Descriptive analysis of the test of everyday attention for children in a Spanish normative sample

Introduction. Test of Everyday Attention for Children (TEA-Ch) has been validated in different countries demonstrating that it is an instrument with a correct balance between reliability and duration. Given the shortage of trustworthy instruments of evaluation in our language for infantile population we decide to explore the Spanish version of the TEA-Ch. Methods. We administered TEA-Ch (version A) to a sample control of 133 Spanish children from 6 to 11 years enrolled in school in the Community of Madrid. Four children were selected at random by course of Primary Education, distributing the sex of equivalent form. Descriptive analysis and comparison by ages and sex in each of the TEA-Ch's subtests were conducted to establish a profile of the sample. In order to analyze the effect of the age, subjects were grouped in six sub-samples: 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 and 11 years-old. Results. This first descriptive analysis demonstrates age exerted a significant effect on each measure, due to an important "jump" in children's performance between 6 and 7 years-old. The effect of sex was significant only in two visual attention measures (Sky Search & Map) and interaction age and sex exerted a significant effect only in the dual task (Score DT). Conclusions. The results suggest that the Spanish version of the TEA-Ch (A) might be a useful instrument to evaluate attentional processes in Spanish child population.

A Pedagogical Strategy for Integrated Education of Spanish in the 4th to 6th Grades of the General Basic Education

Language teaching has become a priority in the Costa Rican educational system, considering it as a tool for communication and development of thought. Without language, there is no access to other curriculum disciplinary knowledge. A successful experience conducted some years ago, with students from 4th to 6th grade, was the basis for the design and implementation of a professional development activity addressed to promoting an integration strategy previously adjusted according to the Ministry’s requirements and the existing national regulations. This study is developed in the framework of a qualitative paradigm including research-action and systematization. A purposive sample was selected based on a suitability factor, through which individuals are informed about the strategy, and then the strategy is applied to a group of students from urban-marginal areas. The techniques used include literature review, analysis of curriculum and Ministry’s regulations, application of an in-depth interview, discussions from the course’s participant in a portfolio, and discussions from students to whom the strategy was applied. We analyzed the considerations of teachers and students, as well as the theoretical and regulatory information by triangulation. The study’s conclusion is the necessity of a communicative approach in language teaching and our recommendation is to implement the strategy developed in the Costa Rican classrooms as provided in this paper.

Experiences with an Object-Oriented, Multi-Stage Language

Metaphor is a multi-stage programming language extension to an imperative, object-oriented language in the style of C# or Java. This paper discusses some issues we faced when applying multi-stage language design concepts to an imperative base language and run-time environment. The issues range from dealing with pervasive references and open code to garbage collection and implementing cross-stage persistence.

The Coming of Post-reflexive Society: Commodification and Language in Digital Capitalism

Language is a unique aspect of human communication because it can be used to discuss itself in its own terms. For this reason, human societies potentially have superior capacities of co-ordination, reflexive self-correction, and innovation than other animal, physical or cybernetic systems. However, this analysis also reveals that language is interconnected with the economically and technologically mediated social sphere and hence is vulnerable to abstraction, objectification, reification, and therefore ideology – all of which are antithetical to its reflexive function, whilst paradoxically being a fundamental part of it. In particular, in capitalism, language is increasingly commodified within the social domains created and affected by ubiquitous communication technologies. The advent of the so-called ‘knowledge economy’ implicates exchangeable forms of thought (language) as the fundamental commodities of this emerging system. The historical point at which a ‘knowledge economy’ emerges, then, is the critical point at which thought itself becomes a commodified ‘thing’, and language becomes its “objective” means of exchange. However, the processes by which such commodification and objectification occurs obscures the unique social relations within which these language commodities are produced. The latest economic phase of capitalism – the knowledge economy – and the obfuscating trajectory which accompanies it, we argue, is destroying the reflexive capacity of language particularly through the process of commodification. This can be seen in that the language practices that have emerged in conjunction with digital technologies are increasingly non-reflexive and therefore less capable of self-critical, conscious change.

Pattern-based analysis of EAI languages : the case of the business modelling language

Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) is a challenging area that is attracting growing attention from the software industry and the research community. A landscape of languages and techniques for EAI has emerged and is continuously being enriched with new proposals from different software vendors and coalitions. However, little or no effort has been dedicated to systematically evaluate and compare these languages and techniques. The work reported in this paper is a first step in this direction. It presents an in-depth analysis of a language, namely the Business Modeling Language, specifically developed for EAI. The framework used for this analysis is based on a number of workflow and communication patterns. This framework provides a basis for evaluating the advantages and drawbacks of EAI languages with respect to recurrent problems and situations.