Despite long wait times, public paediatric developmental assessment services remain crucial for the assessment of vulnerable children, particularly those from disadvantaged backgrounds. Assessment represents a critical opportunity to guide the placement of supports to improve functioning and developmental trajectories. There is, however, a lack of…

Objective: This study examined the characteristics and quality of publicly available COVID-19 information education and communication (IEC) materials in India between March and December 2020. Design: An explanatory sequential mixed-method design was employed to examine the characteristics and quality of 265 purposefully selected IEC materials.…

As Internet carries on its growing in an unceasing manner, more and more students are guided by their teachers to access language learning websites to support self-study. The present study examined some linguistic and interactional properties of French learning websites in terms of readability, referential cohesion and interaction. These…

In this study, we carry out a qualitative and quantitative analysis of abbreviations in 300 randomly collected research paper titles published in the most prestigious European and US-based Astrophysics journals written in English. Our main results show that the process of shortening words and groups of words is one of the most characteristic and…

Natural language processing (NLP) is a field of computer science and linguistics devoted to creating computer systems that use human (natural) language as input and/or output. The authors propose that NLP can also be used for game studies research. In this article, the authors provide an overview of NLP and describe some research possibilities…

Analyzes aspects of language in three novels and their film adaptations. Gives examples of how the films reshaped the novels; speculates about the relationships between language, content, and media; and offers suggestions for instruction. (SR)

In a collaborative effort, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and the Document Design Project conducted an evaluation of marine radio rules for recreational boaters that had been rewritten in plain English by FCC personnel. The revised rules were evaluated by 53 experienced boaters and 52 inexperienced boaters, who were given either the…

Intended for writing teachers, this paper shows how "pithy prescriptions" for writing, such as "use definite, specific, concrete language," can be misleading or wrong. To support this thesis, the paper examines a technical writing book advocating short sentences and finds that it has sentences averaging 27.8 words in one section and 30.18 in…

To provide a rationale for textbook evaluation, a study examined the major and minor topics covered in 20 selected college-level business communication textbooks, the readability level presented for each text, and the number of schools currently using the text. (HOD)

Student editorials and letters to the editor that appeared in selected school newspapers during two school years (1949-1950 and 1973-1974) were analyzed to determine whether the more recent writing revealed characteristics usually associated with oral expression, a hypothetically negative influence of television viewing. In the analysis, only five…

A study examined the match between the vocabularies of children of different ethnic and socioeconomic status groups and the school vocabulary revealed by readability formulas and word lists. The Spache 1040 and the Dale 769 readability formula word lists were used as indicators of school vocabulary in the early primary grades, and a corpus of talk…