Hip-Hop Hamlet: Hybrid Interpretive Discourse in a Suburban High School English Class

This study investigates the collaborative composing processes of a group of five high school seniors who constructed interpretations of each of the five acts of Shakespeare’s Hamlet through the medium of spoken word performances. The group composing processes were analyzed to identify how the students drew on conventions from the spoken word tradition to phrase and perform their interpretations. Findings indicate that across the five spoken word performances, the retelling of the Hamlet narrative involved a set of decisions that were both constrained and afforded by the rap medium. The students’ discussion of how to rewrite the story in the condensed poetic form of a rap required them to clarify events from Shakespeare’s version and both summarize them and interpret them both in their discussion and in their own text. Their interpretive work involved the incorporation of a variety of rap and other pop culture conventions such that their deliberation regarding word choice and accompanying performative elements necessitated careful consideration of the meaning that they found in Shakespeare’s version of the story, itself an adaptation from extant cultural narratives. The study concludes with a consideration of their spoken word interpretations as comprising a hybrid discourse that enabled exploratory interpretive talk that contributed to their understanding of the drama through the collaborative composition of their own representational text

The Social Construction of Data: Methodological Problems of Investigating Learning in the Zone of Proximal Development

↵PETER SMAGORINSKY is Associate Professor, College of Education, University of Oklahoma, 820 Van Vleet Oval, Norman, OK 73019-0260; smagor{at}aardvark.ucs.uoknor.edu. He specializes in defining and assessing classroom literacy.Yeshttps://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/manuscript-submission-guideline

Student engagement in the teaching and learning of grammar: A case study of an earlycareer secondary school English teacher

This article reports a study of coauthor Laur

Atmospheric circulation of tidally locked exoplanets: a suite of benchmark tests for dynamical solvers

The complexity of atmospheric modelling and its inherent non-linearity, together with the limited amount of data of exoplanets available, motivate model intercomparisons and benchmark tests. In the geophysical community, the Held-Suarez test is a standard benchmark for comparing dynamical core simulations of the Earth's atmosphere with different solvers, based on statistically-averaged flow quantities. In the present study, we perform analogues of the Held-Suarez test for tidally-locked exoplanets with the GFDL-Princeton Flexible Modeling System (FMS) by subjecting both the spectral and finite difference dynamical cores to a suite of tests, including the standard benchmark for Earth, a hypothetical tidally-locked Earth, a "shallow" hot Jupiter model and a "deep" model of HD 209458b. We find qualitative and quantitative agreement between the solvers for the Earth, tidally-locked Earth and shallow hot Jupiter benchmarks, but the agreement is less than satisfactory for the deep model of HD 209458b. Further investigation reveals that closer agreement may be attained by arbitrarily adjusting the values of the horizontal dissipation parameters in the two solvers, but it remains the case that the magnitude of the horizontal dissipation is not easily specified from first principles. Irrespective of radiative transfer or chemical composition considerations, our study points to limitations in our ability to accurately model hot Jupiter atmospheres with meteorological solvers at the level of ten percent for the temperature field and several tens of percent for the velocity field. Direct wind measurements should thus be particularly constraining for the models. Our suite of benchmark tests also provides a reference point for researchers wishing to adapt their codes to study the atmospheric circulation regimes of tidally-locked Earths/Neptunes/Jupiters.Comment: Accepted by MNRAS, 23 pages, 17 figures, 2 tables. No changes from previous version, except MNRAS wants no hyphen in the title. Sample movies of simulations are available at http://www.phys.ethz.ch/~kheng/fms

The Nature of Knowledge in Composition and Literary Understanding: The Question of Specificity

↵PETER SMAGORINSKY is Assistant Professor, College of Education, University of Oklahoma, 820 Van Vleet Oval, Norman, OK 73019-0. He specializes in classroom literacy.Yeshttps://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/manuscript-submission-guideline

Circulation characteristics in three eddy-permitting models of the North Atlantic

A systematic intercomparison of three realistic eddy-permitting models of the North Atlantic circulation has been performed. The models use different concepts for the discretization of the vertical coordinate, namely geopotential levels, isopycnal layers, terrain-following (sigma) coordinates, respectively. Although these models were integrated under nearly identical conditions, the resulting large-scale model circulations show substantial differences. The results demonstrate that the large-scale thermohaline circulation is very sensitive to the model representation of certain localised processes, in particular to the amount and water mass properties of the overflow across the Greenland-Scotland region, to the amount of mixing within a few hundred kilometers south of the sills, and to several other processes at small or sub-grid scales. The different behaviour of the three models can to a large extent be explained as a consequence of the different model representation of these processes