Trends in children's fiction in the United Kingdom during the 1980s

Through her work onChildren's Books of the Year Julia Eccleshare has a unique overview of the development of fiction written for children during the 1980s.CLE invited her to detect trends in the writing and publishing of children's books during the past decade.Julia Eccleshare is a freelance editor, advisor to publishers, and reviewer of children's books for national newspapers. She has written or edited some 15 books, includingTreasure Islands: The Woman's Hour Guide to Children's Reading: BBC 1988.     

Children’s private speech during algorithmic and heuristic drawing tasks

This cross-sectional study examined the private speech and task-related activity of 108 school-aged children while they drew pictures of real objects (i.e., a house, a person, and an animal) and make-believe objects (i.e., a house, a person, and an animal) to investigate developmental and task-related changes in self-regulation. Composite scores for each first-grade (N=36), third-grade (N=36), and fifth-grade (N=36) participant were calculated from the repeated raw frequencies of overall private speech and private speech in conjunction with task-related behavior during the two types of drawing activities (i.e., real and make-believe). Scores were then analyzed using regression analysis and 3×2 (Grade×Task Type) ANOVA’s to explore study hypotheses. This study found that: (1) there was a concave curvilinear developmental trend in overall private speech production, (2) participants utilized more private speech during heuristic (i.e., make-believe) drawing tasks than algorithmic (i.e., real) drawing tasks, and (3) school-aged children used private speech in conjunction with task-related behavior in a different manner during the two types of drawing activities. These findings contribute to the Vygotskian perspective regarding the development and function of private speech.     

A componential approach to understanding reading and its difficulties in preadolescent readers

The present study is predicated on the logic of interrelated functional information processing components as an approach to understanding reading and its difficulties in preadolescent readers. The structural equation modelling (and its variants) involved these three latent components: (a) orthographic/phonological component, (b) morphological component, and (c) sentence and paragraph comprehension component. These components were subserved by a total of ten measurable tasks, all administered on-line via the microcomputer under laboratory conditions with reaction time measures as indices of mental representation of word knowledge and sentence/paragraph comprehension. The latent dependent component of reading performance was subserved by standardized vocabulary and reading comprehension tests. The total sample consisted of 298 children in grades, 4, 5, and 6. Maximum likelihood analyses using LISREL show that the data in general do not disconfirm the proposed model for grade 4 readers. The three-component model, with some variables set free, provides a reasonable fit for the grade 5 data but less claim could be made about the goodness of fit for grade 6. The results show the mutually reinforcing and mutually facilitating effects of multilevels and multicomponents of reading. Word structure and word knowledge are particularly predictive of reading. The present Phase 1 work would be validated in a follow-up of another cohort of readers and would also lead to the systematic training of some of the components with poor readers. This study was supported by a grant (No. 410-86-0048) from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.     

Children with autism illuminate the role of social intention in word learning

To what extent do children with autism (AD) versus typically developing children (TD) rely on attentional and intentional cues to learn words? Four experiments compared 17 AD children (M age=5.08 years) with 17 language- and 17 mental-age-matched TD children (M ages=2.57 and 3.12 years, respectively) on nonverbal enactment and word-learning tasks. Results revealed variability in all groups, but particularly within the AD group. Performance on intention tasks was the most powerful predictor of vocabulary in the AD group but not in the TD groups. These findings suggest that word learning cannot be explained exclusively by either attentional or intentional processes, and they provide evidence of a special role for intentional understanding in the vocabulary development of AD children.     

Component skills of text comprehension in less competent Chinese comprehenders

The present study examined the role of verbal working memory (memory span and tongue-twister), two-character Chinese pseudoword reading (two tasks), rapid automatized naming (RAN) (letters and numbers), and phonological segmentation (deletion of rimes and onsets) in inferential text comprehension in Chinese in 31 less competent comprehenders compared with 37 reading comprehension control students and 23 chronological age controls. It was hypothesized that the target students would perform poorly on these cognitive and linguistic tasks as compared with their controls. Furthermore, verbal working memory and pseudoword reading would explain a considerable amount of individual variation in Chinese text comprehension. RAN would have a nonsignificant role in text comprehension. Structural equation analyses and hierarchical multiple regression analyses generally upheld these hypotheses. Our findings support current literature of the role of verbal working memory in reading comprehension found in English. The results, however, suggest differential role of the constructs and the tasks in reading comprehension and provide some answers for comprehension impairment in Chinese students.     

Mobile learning in higher education: A comparative analysis of developed and developing country contexts

The purpose of this paper is to compare and contrast characteristics of use and adoption of mobile learning in higher education in developed and developing countries. A comparative case study based on a survey questionnaire was conducted with 189 students (undergraduate and postgraduate) from Makerere University in Uganda and the University of Adelaide in Australia. The Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT) was employed as the theoretical framework. The results indicated that higher education students in developed and developing countries use a range of technologies for learning, with major differences between Uganda and Australia. The study concludes that mobile learning in higher education in developed and developing country contexts is still at an experimental stage with students using mobile devices in pedagogically limited ways.