Enhancing the phonological processing skills of children with specific reading disability

The present study evaluated the benefits of phonological processing skills training for children with persistent reading difficulties. Children aged between 9-14 years, identified as having a specific reading disability, participated in the study. In a series of three experiments, pedagogical issues related to length of training time, model of intervention and severity of readers' phonological processing skills deficit prior to intervention, were explored. The results indicated that improvement in poor readers' phonological processing skills led to a dramatic improvement in their reading accuracy and reading comprehension performance. Increasing the length of training time significantly improved transfer effects to the reading process. Children with particularly severe phonological processing skill deficits benefited from art extended training period, and both individual and group intervention models for phonological processing training proved successful. Implications for speech and language therapists are discussed.

Dress for Dissent: Reading the Almost Unreadable

The changing ways of clothing in Australia, which has communicated disaffection within the public sphere, is enquired. The relationship between clothes as protested in everyday public life, and those exceptional, socially disruptive clothes on view at specific protest gatherings, are also explored. It is shown that dissident dress in the 1980s demonstrated a greater degree of solidarity in its radical difference from mainstream dress of 2000s. It is suggested that building on reconceptualised notion of protest dressing as process not fixity, the relationship of dissident dress to the mainstream has become, for the most part, less dichotomous.

It's all very well, in theory: Theoretical perspectives and their applications in contemporary pedagogical research

Current debates about educational theory are concerned with the relationship between knowledge and power and thereby issues such as who possesses a truth and how have they arrived at it, what questions are important to ask, and how should they best be answered. As such, these debates revolve around questions of preferred, appropriate, and useful theoretical perspectives. This paper overviews the key theoretical perspectives that are currently used in physical education pedagogy research and considers how these inform the questions we ask and shapes the conduct of research. It also addresses what is contested with respect to these perspectives. The paper concludes with some cautions about allegiances to and use of theories in line with concerns for the applicability of educational research to pressing social issues.

Pedagogical work and the 'cult of the body': Considering the role of HPE in the context of the 'new public health'

Physical education, now often explicitly identified with health in contemporary school curricula, continues to be implicated in the (re)production of the 'cult of the body'. We argue that HPE is a form of health promotion that attempts to 'make' healthy citizens of young people in the context of the 'risk society'. In our view there is still work to be done in understanding how and why physical education (as HPE) continues to be implicated in the reproduction of values associated with the cult of body. We are keen to understand why HPE continues to be ineffective in helping young people gain some measure of analytic and embodied 'distance' from the problematic aspects of the cult of the body. This paper offers an analysis of this enduring issue by using some contemporary analytic discourses including 'governmentality', 'risk society' and the 'new public health'.

A Critical Appraisal of Narrative in Sport History: Reading the Surf Lifesaving Debate

All debates in history—who started the Cold War, how successful were the Chartists in achieving their aims, to what extent was the recession of the American frontier culturally significant in American history— are debates between competing narrative interpretations. Moreover, because the historical imagination itself exists intertextually within our own social and political environment, the past is never discovered set aside from everyday life. History is designed and composed in the here and now.

Second floor reading area interior, Sunshine Coast University Library, Maroochydore

View of second floor reading area with rigid frames and air-conditioning ducting.

Second floor reading area interior, Sunshine Coast University Library, Maroochydore

View of second floor reading area with rigid frames and air-conditioning ducting.

Beginning readers' use of orthographic analogies in word reading

This research re-investigated the claim that beginning readers exploit information from the orthographic rime of clue words to help them to decode unfamiliar words. In Experiment 1, first-grade children were equally able to use orthographic information from the beginning, middle, and end of clue words to identify unfamiliar target words. Moreover, the improvement in reading end- (or orthographic rime-) same target words following clue word presentation reflected phonological priming. In second-grade children, with correction for retesting effects, improvement following clue word presentation for end-same and beginning-same target words was equivalent, although end-same target words improved more than middle-same target words. In Experiment 2, both first- and second-grade children were able to use orthographic information from the beginning, middle, and end of clue words to identify unfamiliar words. Clue word presentation enhanced the reading of beginning-same and end-same target words more than middle-same target words. Improvement was the same for beginning-same and end-same target words. Target word improvement following clue word presentation was greater than that for phonologically primed words only in children reading target words sharing the beginning sequence of the clue word. (C) 1998 Academic Press.

Spelling in adults: The role of reading skills and experience

One hundred university students completed tests of spelling production, vocabulary, reading comprehension, reading experience, and reading accuracy (ability to distinguish a previously read word from a similar distractor). Reading experience, as measured by an adaptation of the Author Recognition Test, and reading accuracy contributed to the prediction of spelling beyond the joint contribution of reading comprehension and vocabulary. The results are more consistent with a uni-process model of spelling based on the quality of word-specific orthographic learning, rather than with a dual-process account relying on both word-specific knowledge and rules.