The Literacy Skills of Secondary Teaching Undergraduates: Results of Diagnostic Testing and a Discussion of Findings

Abstract: The capacity of secondary school teachers to support general literacy and to teach discipline-specific literacy skills depends upon their personal literacy competence. Diagnostic testing of 203 secondary teaching undergraduates at one Australian university revealed deficiencies in personal literacy competence that could affect their future teaching effectiveness. The sample of undergraduates was tested in spelling, vocabulary, and punctuation. Analysis of the results showed high rates of error on general spelling and vocabulary tasks. The degree of error in many cases was severe. For some undergraduates, the prospect of successful remediation so late in their academic career appeared poor. It is suggested that universities need to monitor admission standards and continue to invest in ongoing remediation

John Tzetzes and the blemish examiners : a Byzantine teacher on schedography, everyday language and writerly disposition

The paper focuses on John Tzetzes (ca. 1110-after 1166), a well-known teacher and scholar of the Komnenian era, with the aim of examining two issues. On the one hand, Tzetzes’ opinions about the teaching practice of schedography are collected and analysed, while, on the other, his opinions about everyday language and its possible uses are scrutinised through a close reading of many different passages from his works. In particular, the long epilogue of his Theogony (with its three parts united for the first time on the printed page), written for the sebastokratorissa Eirene around the middle of the Twelfth Century, is discussed in detail as a unique source of debate on what is the appropriate way of addressing and writing for audiences of different social and educational status. The analysis and interpretation of the texts demonstrates that the “idiosyncratic” personality Tzetzes shows in his writings is not a purely personal matter, but is strongly related to the competitive environment of the capital and to Tzetzes’ “middle-class” position in the Constantinopolitan society. The paper also demonstrates that the boundaries of usage between “learned” and “colloquial” discourse are quite fluid and this fluidity can be used in certain contexts to the advantage of a teacher in promoting his status and financial success, or to his disadvantage if he has to defend his choices against a rival. The paper ends with a broader analysis of the term oijkonomiva used by Tzetzes in the Theogony epilogue and of the meaning of this term within the system of literary patronage under the Komnenoi

Foreign Language Translation of Chemical Nomenclature by Computer

Chemical compound names remain the primary method for conveying molecular structures between chemists and researchers. In research articles, patents, chemical catalogues, government legislation, and textbooks, the use of IUPAC and traditional compound names is universal, despite efforts to introduce more machine-friendly representations such as identifiers and line notations. Fortunately, advances in computing power now allow chemical names to be parsed and generated (read and written) with almost the same ease as conventional connection tables. A significant complication, however, is that although the vast majority of chemistry uses English nomenclature, a significant fraction is in other languages. This complicates the task of filing and analyzing chemical patents, purchasing from compound vendors, and text mining research articles or Web pages. We describe some issues with manipulating chemical names in various languages, including British, American, German, Japanese, Chinese, Spanish, Swedish, Polish, and Hungarian, and describe the current state-of-the-art in software tools to simplify the process

English spelling and the computer

The first half of the book is about spelling, the second about computers. Chapter Two describes how English spelling came to be in the state that it’s in today. In Chapter Three I summarize the debate between those who propose radical change to the system and those who favour keeping it as it is, and I show how computerized correction can be seen as providing at least some of the benefits that have been claimed for spelling reform. Too much of the literature on computerized spellcheckers describes tests based on collections of artificially created errors; Chapter Four looks at the sorts of misspellings that people actually make, to see more clearly the problems that a spellchecker has to face. Chapter Five looks more closely at the errors that people make when they don’t know how to spell a word, and Chapter Six at the errors that people make when they know perfectly well how to spell a word but for some reason write or type something else. Chapter Seven begins the second part of the book with a description of the methods that have been devised over the last thirty years for getting computers to detect and correct spelling errors. Its conclusion is that spellcheckers have some way to go before they can do the job we would like them to do. Chapters Eight to Ten describe a spellchecker that I have designed which attempts to address some of the remaining problems, especially those presented by badly spelt text. In 1982, when I began this research, there were no spellcheckers that would do anything useful with a sentence such as, ‘You shud try to rember all ways to youz a lifejacket when yotting.’ That my spellchecker corrects this perfectly (which it does) is less impressive now, I have to admit, than it would have been then, simply because there are now a few spellcheckers on the market which do make a reasonable attempt at errors of that kind. My spellchecker does, however, handle some classes of errors that other spellcheckers do not perform well on, and Chapter Eleven concludes the book with the results of some comparative tests, a few reflections on my spellchecker’s shortcomings and some speculations on possible developments

Plasticity in second language (L2) learning: perception of L2 phonemes by native Greek speakers of English

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University.Understanding the process of language acquisition is a challenge that many researchers spanning different disciplines (e.g. linguistics, psychology, neuroscience) have grappled with for centuries. One which has in recent years attracted a lot of attention has been in the area of non-native phoneme acquisition. Speech sounds that contain multiple phonetic cues are often difficult for foreign-language learners, especially if certain cues are weighted differently in the foreign and native languages. Greek adult and child speakers of English were studied to determine which cues (duration or spectral) they were using to make discrimination and identification judgments for an English vowel contrast pair. To this end, two forms of identification and discrimination tasks were used: natural (unedited) stimuli and another ‘modified’ vowel duration stimuli which were edited so that there were no duration differences between the vowels. Results show the Greek speakers were particularly impaired when they were unable to use the duration cue as compared to the native English speakers. Similar results were also obtained in control experiments where there was no orthographic representation or where the stimuli were cross-spliced to modify the phonetic neighborhood. Further experiments used high-variability training sessions to enhance vowel perception. Following training, performance improved for both Greek adult and child groups as revealed by post training tests. However the improvements were most pronounced for the child Greek speaker group. A further study examined the effect of different orthographic cues that might affect rhyme and homophony judgment. The results of that study showed that Greek speakers were in general more affected by orthography and regularity (particularly of the vowel) in making these judgments. This would suggest that Greek speakers were more sensitive to irrelevant orthographic cues, mirroring the results in the auditory modality where they focused on irrelevant acoustic cues. The results are discussed in terms of current theories of language acquisition, with particular reference to acquisition of non-native phonemes.School of Social Sciences, Brunel Universit

Computational Language Assessment in patients with speech, language, and communication impairments

Speech, language, and communication symptoms enable the early detection, diagnosis, treatment planning, and monitoring of neurocognitive disease progression. Nevertheless, traditional manual neurologic assessment, the speech and language evaluation standard, is time-consuming and resource-intensive for clinicians. We argue that Computational Language Assessment (C.L.A.) is an improvement over conventional manual neurological assessment. Using machine learning, natural language processing, and signal processing, C.L.A. provides a neuro-cognitive evaluation of speech, language, and communication in elderly and high-risk individuals for dementia. ii. facilitates the diagnosis, prognosis, and therapy efficacy in at-risk and language-impaired populations; and iii. allows easier extensibility to assess patients from a wide range of languages. Also, C.L.A. employs Artificial Intelligence models to inform theory on the relationship between language symptoms and their neural bases. It significantly advances our ability to optimize the prevention and treatment of elderly individuals with communication disorders, allowing them to age gracefully with social engagement.Comment: 36 pages, 2 figures, to be submite

Repairs and old-age categorisations: interactional and categorisation analysis

This paper examines the use of self-repairs in ascribing old-age categorisations to self and others in casual interactions among friends. Membership categorisation analysis and conversation analysis are employed to analyse self-recorded, everyday conversations of a group of older Greek Cypriot women with a long interactional history. The interactional organisation of old-age labels, and specifically instances of self-repair of age categorisations, reveal that members orient to old-age categories as hierarchically positioned and inference-rich. Members make relevant a very intricate set of expectations of who can be categorised by whom, with what specific age category term and at which context, partly because other-categorisations can also implicate one’s self-categorisation as old. Sequential and categorisation analyses provide a powerful analytical toolkit for the investigation of participants’ local system of self- and other-ascription of explicit -but also implicit- age identities. It is shown that the combination of membership categorisation analysis and conversation analysis can be extended beyond the analysis of turn-generating categories and can be instrumental in analysing flexible, context-shaped and agentively managed category identifications that also have currency beyond the local interactional occasion