A THREE-YEAR LONGITUDINAL STUDY OF IN-CLASS SUSTAINED SILENT READING WITH TAIWANESE VOCATIONAL COLLEGE STUDENTS

This study examined the effects of three years of in-class sustained silent reading with a group of vocational college students in Taiwan. Readers outperformed comparisons on tests administered after one semester and increased their advantage on tests given at the end of the first year. The gap between the groups narrowed the second year, but readers maintained their superiority at the end of the second and third year. The initial gains were probably due, in part, to the Hawthorne Effect. It is likely that the progress made in the second and third year were more modest, because of external demands on students’ time, which limited the amount of reading students could do outside of class. Overall, the results clearly support the practice of in-school self-selected reading. Keywords:   In-class sustained silent reading; vocational college student; Hawthorne Effect; in-school self-selected readin

A Three-year Longitudinal Study of In-class Sustained Silent Reading with Taiwanese Vocational College Students

This study examined the effects of three years of in-class sustained silent reading with a group of vocational college students in Taiwan. Readers outperformed comparisons on tests administered after one semester and increased their advantage on tests given at the end of the first year. The gap between the groups narrowed the second year, but readers maintained their superiority at the end of the second and third year. The initial gains were probably due, in part, to the Hawthorne Effect. It is likely that the progress made in the second and third year were more modest, because of external demands on students' time, which limited the amount of reading students could do outside of class. Overall, the results clearly support the practice of in-school self-selected reading

Exposure to L2 online text on lexical and reading growth

With the fast-paced development of technology in today’s society, there has been emerging a shift from paper-based reading to digital online reading. While the benefits of exposure to print have been well-established in previous studies, how online reading may impact individuals’ literacy development is largely underexplored. The current study investigated if the amount of English reading experience on the Internet could predict EFL students’ lexical knowledge and reading comprehension ability. Participants were ninety-seven Vietnamese undergraduate students who were administered a website checklist and a vocabulary size test. Their reading comprehension scores were also collected as measures of their reading abilities. Descriptive statistics, hierarchical linear regression and structural equation modelling were utilized for data analysis. The results indicated that exposure to L2 online text was a significant predictor of the participants’ vocabulary size as well as their reading comprehension growth during a course of two years. Pedagogical implications are discussed

Children understimate how much others read: A confirmation using Chinese 7th graders in Hefei, China

There is a common view that “kids these days” don’t read as much as they used to. This view is so firmly held that discussion nearly always focuses on why children don’t read, assuming that the decline in reading is real. For example, in a Good Reads blog, Lynette Sofras asked “Why don’t children read anymore?” 1 Contributors gave a number of reasons such as poor quality of literature written for young people, lack of discipline, the Internet, and force feeding classics to children

Semiparametric Multivariate Accelerated Failure Time Model with Generalized Estimating Equations

The semiparametric accelerated failure time model is not as widely used as the Cox relative risk model mainly due to computational difficulties. Recent developments in least squares estimation and induced smoothing estimating equations provide promising tools to make the accelerate failure time models more attractive in practice. For semiparametric multivariate accelerated failure time models, we propose a generalized estimating equation approach to account for the multivariate dependence through working correlation structures. The marginal error distributions can be either identical as in sequential event settings or different as in parallel event settings. Some regression coefficients can be shared across margins as needed. The initial estimator is a rank-based estimator with Gehan's weight, but obtained from an induced smoothing approach with computation ease. The resulting estimator is consistent and asymptotically normal, with a variance estimated through a multiplier resampling method. In a simulation study, our estimator was up to three times as efficient as the initial estimator, especially with stronger multivariate dependence and heavier censoring percentage. Two real examples demonstrate the utility of the proposed method

Identification of a New Peptide for Fibrosarcoma Tumor Targeting and Imaging In Vivo

A 12-mer amino acid peptide SATTHYRLQAAN, denominated TK4, was isolated from a phage-display library with fibrosarcoma tumor-binding activity. In vivo biodistribution analysis of TK4-displaying phage showed a significant increased phage titer in implanted tumor up to 10-fold in comparison with normal tissues after systemic administration in mouse. Competition assay confirmed that the binding of TK4-phage to tumor cells depends on the TK4 peptide. Intravenous injection of 131I-labeled synthetic TK4 peptide in mice showed a tumor retention of 3.3% and 2.7% ID/g at 1- and 4-hour postinjection, respectively. Tumor-to-muscle ratio was 1.1, 5.7, and 3.2 at 1-, 4-, and 24-hour, respectively, and tumors were imaged on a digital γ-camera at 4-hour postinjection. The present data suggest that TK4 holds promise as a lead structure for tumor targeting, and it could be further applied in the development of diagnostic or therapeutic agent

A dual function TAR Decoy serves as an anti-HIV siRNA delivery vehicle

The TAR RNA of HIV was engineered as an siRNA delivery vehicle to develop a combinatorial therapeutic approach. The TAR backbone was found to be a versatile backbone for expressing siRNAs. Upon expression in human cells, pronounced and specific inhibition of reporter gene expression was observed with TARmiR. The resulting TARmiR construct retained its ability to bind Tat and mediate RNAi. TARmiR was able to inhibit HIV gene expression as a TAR decoy and by RNA interference when challenged with infectious proviral DNA. The implications of this dual function therapeutic would be discussed

Gene-Expression Signatures Can Distinguish Gastric Cancer Grades and Stages

Microarray gene-expression data of 54 paired gastric cancer and adjacent noncancerous gastric tissues were analyzed, with the aim to establish gene signatures for cancer grades (well-, moderately-, poorly- or un-differentiated) and stages (I, II, III and IV), which have been determined by pathologists. Our statistical analysis led to the identification of a number of gene combinations whose expression patterns serve well as signatures of different grades and different stages of gastric cancer. A 19-gene signature was found to have discerning power between high- and low-grade gastric cancers in general, with overall classification accuracy at 79.6%. An expanded 198-gene panel allows the stratification of cancers into four grades and control, giving rise to an overall classification agreement of 74.2% between each grade designated by the pathologists and our prediction. Two signatures for cancer staging, consisting of 10 genes and 9 genes, respectively, provide high classification accuracies at 90.0% and 84.0%, among early-, advanced-stage cancer and control. Functional and pathway analyses on these signature genes reveal the significant relevance of the derived signatures to cancer grades and progression. To the best of our knowledge, this represents the first study on identification of genes whose expression patterns can serve as markers for cancer grades and stages