Intervention procedures for increasing preschool children's interest in and knowledge about reading

Pages numbered 2-50Includes bibliographical references (p. 45-49)Supported in part by the National Institute of Education under contract no. NIE-400-81-003

Avoiding Edmund : reading acknowledgment as failure in Stanley Cavell’s King Lear

Critics of King Lear often remark that the play feels like a dramatic failure despite its place at the very top of the Shakespearean canon. Using Stanley Cavell’s famous essay on the play, “The Avoidance of Love,” as a framework for interpreting Lear, I argue that an epistemological and ethical failure lies at the heart of the play: an inability to acknowledge the presence of others. In my reading, Cavell’s essay works emotively rather than argumentatively, by approximating the affective scenario of King Lear. Appropriately, Cavell’s essay falters in the same way that Shakespeare’s play does: it cannot attempt to acknowledge other minds without enacting the failure of that very effort. I consider this failure primarily in relation to Edmund, the play’s chief antagonist. Using Cavell’s understanding of what it means to be present before others and before oneself, I show that Edmund’s final words are a brief and poignant instance in which he realizes his true position relative to other minds and his own. I argue that Cavell’s argument fails to properly consider Edmund by its own terms, and in doing so, it enacts its own subject: the impossibility of acknowledging the presence of the other. Moving to Lear’s Fool, I argue that the Fool functions as a voice of political consciousness, comparing his position to Cavell’s own context. The Fool imagines a world where the failure of acknowledgment leaves everyone “darkling.” Ultimately, the play imagines human relationships in essentially pessimistic terms: the attempt to recognize the other results in the erasure of any sense of commonalityEnglis

Readers reading practices of EFL Yemeni students: recommendations for the 21st century

This paper investigates the reading practices of forty-five second year EFL Yemeni undergraduate students using the Four Resources Model of multiliteracy practices. The Four Resources Model of multiliteracy practices organizes reading practices into four key practices: code breaking, text participating, text uses and text analysing levels. Quantitative and qualitative methods, designed based on the Four Resources Model constructs, were used to collect data from a sample of students studying English as a Foreign Language at a university in Yemen. Quantitative data was collected through a questionnaire, while qualitative data was gathered using semi-structured interviews guided by the research objectives. The findings reveal that Yemeni students were medium users of the code breaker and text user practices whereas the meaning making and text analysis practices were reported to be used in low usage. On the whole, these early findings suggest that the reading practices and reading abilities of the Yemeni students are still limited even at the tertiary level and have not developed fully with regard to reading in English. This paper reports in detail, the use of the Four Resources Model as a tool to determine reading efficacy while examining the aforementioned findings. Discussion is put forward on the implications for teaching of reading and its approaches in a Yemeni context, especially in view of the students‟ reading needs at the tertiary level in Yemen

Quakers and Scripture

This chapter explores how the Quakers’ use of the Bible has developed, recognizing changes both in the Friends movement and in its historical and cultural settings. Friends’ approaches to Scripture have varied widely as they have responded over time to the influences of the Enlightenment, revivalism, fundamentalism, Modernism, and other factors. The chapter describes how Quakers have viewed the authority and inspiration of the Bible and how they have held the importance of the Bible in tension with the inward teaching of Christ, whom they refer to as the ‘Word of God’. The chapter also contrasts various forms of Bible study with reading the Bible with empathy as a fruit of Quaker spirituality

Evaluating the Usability of Automatically Generated Captions for People who are Deaf or Hard of Hearing

The accuracy of Automated Speech Recognition (ASR) technology has improved, but it is still imperfect in many settings. Researchers who evaluate ASR performance often focus on improving the Word Error Rate (WER) metric, but WER has been found to have little correlation with human-subject performance on many applications. We propose a new captioning-focused evaluation metric that better predicts the impact of ASR recognition errors on the usability of automatically generated captions for people who are Deaf or Hard of Hearing (DHH). Through a user study with 30 DHH users, we compared our new metric with the traditional WER metric on a caption usability evaluation task. In a side-by-side comparison of pairs of ASR text output (with identical WER), the texts preferred by our new metric were preferred by DHH participants. Further, our metric had significantly higher correlation with DHH participants' subjective scores on the usability of a caption, as compared to the correlation between WER metric and participant subjective scores. This new metric could be used to select ASR systems for captioning applications, and it may be a better metric for ASR researchers to consider when optimizing ASR systems.Comment: 10 pages, 8 figures, published in ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS '17

Component skills of inferential processing in older readers

Thesis (M.S.)--Boston UniversityThe ability to make inferences has been shown to be a crucial component of successful reading in older students. The current project investigates differences in comprehension of text-based (factual) and inferential information across grade levels and modalities, and seeks to determine which component language and reading skills that are important in making inferences. 1,836 students in grades 6-12 were tested on a computerized battery of language subtests in the auditory and written modalities. Eleven subtests examining performance on lower levels of were administered in addition to a measure of factual and inferential discourse comprehension. Results demonstrated that students performed better overall in the written modality. Students in older grades were consistently faster and more accurate. Vocabulary knowledge had the biggest effect for performance on inferential questions in the written modality in middle school, while sentence-level skills were most important in high school. In the auditory modality, sentence-level skills were most predictive across question types and grade levels. Implications for theories of inferential processing and for teaching inferences within literacy education frameworks will be discussed

Deaf children need language, not (just) speech

Deaf and Hard of Hearing (DHH) children need to master at least one language (spoken or signed) to reach their full potential. Providing access to a natural sign language supports this goal. Despite evidence that natural sign languages are beneficial to DHH children, many researchers and practitioners advise families to focus exclusively on spoken language. We critique the Pediatrics article ‘Early Sign Language Exposure and Cochlear Implants’ (Geers et al., 2017) as an example of research that makes unsupported claims against the inclusion of natural sign languages. We refute claims that (1) there are harmful effects of sign language and (2) that listening and spoken language are necessary for optimal development of deaf children. While practical challenges remain (and are discussed) for providing a sign language-rich environment, research evidence suggests that such challenges are worth tackling in light of natural sign languages providing a host of benefits for DHH children – especially in the prevention and reduction of language deprivation.Accepted manuscrip