Principles of effective literacy practice for EAL students in New Zealand classrooms.

The New Zealand Ministry of Education has recently identified the need for teachers to be prepared to meet the needs of English as an additional language (EAL)² students in New Zealand schools more effectively. This paper offers a number of principles to guide policy, practice and teacher development. The paper draws on Alton-Lee's (2003) best evidence synthesis of quality teaching for diverse students, and Franken and McComish's (2003a, 2003b) observations and analysis of provisions for EAL students in New Zealand schools. The principles, grounded in second language and literacy acquisition research, point to the need to provide particular enabling conditions for the literacy development of EAL students if they are to achieve as well as their English-speaking peers

Terminology for Membrane Distillation

One of the subjects of the “Round Table ” at the “Workshop on Membrane Distillation ” in Rome on May 5,1986 was nomenclature. The best example for the need of a more uniform language is the name of the process itself. In Rome the following names were used by the authors present: membrane distillation

Fatigue of intermittently stimulated quadriceps during imposed cyclical lower leg movements

During prolonged experiments the influence of knee angular velocity, and stimulation parameters (interpulse interval (IPI), duty cycle (DC), number of pulses per cycle (NP)) on fatigue-induced torque\ud decline of paralyzed human quadriceps was studied. Identification of torque-angle and -angular velocity was also performed. The overall loss of maximum torque (MT) and torque-time integral ('lTI) per cycle during sustained intermittent stimulation during isokinetic movement had a typical exponential decay reaching asymptotic values. Larger knee velocities resulted in a significantly faster and relative larger decay of MT and TTI. The rate and relative magnitude of fatigue during concentric contractions are in direct relation\ud to NP. The results may be valuable in the design of optimal control systems for FES which pursue minimization of muscle fatigue

Towards integrative religious education in Belgium and Flanders: challenges and opportunities

This article describes the way in which religious education (RE) has been organised in Flanders and Belgium, and gives attention to the problems and challenges that arise these days. We argue that the Schoolpact of 1958 which implies separate RE in different religions in public schools needs a revision. Therefore, we propose an alternative system, within the boundaries of the Belgian constitution that makes room for integrative RE as a new compulsory school subject in all schools

An Engineering Approach towards Action Refinement

In the abstract modelling of distributed systems we may need methods to replace abstract behaviours by more concrete behaviours which are closer to implementation mechanisms. Furthermore, we may want these methods to preserve the correctness of such a replacement. This paper introduces an approach towards action refinement in which an abstract action is replaced by a concrete activity. This approach is based on a careful consideration of the `action' and `causality relation' architectural concepts, which enable an abstract action to be replaced by many alternative concrete activities in a general way. This approach is based on the application of abstraction rules to determine whether a concrete activity conforms to an abstract action, considering the context in which the concrete activity and the abstract action are embedde

Characteristics of quality teaching for students in New Zealand schools whose first language is not English

The current paper draws on the findings of two recent research reports commissioned by the New Zealand Ministry of Education (Alton-Lee, 2003; Franken & McComish, 2003) in order to generate a synthesised statement of characteristics of quality teaching for students for whom English is not the first language (referred to from here as NESB students1) in New Zealand schools. Alton-Lee (2003, see Ministry of Education website, www.minedu.govt.nz) provides a synthesis of research-based evidence addressing the nature of quality teaching in schooling for the full range of diverse students. In this work, diversity encompasses “many characteristics including ethnicity, socio-economic background, home language, gender, special needs, disability, and giftedness” (Alton-Lee, 2003, p. v). Because her synthesis addresses diversity in the student population, she focusses on what is common to diverse students and thus does not specify particular conditions that pertain to any one sub-group of diverse students. Franken and McComish (2003) on the other hand, is a research report into the English language support for NESB (Non English Speaking Background) students in New Zealand schools. It includes a literature review of evidence-based research into second language teaching and learning, particularly classroom based research. It also reports on observations and analysis of practices in New Zealand schools, and discusses how these documented practices relate to the research findings from the literature