Special Libraries, January 1962

Volume 53, Issue 1https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/sla_sl_1962/1000/thumbnail.jp

Literacies of Bilingual Youth: A Profile of Bilingual Academic, Social, and TXT Literacies

This dissertation identifies three types of language skills that urban Spanish/English bilingual youth possess (academic, social, and texting language), and reports on their relationship while documenting and analyzing the features of text messaging among this population. The participants in this study are Spanish-dominant bilingual young adults enrolled in a high school completion program in New York City. They are in the process of developing both Spanish and English academic literacy skills, and it is well known that they tend to perform below the grade they are enrolled in. For this reason, they are often referred to as being “language-less” (DeCapua & Marshall, 2011; Freeman, Freeman, & Mercuri, 2002) in an academic setting. Yet, little was previously known about their linguistic skills in other language forms such as social and Txt. This research seeks to understand and document their abilities across language forms and modalities, painting a composite picture of non-traditional bilinguals students’ linguistic skills. The aims of this dissertation are achieved through three different approaches. The first is a quantitative study into participants’ literacy skills through the use of assessments measuring academic literacy and social language awareness across written, aural, and digital modalities. The second is an in-depth analysis of the features participants use when texting (communicating via SMS and iMessage). Txt is a relatively new language form, and the analysis presented in this dissertation identifies the features and patterns that illustrate its systematic and constrained nature. The third approach is a case study focused on the texting behavior between two prolific texters. The theories developed based on the texting patterns of all participants (except those two texters) are applied to this one conversation for validation. This conversation constitutes more than half of the text messages that students contributed to the project, highlighting just how important this language form is in the daily life of young adults. A final component of this dissertation is the public availability of the text messages as an anonymized corpus along with the code and methods used to analyze the data. The text message corpus is available at www.byts.commons.gc.cuny.ed

A new hybrid metric for verifying parallel corpora of Arabic-English

This paper discusses a new metric that has been applied to verify the quality in translation between sentence pairs in parallel corpora of Arabic-English. This metric combines two techniques, one based on sentence length and the other based on compression code length. Experiments on sample test parallel Arabic-English corpora indicate the combination of these two techniques improves accuracy of the identification of satisfactory and unsatisfactory sentence pairs compared to sentence length and compression code length alone. The new method proposed in this research is effective at filtering noise and reducing mis-translations resulting in greatly improved quality.Comment: in CCSEA-201

An Observation about Truth

Tarski's analysis of the concept of truth gives rise to a hierarchy of languages. Does this fragment the concept all the way to philosophical unacceptability? I argue it doesn't, drawing on a modification of Kaplan's theory of indexicals

The Economy Of Typography (the Arrangement or Mode of Operation of Typography)

The thesis will show that the current research into legibility and readability regarding certain aspects or characters of type is incomplete, and will demonstrate what further research is necessary to complete the analysis of these aspects or characters in the economy of typography in continuous text. Chapter 1 will show that the development of reading depends on the legibility of the typography and characters ‘recognizing patterns, planning strategy, and feeling’ in other words reading and writing are interdependent all depend in some part on the construction of the characters and their relationship to each other. It will also show that readable writing is desirable and important for the reader’s sake. Chapter 2 will deal with the practical presentation of the characters of what the reading public read, and the role played by legibility and readability of typography in conveying their message. Printers and designers will also have a working knowledge and experience of legibility and readability which is incorporated into typograhy presentations, and this also is taken into account in chapter 2. Chapter 3 reviews the criteria and methods used in typography readability and legibility research. The research will show that readability is the ease with which the eye can absorb the message and move along the line, and legibility is based on the ease with which one letter can be identified from another. Chapter 4 entitled Analysis and Recommendations concludes the thesis with a summary of chapters 1, 2 and 3 before presenting a comparative analysis of current research into legibility, with particular emphasis on misreading or misrecognition of characters, and provides illustrations of the conclusions reached by way of bar chart and tables. Appendix One of the thesis contains a comprehensive list of the research into legibility and readability. Appendix Two contains the graphics of Benjamin Sherbow showing typography layout supportive of type spacing matters discussed in chapter 2. The thesis has an extensive bibliography of the works referred to throughout the thesis

Representing and Redefining Specialised Knowledge: Medical Discourse

This volume brings together five selected papers on medical discourse which show how specialised medical corpora provide a framework that helps those engaging with medical discourse to determine how the everyday and the specialised combine to shape the discourse of medical professionals and non-medical communities in relation to both long and short-term factors. The papers contribute, in an exemplary way, to illustrating the shifting boundaries in today’s society between the two major poles making up the medical discourse cline: healthcare discourse at the one end, which records the demand for personalised therapies and individual medical services; and clinical discourse the other, which documents research into society’s collective medical needs