Genres and Learning to Read

The issue of text genre has begun to loom larger in thinking about literacy development, especially with the foregrounding of range in the latest National Curriculum orders for English. Lynne Kirk and Henry Pearson describe their investigation into the effects of text genre upon children's reading and conclude that, although story is the most immediately attractive genre, no one genre has all the qualities for helping children to learn to read.     

Beginners and programming: insights from second language learning and teaching

This paper will consider issues that are important in the teaching and learning of programming to students in their first year of an undergraduate course in a computer science discipline. We will suggest that the current educational climate offers the opportunity to move the focus onto the learner and their experience, and that second language learning and teaching in the field of English as a Second, or Foreign, Language may be a fruitful area on which to draw. We will review a particular aspect of second language pedagogy-learner strategies-and discuss their applicability to students who are starting to learn how to program. We will consider ways in which these strategies might be useful to support learning programming at this level.     

Understanding Students' Motivation in Sport and Physical Education: From the Expectancy-Value Model and Self-Efficacy Theory Perspectives

In this article, the roles of individuals' expectancy beliefs and incentives (i.e., task value, outcome expectancy) in sport and physical education are examined from expectancy-value model and self-efficacy theory perspectives. Overviews of the two theoretical frameworks and the conceptual and measurement issues are provided, followed by a review of developmental and gender/racial differences and the influences of sport and physical education on children's motivational beliefs.     

Violence,Silence and Storytelling: The Dilemma of Matricide in Women’s Memoirs

In this paper I explore how women’s thinking subjectivity is structured by a need to negotiate between identifying with and repudiating our mothers. Oriented by Melanie Klein’s theory of matricide which posits that an infant’s capacity to think for herself originates in her need to separate from her mother, I consider the implications of this structure for women’s gendered experiences of intellectualism. To examine how this dilemma of matricide animates women’s thinking lives I read Helen M. Buss’s criticism of Carolyn Kay Steedman’s memoir Landscape for a Good Woman. I argue that Buss’s criticism of Steedman is symptomatic of her ambivalent relation to the problem of identification and repudiation that drives her own intellectual labour. I then turn to a scene in Buss’s memoir, Memoirs from Away, to examine how the matricidal dilemma resonates through her work of reading other women’s memoirs and of writing her own.     

Critiquing the school community: a qualitative study of children's conceptualizations of their school 1

Schools are traditionally seen as responsible for the educational outcomes of our children. However, schools also play an important role in the development of aspects such as self‐efficacy, participation, competence and self‐determination. As schools are often run as societies rather than communities, they offer little opportunity for these attributes (self‐efficacy, participation, competence and self‐determination) to develop. Forty‐six children aged from nine to 12 years were interviewed to ascertain their conceptualizations of the school community. The children define their school in terms of people, places for activities and interaction, a place for safety, cooperation, influence and functionality. The responses closely align to the adult conceptualizations of sense of community as purported by McMillan and Chavis (1986 McMillan, D.W. and Chavis, D.M. 1986. Sense of community: a definition and theory. Journal of Community Psychology, 14: 6–23. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]). Implications of this research suggest that children can and should have an integral role in designing a curriculum and systems relevant to the school context if we are at all concerned with their psychological wellness.     

Development of dyslexic subgroups:

There is a consensus that dyslexia is on a continuum with normal reading skill and that dyslexics fall at the low end of the normal range in phonological skills. However, there is still substantial variability in phonological skill among dyslexic children. Recent studies have focused on the high end of the continuum of phonological skills in dyslexics, identifying a “surface” dyslexic, or “delayed” profile in which phonological skills are not out of line with other aspects of word recognition. The present study extended this work to a longitudinal context, and explored differences among subgroups of dyslexics on a battery of component reading skills. Third grade dyslexics (n=72) were classified into two subgroups, phonological dyslexics and delayed dyslexics, based on comparisons to younger normal readers at the same reading level (RL group). The children were tested at two points (in third and fourth grade). The results revealed that the classification of dyslexics produced reliable, stable, and valid groups. About 82 percent of the children remained in the same subgroup category when retested a year later. Phonological dyslexics were lower in phoneme awareness and expressive language. Delayed dyslexics tended to be slower at processing printed letters and words but not at rapid automatic naming of letters, and relied more heavily on phonological recoding in reading for meaning than did phonological dyslexics. A subset of the delayed dyslexics with the traditional “surface dyslexic” pattern (relatively high pseudoword and low exception word reading) was also identified. The surface subgroup resembled the RL group on most measures and was not very stable over one year. The results are discussed in light of current models of dyslexia and recent subgrouping schemes, including the Double-Deficit Hypothesis.