‘It Brings it all Back, all those Good Times; it Makes Me Go Close to Tears’. Creating Digital Personalised Stories with People who have Dementia

The purpose of these three case studies was to analyse and theoretically explain the contribution of digital multimedia personalisation to stimulate and share long-term memories of people who live with mild to moderate dementia. We investigated how the use of a freely available iPad app can, in a supporting context, facilitate the creation of personalised multimedia stories, including the participants’ audio recordings, texts and photos of items, places or people important to them. Three people who were recruited from a club for people living with dementia created personalised multimedia stories using their own photographs and/or pictures downloaded from the internet, with written captions and audio-recorded voiceovers. Our analysis focuses on the themes and symbols across the three final stories of the participants and the process of creating stories with the Our Story iPad app. The discussion concerns the theoretical value of multimedia and the practical value of story-making apps for people with dementia. We conclude that the multimedia features available with the Our Story app offer a unique opportunity for people living with dementia to store, access and generate memories, capture them in writing and audio; and the ability to continue adding to the original stories

A longitudinal investigation of prosodic sensitivity and emergent literacy

Prosodic sensitivity – the rhythmic patterning of speech – is theorized to influence reading and spelling via vocabulary knowledge, phonological, and morphological awareness. Previously this conceptual model has been evidenced with children who can already read, however as orthographic knowledge can be used to complete phonological awareness tasks it cannot be said definitively that it is prosodic sensitivity influencing reading and spelling and not the reverse. Therefore, the present study sought to test the model in a longitudinal study conducted at the outset of reading development. A sample of 4- to 5-year-old English-speaking children (N = 101) were assessed for their prosodic sensitivity, vocabulary knowledge, phonological and morphological awareness, and one year later (N = 93) for their word reading and spelling. A path analysis revealed that the conceptual model provides an adequate fit to our sample data: prosodic sensitivity in pre-reading children predicts reading and spelling indirectly through other emergent literacy skills. The implications of these findings are discussed in relation to models of literacy development and literacy instruction

Drama, performance and touch in the medieval convent and beyond

In this analysis we explore the sensory performances of the performer, rather than the spectator, in medieval convent drama, particularly the tactile experiences of clothing, props, wigs, and beards worn by female performers presenting male and female characters

Spelling development in young children: a case of Representational Redescription?

' This article may not exactly replicate the final version published in the APA journal. It is not the copy of record.' Original article can be found at: http://content.apa.org/journals/0022-0663 Copyright American Psychological AssociationTwo experiments explored children’s spelling development in the context of the Representational-Redescription Model (Karmiloff-Smith, 1992). Fifty-one 5-7 year old children (experiment one) and 44 5-6 year olds (experiment two) were assessed, via spelling production and recognition tasks, for phonological to morphological spelling development and representational levels derived from the RR model respectively. Children were allocated to one of the Nunes, Bindman and Bryant’s (1997) stages for spelling production and to one of the representational levels derived from the RR model for spelling recognition and accompanying verbal justifications indicating their knowledge and understanding of spelling. These results are discussed in terms of how the R-R model accounts for the, hitherto unexplained cognitive mechanisms that underlie spelling development and the notion of multi-representation in spelling.Peer reviewe

Spelling and Reading Representations in Children

This thesis sought to conceptualise children’s spelling and reading representations in a novel way based upon the implicit-explicit framework proposed by the Representational-Redescription (RR) model (Karmiloff-Smith, 1992). The children studied were aged 4-7 years. Existing models of spelling and reading (e.g. Frith, 1985, Ehri, 1998, 1999, 2002) describe the developmental process as a series of stages/phases. An alternative approach adopted here is derived from the author’s previous research (Critten et al. 2007). It employs a coding scheme that analyses children’s explanations of and performance on, recognition tasks that reveal varying levels of explicitness in understanding of spelling. In this thesis the levels are empirically validated for both spelling and reading. It begins with an attempt to show that young children represent spelling knowledge implicitly. A longitudinal study then elucidates the developmental trajectory of both spelling and reading over the course of a year demonstrating that changes occur in the explicitness of children’s underlying representations. By comparing the co-development of spelling and reading it was possible to demonstrate that phonological information is often explicitly used first in spelling before reading, lending support to Frith’s (1985) “pace maker” notions. The final study examined how context, previously known to facilitate children’s reading ability can also facilitate their spelling development. This effect occurs not just for reading and spelling performance but for explicit understanding, building on the Lexical Quality Hypothesis (Perfetti & Hart, 2002) that proposes a role for semantic information in successful spelling and reading. These findings are integrated into a proposal for a new model of development: the Spelling and Reading Explicitation Model (SREM). This model postulates that children develop beyond implicit recognition to form “active” explicit representations, accounting for generalisation errors and characterised as being consciously accessible and verbalisable. It proposes that the development of reading and spelling skill is based upon processes of abstraction, interpretation and application of phonological and morphological knowledge