Health risk appraisal for older people 4: case finding for hypertension, hyperlipidaemia and diabetes mellitus in older people in English general practice before the introduction of the Quality and Outcomes Framework

Early intervention can help to reduce the burden of disability in the older population, but many do not access preventive care. There is uncertainty over what factors influence case finding in older patients in general practice.

Multiprofessional collaboration in teaching practices in all-day-schools in Switzerland

Multiprofessional collaboration in settings of extended education has been an important research topic in the past 40 years and has been discussed as a means to improve educational achievement, foster professional development, and support teachers in their everyday work. Several recent studies in multiprofessional settings found that collaboration practices often remain on a student-centered, time-limited, and superficial level of exchange, whereas higher forms of collaboration are very rare (Dizinger, Fussangel, Kasper, 2011). Furthermore there exists an obvious research gap on collaboration in Swiss all-day schools (Jutzi&Thomann, 2012). In this study we analyzed practices of multiprofessional collaboration in school-based and community-based extracurricular activities of all-day schools in Switzerland. The aim of this qualitative study of 10 all-day schools was to answer the following questions: (a) What forms of collaboration (informal/formal) are used between the different professionals? and (b) Are there different types of all-day schools with regard to distinctive and consistent types of collaboration? We conducted 18 problem-centered interviews (with the principals/heads of the all-day schools) and 10 focus group discussions (teams). In the process of data evaluation, we applied the method of qualitative content analysis. The results show that multiprofessional collabo ration is taking place in all of the all-day schools examined in the study. However, the collaborative practices differ in their level of intensity, design, and purpose.

Multi-grade teaching practices in Austrian and Finnish primary schools

This article describes the teaching strategies used in multi-grade classes in five small rural primary schools in Austria and Finland on the basis of the content analysis of transcribed teacher interviews. Two main types of strategies were identified: practices that (1) aim to reduce or (2) capitalize on students’ heterogeneity. The results illustrate how differently multi-grade teaching can be realized and how it can effectively support individual student learning. The findings are discussed with regard to teacher education with the intention of increasing the awareness of the professional skills required in high-quality teaching practices in multi-grade teaching.

English in England

The intention of the present volume is to unite the research of a range of scholars who have been working on features of non-standard, vernacular English which show an areal distribution, i.e. which cluster geographically across the world. Features common to an area can be due to (i) shared dialect input, (ii) common but separate innovations after settlement, or (iii) area-internal diffusion from one variety to another and/or others. The relative weighting of these factors is an important topic in the book and is a key focus in the 17 chapters. The book is divided into two large blocks, the first one consisting of case studies (8 chapters) and the second with features complexes (9 chapters). The former look at major anglophone locations from an areal perspective while the latter examine linguistic categories and features with a view to determine whether these could be areally based or not.

A variationist approach to the examination of insertion and deletion of /h/ in Kosraean English

I report on language variation in the unresearched variety of English emerging on Kosrae, Federated States of Micronesia. English is spoken as the inter-island lingua franca throughout Micronesia and has been the official language of FSM since gaining its independence in 1986, though still retaining close ties with the US through and economic “compact” agreement. I present here an analysis of a corpus of over 90 Kosraean English speakers, compiled during a three month fieldwork trip to the island in the Western Pacific. The 45 minute sociolinguistically sensitive recordings are drawn from a corpus of old and young, with varying levels of education and occupations, and off-island experiences. In the paper I analyse two variables. The first variable is the realisation of /h/, often subject to deletion in both L1 and L2 varieties of English. Such occurrences are commonly associated with Cockney English, but also found in Caribbean English and the postcolonial English of Australia. For example:  Male, 31: yeah I build their house their local huts and they pay me /h/ deletion is frequent in Kosraean English, but, perhaps expectedly, occurs slightly less among people with higher contact with American English, through having spent longer periods off island. The second feature under scrutiny is the variable epenthesis of [h] to provide a consonantal onset to vowel-initial syllables.  Male, 31: that guy is really hold now This practice is also found beyond Kosraean English. Previous studies find h-epenthesis arising in L1 varieties including Newfoundland and Tristan de Cunha English, while similar manifestations are identified in Francophone L2 learners of English. My variationist statistical analysis has shown [h] insertion:  to disproportionately occur intervocalically;  to be constrained by both speaker gender and age: older males are much more likely to epenthesis [h] in their speech;  to be more likely in the onset of stressed as opposed to unstressed syllables. In light of the findings of my analysis, I consider the relationship between h-deletion and h-epenthesis, the plausibility of hypercorrection as a motivation for the variation, and the potential influence of the substrate language, alongside sociolinguistic factors such as attitudes towards the US based on mobility. The analysis sheds light on the extent to which different varieties share this characteristic and the comparability of them in terms of linguistic constraints and attributes. Clarke, S. (2010). Newfoundland and Labrador English. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press Hackert, S. (2004). Urban Bahamian Creole: System and Variation. Varieties of English Around the World G32. Amsterdam: Benjamins Milroy, J. (1983). On the Sociolinguistic History of H-dropping in English in Current topics in English historical linguistics: Odense UP