging Studies of Reading Development and Reading Disability

Converging evidence from a number of neuroimaging studies, including our own, suggest that fluent word identification in reading is related to the functional integrity of two left hemisphere posterior systems: a temporo-parietal system and a ventral occipito-temporal system. These posterior systems are functionally disrupted in developmental dyslexia. Reading disabled, relative to nonimpaired, readers demonstrate heightened reliance on both inferior frontal and right hemisphere posterior regions, presumably in compensation for the LH posterior difficulties. We propose a neurobiological account suggesting that for normally developing readers the temporo-parietal system predominates at first, and is associated with aspects of processing critical in learning to integrate orthography with phonological and lexical-semantic features of printed words. The occipito-temporal system, by contrast, constitutes a fast, late-developing, word-identification system that underlies fluent word recognition in skilled readers.