Australian English and its culture : el inglés australiano y su cultura.

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Skills for life : improving adult literacy and numeracy. Report by the Comptroller and Auditor General.

En este informe se dan a conocer los principales resultados de un programa puesto en marcha por el Departamento de Educación y Formación, en marzo de 2001 cuya finalidad era la de romper con el bajo nivel de alfabetización y aritmética de la población adulta de Inglaterra, mejorar sus habilidades para la vida y elevar el nivel de calidad de esta modalidad de educación en todas las zonas del país. Para ello, se han llevado a cabo iniciativas que permiten actualizar la formación de los profesores en materia de alfabetización, lenguaje y aprendizaje de las matemáticas y se han desarrollado diversos enfoques para identificar a las personas con baja cualificación y animarlas a la participación en el aprendizaje.

A technique to train auditory and visual memory for speech patterns in young hearing-impaired children

This paper details a technique for training auditory memory for length of speech sounds in preschool children with a profound hearing loss.

An examination of cued speech as a tool for language, literacy, and bilingualism for children who are deaf or hard of hearing

This study examines the purpose and uses of Cued Speech, its benefits and limitations, and its effectiveness as a tool for language, literacy, and bilingualism.

The discrimination of auditory and visual number

This study compares the discrimination of successive visual number and successive auditory number using the same stimulus durations and presentation rates for both stimuli. The accuracy of the discrimination of successive number decreased as the presentation rate increased and the number in a series increased.

Cross-modality temporal resolution for auditory, vibrotactile, and visual stimuli

This paper reviews a study of cross-modalities and within-modalities and their effects on speech perception.

Most comfortable listening levels of hearing impaired people: effects of everyday auditory and visual environments

This paper discusses a study to evaluate the changes that may occur in most comfortable listening levels when hearing aid users encounter a realistic auditory and visual environment.

Literature, literacy and the discourses of English teaching: a case study

This article examines the discourses of English teaching, and their implications for subject and literacy teaching and learning. Case study evidence is presented to illustrate the ways in which competing discourses are enacted in the classroom. We argue the need to critically examine the educational value of teacher discourses, which have an important impact on instructional practices and the quality of pupils' learning.

The effect of learning condition on perceptual anticipation, awareness, and visual search

The efficacy of explicit and implicit learning paradigms was examined during the very early stages of learning the perceptual-motor anticipation task of predicting ball direction from temporally occluded footage of soccer penalty kicks. In addition, the effect of instructional condition on point-of-gaze during learning was examined. A significant improvement in horizontal prediction accuracy was observed in the explicit learning group; however, similar improvement was evident in a placebo group who watched footage of soccer matches. Only the explicit learning intervention resulted in changes in eye movement behaviour and increased awareness of relevant postural cues. Results are discussed in terms of methodological and practical issues regarding the employment of implicit perceptual training interventions. (c) 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Learning associations between places and visual cues without learning to navigate: neither fornix nor entorhinal cortex is required

Rats with fornix transection, or with cytotoxic retrohippocampal lesions that removed entorhinal cortex plus ventral subiculum, performed a task that permits incidental learning about either allocentric (Allo) or egocentric (Ego) spatial cues without the need to navigate by them. Rats learned eight visual discriminations among computer-displayed scenes in a Y-maze, using the constant-negative paradigm. Every discrimination problem included two familiar scenes (constants) and many less familiar scenes (variables). On each trial, the rats chose between a constant and a variable scene, with the choice of the variable rewarded. In six problems, the two constant scenes had correlated spatial properties, either Alto (each constant appeared always in the same maze arm) or Ego (each constant always appeared in a fixed direction from the start arm) or both (Allo + Ego). In two No-Cue (NC) problems, the two constants appeared in randomly determined arms and directions. Intact rats learn problems with an added Allo or Ego cue faster than NC problems; this facilitation provides indirect evidence that they learn the associations between scenes and spatial cues, even though that is not required for problem solution. Fornix and retrohippocampal-lesioned groups learned NC problems at a similar rate to sham-operated controls and showed as much facilitation of learning by added spatial cues as did the controls; therefore, both lesion groups must have encoded the spatial cues and have incidentally learned their associations with particular constant scenes. Similar facilitation was seen in subgroups that had short or long prior experience with the apparatus and task. Therefore, neither major hippocampal input-output system is crucial for learning about allocentric or egocentric cues in this paradigm, which does not require rats to control their choices or navigation directly by spatial cues.

Reality monitoring and visual hallucinations in Parkinson's disease

Between 8 and 40% of Parkinson disease (PD) patients will have visual hallucinations (VHs) during the course of their illness. Although cognitive impairment has been identified as a risk factor for hallucinations, more specific neuropsychological deficits underlying such phenomena have not been established. Research in psychopathology has converged to suggest that hallucinations are associated with confusion between internal representations of events and real events (i.e. impaired-source monitoring). We evaluated three groups: 17 Parkinson's patients with visual hallucinations, 20 Parkinson's patients without hallucinations and 20 age-matched controls, using tests of visual imagery, visual perception and memory, including tests of source monitoring and recollective experience. The study revealed that Parkinson's patients with hallucinations appear to have intact visual imagery processes and spatial perception. However, there were impairments in object perception and recognition memory, and poor recollection of the encoding episode in comparison to both non-hallucinating Parkinson's patients and healthy controls. Errors were especially likely to occur when encoding and retrieval cues were in different modalities. The findings raise the possibility that visual hallucinations in Parkinson's patients could stem from a combination of faulty perceptual processing of environmental stimuli, and less detailed recollection of experience combined with intact image generation. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All fights reserved.

Spiritual literacy and tacit knowledge

This article represents a critique of the 'spiritual literacy' approach to spiritual education developed by Andrew Wright (e.g. 2000a), with particular reference to the inclusion of Michael Polanyi's theory of 'tacit knowledge'. Wright's assessment of the current state of religious education is summarised and his proposed method is outlined. Polanyi's ideas are then described and assessed for their compatibility with the 'spiritual literacy' approach.