Students’ communication, argumentation and knowledge in a citizens’ conference on global warming

An empirical study on 12th-grade students?? engagement on a global warming debate as a citizens?? conference is reported. Within the design-based research methodology, an interdisciplinary teaching sequence integrating an initiation to non-violent communication was developed. Students?? debates were analyzed according to three dimensions: communication, argumentation, and knowledge. Students regulated their oral contributions to the debate by identifying judgments in their discussions. Rhetorical processes developed by students were mainly related to the identity of debate protagonists with interest attributions, authority, and positions. Students?? arguments also relied on empirical data. The students?? knowledge focused on energy choices, economic, political, and science development issues. Implications for socioscientific issues integration in class are discussed.     

Introduction

Reading and Writing -     

Reflections on ethical dilemmas in working with so-called ‘vulnerable’ and ‘hard-to-reach’ groups: experiences from the Foodways and Futures project

This article reflects on ethical limitations and dilemmas encountered during fieldwork of the Foodways and Futures project (2013–2016). Foodways and Futures is a qualitative action research project aimed at exploring the food choices of former homeless young people (aged 16–25) in Aberdeenshire. In Scotland, where over 13,000 young people become homeless every year, Foodways and Futures aims to address social injustices as well as the implications of malnutrition in young people. Four interrelated main themes surrounding ethics became apparent during fieldwork: issues of communication, trust, issues with consent forms and power relations. Reflecting on these themes makes it clear that ethical guidelines are not necessarily beneficial for researchers as well as participants, especially if they are part of so-called vulnerable groups.     

楔式制动器设计提高了线控刹车的性能

采用电子楔式制动器（Electronic Wedge Brake,EWB）,现在可以设计12V线控刹车了!EWB是去年法兰克福车展上电子和机械电子产品开发商Siemens VDO推出的.     

Impact of Mainstreaming and Disability Visibility on Social Representations of Disability and Otherness Held by Junior High School Pupils

The present study sought to gauge the impact of integrating pupils with disabilities in ordinary schools on the social representations of disability and otherness held by their classmates. In particular, we studied the effects of the disability’s visibility—a visible disability (i.e., cerebral palsy) versus a non-visible disability (i.e., severe learning difficulties)—and of “integration experience” (belonging to a class that may or may not include a pupil with a disability). Results showed that pupils shared the same representation of disability, made up mainly of pathological features. Disability also lay at the core of their representation of otherness, which was both rich and diversified. The peripheral components of these representations varied according to the participants’ experiences in the classroom and the visibility of the disability.     

Children with Down syndrome use phonological knowledge in reading

Contrary to the findings of Cossu, Rossini &Marshall [(1993a), Cognition 46: 129–138], the present experiment showed a clear link between phonological awareness and reading performance in children with Down syndrome. Although metaphonologicalperformance was lower in children with Downsyndrome than in normal controls of the samereading level, phonological awareness andreading were significantly correlated in bothgroups. However, children with Down syndromeremained deficient in skills such as rhymingwhich are not practised as a result ofliteracy. These results are discussed withinthe framework of Gombert's metalinguisticdevelopment theory where, on the basis of aninitial phonological sensitivity, alphabeticreading is a pacemaker for the development ofexplicit phonological awareness.     

How do illiterate adults react to metalinguistic training?

The present study focuses on the capacity of illiterate adults to master three different metalinguistic tasks: judgment of phonological length of words, initial consonant deletion, and lexical segmentation of sentences. Illiterates’ performance, during a pre-test and after training, was compared with that of literates and partial illiterates (adults at the beginning of the process of acquiring literacy) who received the same training. In the pre-test, illiterates were lower than literates in the three tasks; and partial-illiterates were at an intermediate level in two of the tasks. The three groups profited from the training, especially illiterates and partial-illiterates for whom improvement was dramatic across all three tasks. Finally, the results revealed a hierarchy of difficulty across the tasks. The capacity to focus on the phonological dimension seemed to be a prerequisite for the phoneme deletion ability. The task of lexical segmentation seemed to be more a measure of syntactic awareness than a measure of phonological awareness.     

Do deaf children use phonological syllables as reading units?

This study aimed at examining whether deaf children process written words on the basis of phonological units. In French, the syllable is a phonologically and orthographically well-defined unit. French deaf children and hearing children matched on word recognition level were asked to copy written words and pseudo-words. The number of glances at the item, copying duration, and the locus of the first segmentation (i.e., after the first glance) within the item were measured. The main question was whether the segments copied by the deaf children corresponded to syllables as defined by phonological and orthographic rules.The results showed that deaf children, like hearing children, used syllables as copying units when the syllable boundaries were marked both by orthographic and phonological criteria. However, in a condition in which orthographic and phonological criteria were differentiated, the deaf children did not perform phonological segmentations while the hearing children did. We discuss two explanatory hypotheses. First, items in this condition were difficult to decode for deaf children; second, orthographic units were probably easier to process for deaf children than phonological units because of a lack of automaticity in their phonological conversion processes for pseudo-words. Finally, incidental observations during the experimental task raised the question of the use of fingerspelled units.     

Multivariate predictive model for dyslexia diagnosis

Dyslexia is a specific disorder of language development that mainly affects reading. Etiological researches have led to multiple hypotheses which induced various diagnosis methods and rehabilitation treatments so that many different tests are used by practitioners to identify dyslexia symptoms. Our purpose is to determine a subset of the most efficient ones by integrating them into a multivariate predictive model. A set of screening tasks that are the most commonly used and representative of the different cognitive aspects of dyslexia was proposed to 78 children from elementary school (mean age = 9 years ± 7 months) exempt from identified reading difficulties and to 35 dyslexic children attending a specialized consultation for dyslexia. We proposed a multi-step procedure: within each category, we first selected the most representative tasks using principal component analysis and then we implemented logistic regression models on the preselected variables. Spelling and reading tasks were considered separately. The model with the best predictive performance includes eight variables from four categories of tasks and classifies correctly 94% of the children. The sensitivity (91%) and the specificity (95%) are both high. Forty minutes are necessary to complete the test.