Writing Motivation of Students with Specific Language Impairments

This study was designed to compare the writing motivation of students with specific language impairments with their non-disabled peers. Due to the cognitive and linguistic demands of the writing process, students with language impairments face unique difficulties during the writing process. It was hypothesized that students with specific language impairments will be more likely to report lower levels of perceived writing competence and be less autonomously motivated to write. Students in grades 3-5 in 11 schools (33 with specific language impairments, 242 non-disabled peers) completed self-report measures, designed from a Self-Determination Theory perspective, which measured the degree that students are intrinsically motivated to write as well as their perceived writing competence. Statistical analyses showed that (1) students with specific language impairments reported lower levels of perceived writing competence and autonomous writing motivation; (2) SLI status was a significant predictor of perceived writing competence after spelling, grade, and gender were controlled; and (3) when spelling, grade, and gender were controlled, perceived writing competence was a significant predictor of autonomous writing motivation, but SLI status was not. The results of this study are expected to inform the current understanding of the relationship between language ability and writing motivation in students with specific language impairments, as well as the design of future writing interventions.

Challenges of Students’ Industrial Work Experience Scheme (SIWES) in Library and Information Science in the ICT Environment

The ICT revolution has permeated every profession and all areas of human endeavour. Professions such as law, medicine , engineering, and library and information science are adjusting to the ICT environment through re-tooling, retraining, and curriculum revision. The purpose of this study is to explore the impact of ICT on the student industrial work experience scheme (SIWES) of library and information science students. It traces the historical development of the scheme, the ICT development trends in LIS, and the challenges this development brings to SIWES. Strategies to absorb this shock created by ICT are offered.

Traces, Patterns, Texture: In Search of Aesthetic Teaching/Learning Encounters

This inquiry reveals the crucial guidance of teachers toward surveying the capacity and needs of students, the formation of ideas, acting upon ideas, fostering connections, seeing potential, making judgments, and arranging conditions. Each aesthetic trace causes me to wonder how teachers learn to create experiences that foster student participation in the world aesthetically. The following considerations surface: • Given the emphasis in schools on outcomes and results, how do we encourage teachers to focus on acts of mind instead of end products in their work with students? • Given the orientations toward technical rationality, to fixed sequence, how do we help teachers experience fluid, purposeful learning adventures with students in which the imagi¬nation is given room to play? • Given the tendency to conceive of planning in teaching as the deciding of everything in advance, how do we help teachers and students become attuned to making good judgments derived from within learning experiences? • How do we help teachers build dialogical multivoiced conversations instead of monolithic curriculum? • What do we do to recover the pleasure dwelling in subject matter? How do we get teachers and students to engage thoughtfully in meaningful learning as opposed to covering curriculum7 • A capacity to attend sensitively, to perceive the complexity of relationships coming together in any teaching/learning experience seems critical. How do we help teachers and students attend to the unity of a learning experience and the play of meanings that arises from such undergoing and doing? The traces, patterns, and texture evidenced locate tremendous hope and wondrous possibilities alive within aesthetic teaching/learning encounters. It is such aliveness I encountered in the grade 4 art classroom that opened this account and continues to compel my attention. Possibilities for teaching, learning, and teacher education emerge. I am convinced they are most worthy of continued pursuit.