An exploration of the ways in which children with Communication Difficulties can be enabled to express views on their experience of meeting Educational Professionals: An Action Research project

This action research explored the ways in which children with Communication Difficulties could be enabled to express views on meeting educational professionals, particularly Educational Psychologists for the purpose of Statutory Assessment (SA). It built upon the body of literature on children’s participation and especially the importance of hearing the marginalised voice of children with Communication Difficulties in educational settings. Uniquely, the research elicited children’s understandings of the process and outcomes of assessment: looking beyond describing what they did or did not like. The research was framed by Self Determination Theory. Exploring the restraining and enabling factors in this process was the original contribution of this research to the field. A social constructionist epistemology underpinned this research: positioning children’s views as constructed through the interactive, cyclical process of being listened to, and acted upon. Each of the four stages of the research process led serially to the next, culminating in a final detailed piece of research. For this final research stage, thirteen children with Communication Difficulties, aged between six and ten years and attending mainstream settings, were recruited. They were observed giving views on their recent experiences of SA, supported by an adult and using an iPad application developed in the preceding stages. Semi-structured interviews followed the observations, using an explanatory leaflet about SA also developed during the research. These findings were then thematically analysed using a deductive approach. Findings identified particular socio-contextual factors that are perceived as enabling or restraining by children with Communication Difficulties. They were less likely to have contextually appropriate ways to respond to questions due to a lack of preparation, explanation and previous opportunities to practise giving views. Difficulties in communication were supported by conduits that encouraged alternative methods of communication and provided visual structure. Supporting adults played a key role within collaborative relationships that boosted the children’s autonomy and encouraged their competence. Outcomes from the research included the importance of: child-friendly information concerning the SA process and especially with a focus on preparing a child to meet with an EP; a multi-media application to support children’s views; a checklist for EPs and good practice guidance for schools

Early years educators’ interpretations of a bilingual literacy curriculum implemented in Content Language Integrated (CLIL) classrooms in the United Arab Emirates: A phenomenological approach to investigating learning

This qualitative phenomenological holistic single case study (Baxter and McMaster 2009, p. 549; Byman 2016, p. 60; Creswell and Poth 2018) drew from a paradigm of interpretivism (Bryman 2016; DePoy and Gitlin 2020) that “examined, explained and described” (McKenney and Reeves 2011, p.30) what sixteen multilingual early years educator participants have in common (Creswell and Poth 2018) as they experienced a Bilingual Literacy Curriculum (BLC) with a Content Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) pedagogy (Nikula, and Smit 2010, cited in Arnó and Mancho-Barés 2015, p. 740; San Isidro 2021) at a private school in the UAE. The study explored the bilingual experiences of twelve Arabic early years pupils engaged in language transfer (Cummins 2017; Genesee and Jared 2008) through emergent “translanguaging” (Garcia 2009, p. 157). The study addressed the lack of research evidence concerning descriptive bilingual literacy programs in Arabic Early Childhood Education and the inclusion of early years educators in the UAE education reform and decision-making policies (Aljazeari and Alchalabee 2019; Boles and Dillon 2019; Gallagher 2011; Mohamed and Medhammer 2014; O’Sullivan 2015; O’ Leary and Thompson 2019). Qualitative data was analysed using a reflexive thematic analysis (RTA) approach (Braun and Clarke 2021), and conceptual findings were explained using an interpretive phenomenological approach. The results revealed that the multilingual early years educators evidenced the integration of the BLC with CLIL through translated children’s literature and an emergent translanguaging approach (Garcia-Lopez, Mor, and Tesconi 2020) valuable within “classroom curricula” (Deng 2010, p. 386) to develop English language skills, specifically, oral fluency amongst early-years Arabic pupils. Hopefully, this study's findings will inform the practices of in-service early years educators and ECE policymakers in the UAE engaged in education reform (Gallagher 2011) and the decision-making initiatives concerning early years bilingual literacy, curriculum design, and pedagogy in Arabic settings

Attentive Speaking. From Listener Feedback to Interactive Adaptation

Buschmeier H. Attentive Speaking. From Listener Feedback to Interactive Adaptation. Bielefeld: Universität Bielefeld; 2018.Dialogue is an interactive endeavour in which participants jointly pursue the goal of reaching understanding. Since participants enter the interaction with their individual conceptualisation of the world and their idiosyncratic way of using language, understanding cannot, in general, be reached by exchanging messages that are encoded when speaking and decoded when listening. Instead, speakers need to design their communicative acts in such a way that listeners are likely able to infer what is meant. Listeners, in turn, need to provide evidence of their understanding in such a way that speakers can infer whether their communicative acts were successful. This is often an interactive and iterative process in which speakers and listeners work towards understanding by jointly coordinating their communicative acts through feedback and adaptation. Taking part in this interactive process requires dialogue participants to have ‘interactional intelligence’. This conceptualisation of dialogue is rather uncommon in formal or technical approaches to dialogue modelling. This thesis argues that it may, nevertheless, be a promising research direction for these fields, because it de-emphasises raw language processing performance and focusses on fundamental interaction skills. Interactionally intelligent artificial conversational agents may thus be able to reach understanding with their interlocutors by drawing upon such competences. This will likely make them more robust, more understandable, more helpful, more effective, and more human-like. This thesis develops conceptual and computational models of interactional intelligence for artificial conversational agents that are limited to (1) the speaking role, and (2) evidence of understanding in form of communicative listener feedback (short but expressive verbal/vocal signals, such as ‘okay’, ‘mhm’ and ‘huh’, head gestures, and gaze). This thesis argues that such ‘attentive speaker agents’ need to be able (1) to probabilistically reason about, infer, and represent their interlocutors’ listening related mental states (e.g., their degree of understanding), based on their interlocutors’ feedback behaviour; (2) to interactively adapt their language and behaviour such that their interlocutors’ needs, derived from the attributed mental states, are taken into account; and (3) to decide when they need feedback from their interlocutors and how they can elicit it using behavioural cues.This thesis describes computational models for these three processes, their integration in an incremental behaviour generation architecture for embodied conversational agents, and a semi-autonomous interaction study in which the resulting attentive speaker agent is evaluated. The evaluation finds that the computational models of attentive speaking developed in this thesis enable conversational agents to interactively reach understanding with their human interlocutors (through feedback and adaptation) and that these interlocutors are willing to provide natural communicative listener feedback to such an attentive speaker agent. The thesis shows that computationally modelling interactional intelligence is generally feasible, and thereby raises many new research questions and engineering problems in the interdisciplinary fields of dialogue and artificial conversational agents

Data-Driven Sourcing: How Journalists Use Digital Search Tools to Decide What's News

This dissertation examines the efforts of journalists to expand their pool of potential sources beyond a group of people often called "the usual suspects." This group consists of public officials, business leaders, experts, spokespeople, and other people who are in the news often. Using interviews, participant observation, a survey, and online ethnography, this research investigates how a growing skepticism of the usual suspects and increasingly powerful technology have led to innovations in the source search process. Some journalists have seen potential in digital search tools, including databases and social media, for finding sources that had once been too difficult or time-consuming to find. Journalists themselves have created two source-finding initiatives: a database called the Public Insight Network, and Storyful, which calls itself the "world's first social news agency." Storyful journalists specialize in finding and verifying social media content from the scenes of breaking news events. Journalists have also used other tools created by public relations professionals and technologists. How did the availability of these tools change the reporting process? It varied by tool, and by journalist. Although the tools were designed to do similar things, journalists used them in different ways. This dissertation examines how journalists used these tools in three stages of the reporting process: finding sources, verifying sources, and managing sources. Ultimately, most journalists used these tools not to find new sources, but to follow and research sources they had already identified by name or location. Few journalists had discovered new sources and story ideas with the help of digital search tools. So while these tools opened new possibilities for finding sources, journalists were still more likely to cover some people and topics over others

The Whitworthian 2004-2005

The Whitworthian student newspaper, September 2004-May 2005.https://digitalcommons.whitworth.edu/whitworthian/1088/thumbnail.jp