Background: While highlighting is one of the most common strategies to enhance reading comprehension, little is known about how highlighting behavior and its relationship with performance varies across cultures. Our purpose was to examine whether the use and the success of highlighting prevalence, quantity, and task relevance vary internationally.…

This practice report describes the application of scenario-based learning to improve awareness of interpersonal skills in sport and exercise students. Thirty second-year undergraduate students over two consecutive academic years engaged in three scenario-based learning activities that simulated client interviews and consultations. The consensus…

Purpose: In healthy speakers, the more frequent and probable a word is in its context, the shorter the word tends to be. This study investigated whether these probabilistic effects were similarly sized for speakers with dysarthria of different severities. Method: Fifty-six speakers of New Zealand English (42 speakers with dysarthria and 14 healthy…

Background: This study investigated transition, or school leaving, as experienced by young adults living in Aotearoa New Zealand who had significant intellectual and developmental disabilities. Method: To investigate these typically unheard perspectives, qualitative methods were adapted to individual communication preferences. Personal and…

We investigated writing performance and knowledge of writing before and after a persuasive writing intervention for ethnically diverse elementary school students in a low socio-economic community in Aotearoa/New Zealand (NZ). We used a one-group pre-post design. The participants (n = 24) were year 5 and 6 students (ages 9-11) from the same…

A number of researchers have done extensive work on ontologies, epistemologies and pedagogies in relation to Pasifika research, but little on methodologies. Vaioleti describes talanoa as a phenomenological research approach which is ecological, oral and interactive. Halapua's article Talanoa Process: The Case of Fiji (2008) emphasises talanoa as a…

Reflection is an essential process for optimizing student learning outcomes in study abroad. Composing digital stories is a promising strategy for achieving high quality reflection. In this project we developed and explicated a rubric for assessing how students used the digital storytelling format to reflect on their study abroad experiences. We…

New Zealand's approach to literacy instruction is predominantly whole language. Explicit code-orientated literacy instruction is not favoured, however, most teachers are believed to include phonics in their literacy lessons. No study has been reported on phonics use in New Zealand schools. Survey responses on the use of phonics instruction from…

Research indicates that teachers can face challenges in knowing how to support language learners because they often have minimal training in teaching language learners in mainstream contexts (Martin, 2004; Sharma et al., 2011) and may consider language learners using their home language as detrimental to their learning (Franken & McComish,…

While there is widespread agreement that "all" learners of the 21st century need to be numerate and literate, reforming pedagogical practices to achieve such an outcome is challenging for many teachers. This is a report of one aspect of a project which aims to integrate a culturally responsive pedagogical mathematics practice within…

This study investigates the occurrence of corrective feedback and uptake in child ESOL classes. Transcripts of 8.1 hours of lessons in 6 ESOL classes in a New Zealand primary school were analysed to explore the relationship between errors, feedback, and uptake. The results revealed that there was a clear preference for recasts and explicit…

This experiment investigated the combined use of visual prompts, daily feedback, and rewards to reduce electricity consumption in a university residential hall. After a 17-day baseline period, the experimental intervention was introduced in the intervention hall, and no change was made in the control hall. Energy usage decreased in the…

This article presents the results of a study examining the effectiveness of written corrective feedback (CF) on the simple past tense and the impact beliefs may have on students' uptake of the feedback they receive. A seven-week study was carried out with 42 advanced EFL learners in Vientiane, Laos. Students' beliefs about written CF were first…

This paper draws on a wider literature review, completed by the author in 2007, about the effectiveness of teachers' aides (TAs). It discusses the effects of the proximity of TAs on the students with disabilities to whom they are assigned. It also reports on studies where TAs have been trained to support the students to interact with their peers…

This study examines the role of abstractness during the activation of a lexical representation. Abstractness and conflict are directly modeled in our approach by invoking lexical representations in terms of contrastive phonological features. In two priming experiments with English nouns differing only in vowel height of their stem vowels (e.g.,…