Asperger Syndrome and the English curriculum: addressing the challenges

A major criterion for the diagnosis of Asperger syndrome is an impairment of the imagination. This article focuses on the specific difficulties that students with Asperger syndrome have with the imaginative content of the English curriculum. It examines the problems with reading and writing imaginatively of a group of students with AS in a secondary school mainstream setting. Various strategies and interventions are considered and discussed which could aid their understanding and learning in relation to the imaginative element of the English curriculum. While acknowledging that this is an area of real difficulty for these students, recommendations include: treating students with AS as individuals; using a small group setting; providing support through structured frameworks.

List 229: Irish and English Dendrochronology

These results cover dating undertaken since the last published list of dated building from Ireland (Brown (2002)); one English church building is also included in the list. Thanks are due to the owners of the buildings and especially to everyone who assisted in taking of the samples: Phil Barrett, Sapphire Mussen, Charles Lyons, Jon Pilcher and Mike Baillie, Amanda Pedlow, Caimin O’Brien and Martin Timoney. Most of the descriptions of the buildings are taken from the National Inventory of Architectural Heritage http://www.buildingofi reland.ie/. The correlation values were generated by CROSS84 (Munro, 1984), which provides a signifi cance level for the date to be correct; *** (extremely signifi cant), ** (very signifi cant), * (signifi cant), nsm (not signifi cant). Estimated felling date ranges are based on the Belfast sapwood estimate of 32 ± 9 years. Date ranges have been calculated by adding and subtracting 9 years from the calculated estimated felling dates. Timbers from the following buildings could not be dated. Cork: St Finbarre’s Cathedral (W 675 715); Dublin: Christchurch Cathedral (O 152 341); Galway: Cloghan Castle (M 972 119); Kilkenny: Rothe House (S 506 563); Offaly: Boveen House (S 075 956); Waterford: Christchurch Cathedral (S 616 121). Generally only single oak samples were recovered from these structures. References: D.Brown, ‘Dendrochronological dating building from Ireland’, VA 33 (2002), 71–3; M. Munro, ‘An improved algorithm for crossdating tree-ring series’, Tree-Ring Bulletin 44 (1984), 17–27.

‘Who Ate All the Pride?’:Patriotic Sentiment and English National Football Support.

The growing popularity of English national insignia in international football tournaments has been widely interpreted as evidence of the emergence of a renewed English national consciousness. However, little empirical research has considered how people in England actually understand football support in relation to national identity. Interview data collected around the time of the Euro 2000 and the 2002 World Cup tournaments fail to substantiate the presumption that support for the England football team maps onto claims to patriotic sentiment in any straightforward way. People with far-right political affiliations did generally use national football support to symbolise a general pride in English national identity. However, other people either claimed not to support the England national team precisely because of its associations with nationalism, or else bracketed the domain of football support from more general connotations of English patriotism.

Sarcasm Detection on Czech and English Twitter

This paper presents a machine learning approach to sarcasm detection on Twitter in two languages – English and Czech. Although there has been some research in sarcasm detection in languages other than English (e.g., Dutch, Italian, and Brazilian Portuguese), our work is the first attempt at sarcasm detection in the Czech language. We created a large Czech Twitter corpus consisting of 7,000 manually-labeled tweets and provide it to the community. We evaluate two classifiers with various combinations of features on both the Czech and English datasets. Furthermore, we tackle the issues of rich Czech morphology by examining different preprocessing techniques. Experiments show that our language-independent approach significantly outperforms adapted state-of-the-art methods in English (F-measure 0.947) and also represents a strong baseline for further research in Czech (F-measure 0.582).