Need for effective community participation in catchment planning in Australia

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Creating the political will necessary for achieving multilateral disarmament : the need for a peace-industrial complex

This dissertation deals with the failure to end the central arms race and provides some alternative proposals. Chapters 1 and 2 look at the failure of governmental disarmament negotiations and the ineffectiveness of the non-governmental peace movement. Chapter 3 outlines the author's recommended comprehensive strategy for ending the arms race? both the need for the US to make a dramatic unilateral initiative to break the deadlock (Super GRIT) and a detailed disarmament treaty. The main problem, as argued by the author, is more one of political will and so it is necessary to find a way of creating the political will to stimulate the US to make that dramatic unilateral initiative. He calls for the creation of a Peace-Industrial Complex. The intellectual arguments for the potential basis of such a complex are to be found in the research done by the United Nations; this is examined throughout Part II (Chapters 4-7). Unfortunately very little attention has been paid by governments to this work. Part III (Chapters 8 and 9) deals in more detail with the recommended Peace-Industrial Complex. Chapter 8 looks at its possible creation and method of work. Chapter 9 suggests that the proposed complex creates a transcending vision: from ‘uclear winter’to ‘nuclear spring’.

Gender and genre : a case study of a girl and a boy learning to write

This study addresses questions of gender and genre in early writing by drawing on systemic linguistic theory, It is a longitudinal case study that compares the writing development of two children, a boy and a girl/ who learned to write in classrooms that adopted an approach to writing known in Australia as 'process writing1, The children's written texts were analysed using the systemic functional grammar as developed by MAK, Hallidey and the models of genre and register as proposed by J,R, Martin. The children were followed for the first two and a half years of their schooling, from the first day of kindergarten to the middle of grade two. They were observed weekly during the daily ‘writing time’ and all texts were collected. Although the children were ostensibly 'free’ to determine both the writing topics and text types they produced, systemic analysis revealed that: 1) the majority of texts written were of one genre, the Observation genre, in which the children reconstructed their personal experience with family and friends and offered an evaluation of it. 2) a significant pattern of gender differences occurred within this genre, such that the boy reconstructed experience in terms of the male cultural stereotype of being an active participant in the world, while the girl reconstructed experience in terms of the female stereotype of being a more passive observer of experience. It is the strength of systemic linguistic analysis that it revealed how the choices the children made in language were constrained by a number of social and cultural contexts, including: a) the teacher's theoretical orientation to literacy; b) the models of spoken and written language available to the children; and c) the ideology of gender in the culture. In particular, the analysis made visible how children appropriate the meanings of their culture and socialise themselves into gender roles by constructing the ideology of gender in their writing. The study contributes to an understanding of genres by offering a revised description of the Observation genre, which derives from the Observation Comment genre originally identified by Martin and Rothery (1981). It also raises a number of implications for teacher training and classroom practice, including the need for: 1) increased teacher consciousness about gender and genre, especially an understanding that choices in language are socially constructed 2) a critical reassessment of the notion of 'free topic choice’ promoted by 'process writing' pedagogy, a practice which may limit choice and tacitly support the gender status quo.

Patient assessment of medication information leaflets and validation of the Evaluative Linguistic Framework (ELF)

Objective : To obtain patient feedback about the structure and quality of medication information leaflets and validate the usefulness of the Evaluative Linguistic Framework (ELF) for improving written communication with patients.
Methods : Triangulated feedback about a set of rheumatoid arthritis (RA) medication leaflets, some developed with knowledge of the ELF, was obtained from 27 people with RA from interviews, focus group discussion and self-administered questionnaires. The principal elements of the framework were investigated: overall generic structure and functions of each stage, interpersonal relationship between writer and reader, technicality of language and density of information.
Results : Participant assessments of the leaflets aligned with the framework in terms of what constituted a good leaflet. While the main purpose of the leaflets was identified as being information provision, participants also wanted clear instructions, benefits to be highlighted and side effects to be comprehensively listed. For comprehensiveness and user-friendliness, leaflets developed with guidance of the ELF were consistently preferred.
Conclusion : According to people with RA, leaflets generated from a linguistic framework are clearer and more effective in communicating information about medications.
Practice Implications : The ELF is a user-friendly, structured analytic system that can assist with the development of effective high quality patient information materials.

Course websites, computer proficiency and need for achievement : implications for MBA student performance

Course websites have become a basic requirement for course promotion and delivery in many universities. This study explores the relationship between perceived usefulness of course websites and student performance in an accounting course within a Masters of Business Administration (MBA) programme. Data from 48 students were found to support several hypotheses. Specifically, the findings of the study indicate that there is a significant correlation between the perceived usefulness of course website features such as lecture notes, tutorial questions and solutions and the frequency of use or access by students of such course website features. Further, we found that the perceived usefulness of course websites was positively related to students’ computer proficiency, but not with the frequency with which students missed classes. The findings also indicate that students with high need for achievement achieved better performance scores, but there was no significant relationship between perceived usefulness of course website and performance. These findings have several implications for the design and development of course websites at post-graduate level, and for future research examining the link between information technology and accounting education.

Editorial : the construction of academic literacy and difference

In recent years, academic literacy has been a subject of heated scholarly and political debates. How academic literacy is defined, whom it serves, and what its purposes are shape both educational policies and the pedagogical practices adopted in classrooms. Any definition of academic literacy, its purposes and its learners also constructs powerful notions of difference. For instance, many traditional definitions of academic literacy posit “out of school” literacy (or literacies) as its opposite; current literacy standards and performance measures create categories of students as able or struggling; and so on. At a time when English classrooms around the world are becoming more multicultural, multilingual and international, how might understandings of academic literacy respond to cultural, linguistic, gender, economic, (dis)ability and other differences? How can literacy be taught to difference without reducing it to sameness? Framing the curriculum around dominant cultural literacy and establishing communal homogeneity, whilst de-legitimizing the Other and announcing ever-new strangers, is not feasible in a new multilingual, multiculural order. There is an increasing need to resist conservative tendencies and to continue a socially critical model of literacy education that is more response-able to the lives of strangers and other forms of difference in a late-modern, globalized society at the same time that it provides opportunities for all students to expand their communicative repertoires and to gain agency in the “design of their social futures” (New London Group, 2000). Articles in this issue respond in different ways to this agenda.

Measuring quality of life in alcohol and other drug users - the need for improvement

Objective : The use of Quality of Life (QoL) -related measures in Alcohol and Other Drug-related research has increased dramatically over the past decade. However, there remains a great deal of confusion about which type of QoL measure is most valid, what each constrict actually measures and the ethicality of the process of QoL measurement and its subsequent transfer to monetary value. This is particularly important in regard to subsequent resource allocation on the basis of Quality Adjusted Life Years (QALYs). We aim to review the logic of current QoL -related measurement and determine the most conceptually valid way of measuring QoL.

Methods : This review considers some of the broad principles that concern quality of life assessment. These are discussed in relation to health-related quality of life (HRQoL) and the measurement of subjective well-being.

Results : We argue that there are serious logical and methodological issues concerning HRQoL measurement, to the extent that the instruments may not be regarded as valid measures of life quality as this term is generally understood.

Conclusions : It is recommended that HRQoL measurement be abandoned in favour of three separate forms of measurement as medical symptoms, subjective well-being and specific dimensions of psychological ill-being.

Positioning, linguistic theory and Orwell's short nonfiction

It is argued, making reference to an Orwell text sample, that linguistic theory illuminates "positioning" (as term and concept), that positioning's flexibility contributes to critical textual analysis and to attempts to understand complex human processes, but how far language may constrain as well as facilitate such understanding must remain open.