Domesticating patriarchy: hegemonic masculinity and television's "Mr. Mom"

This essay examines television news treatments of stay-at-home dads (Mr. Moms)during the late 1990s and argues that these news accounts represent a challenge to more traditional masculine identities depicted in media. While offering a nominal challenge, however, these representations reinscribe significant aspects of patriarchal privilege within domestic space. Through a combination of discursive strategies compatible with the commercial needs of contemporary media organizations, television news programs' Mr. Moms operate ideologically to legitimate domesticity and nurturance as appropriately masculine. In so doing, they challenge some traditional notions about men while further solidifying a connection between these men and heterosexuality in the context of mainstream television news representations of middle-class family life in the contemporary United States. This process of legitimating nurturance and domesticity also and concurrently reverses the genders long articulated to particular advertising target segments within the commodity broadcast audience. This representational process reifies and naturalizes the class specificity of these Mr. Moms while it fuels television's continual need to produce and satisfy new audience niches in order to survive and compete in the media environment of today.     

A new technique for detecting patterns of term usage in text corpora

Term occurrence A is included in term occurrence B if A is a substring of B. By making a single pass through a slightly non-standard KWIC index, every recurring phrase can be detected, and its inclusion relationships with other phrases and/or single words can be computed. Results obtained by processing a corpus of 2675 medical titles indicate that several properties definable in terms of inclusion relationships among terms have significance for vocabulary control. Preliminary results from a corpus of more than 62,000 medical titles have confirmed this finding.     

Effects of a Cross-Linguistic Storybook Intervention on the Second Language Development of Two Preschool English Language Learners

The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of a shared reading experience between parent and child in the child’s home language on the emergent literacy and language acquisition in English of preschool-age English Language Learners. Parents of Spanish-speaking four-year-old Head Start students read storybooks in Spanish with their children concurrently with the use of the English language version of the books in the classroom. A single subject design with multiple baselines across subjects and settings was applied. Observed variables included changes in the frequency of utterances, the Mean Length of Utterance-word, and the frequency of spontaneous or child-initiated utterances in various settings within the Head Start classroom. The results indicated that there might be a relation between the shared reading experience in the home language and the child’s second language acquisition. Additionally, there appeared to be a relation between the behaviors and the settings. Finally, implications of this study were discussed.