Shared reading is a common practice in preschool classrooms and is purported to develop oral language, print concepts, and listening comprehension. The actual practice of reading aloud differed greatly among observed classrooms resulting in variations in potential positive effects. This study examines the potential effects of professional…

Dynamic geometry software (DGS) is often used for development of interactive teaching materials in many subjects, not only mathematics. These interactive materials can contain hundreds of elements in order to represent complex objects, and script programs to control their behavior. We propose an approach for creating, importing and using…

In the new millennium model of low definition curriculum, teachers have professional latitude to deliver prescribed disciplinary content through a range of pedagogical and assessment orientations. The rhetoric is that with carefully crafted practice, the goal of high quality/high equity learning outcomes can be achieved for all students. This…

There is now a strong evidence base from theory and research providing a "template" to inform practice at Wave 2, guiding the design and implementation of time-limited effective early intervention programmes for pupils identified as "at risk" of reading difficulties following initial literacy instruction (Rose, 2009). In…

This study aims to determine the attitudes toward Standard Spoken Tamil (SST) and Literary Tamil (LT) of 46 Tamil teachers in Singapore. The teachers' attitudes were used as an indicator of the acceptance or nonacceptance of SST as a viable option in the teaching of Tamil in the classroom, in which the focus has been largely on LT. The…

Understanding implicature--something meant, implied, or suggested distinct from what is said--is paramount for successful human communication. Yet, it is unclear how our cognitive abilities fill in gaps of unspecified information. This study presents three distinct sets of experiments investigating how people understand implied contrasts conveyed…

A crucial component of language acquisition involves organizing words into grammatical categories and discovering relations between them. The organization of words into categories, and the generalization of patterns from some seen word combinations to novel ones, account for important aspects of the expansion of linguistic knowledge in the early…

Internet-Scale code retrieval deals with the representation, storage, and access of relevant source code from a large amount of source code available on the Internet. Internet-Scale code retrieval systems support common emerging practices among software developers related to finding and reusing source code. In this dissertation we focus on some…

This thesis contributes to the growing field of ethnophysiography, a new subfield of cognitive anthropology that aims to determine the universals and variation in the categorization of landscape objects across cultures. More specifically, this work looks at the case of the Seri people of Sonora, Mexico to investigate the way they categorize…

Based on LSA's (Latent Semantic Analysis) measuring textual coherence and Halliday and Hasan's cohesive concepts and their categorization of cohesive devices, this paper analyzes coherent relatedness and cohesive devices of 100 Chinese students' English writings. The results indicate that (1) LSA is proved to be an objective and appropriate method…

Goldberg's (1995) recognition that, in addition to various word-level constructions, sentences also instantiate meaningful argument structure constructions enables a non-polysemy-based analysis of various verb 'alternations' (Levin 1993). In such an analysis, meaning variations associated with the use of the same verb in different argument…

Background: Nonword repetition (NWR) involves the ability to perceive, store, recall and reproduce phonological sequences. These same abilities play a role in word and morpheme learning. Cross-linguistic studies of performance on NWR tasks, word learning, and morpheme learning yield patterns of increased performance on all three tasks as a…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to discuss how learning styles and theories are currently used within personalised adaptable e-learning adaptive systems. This paper then aims to describe the e-learning platform iLearn and how this platform is designed to incorporate learning styles as part of the personalisation offered by the system.…

In this essay, I apply current linguistic theory to reanalyze earlier research on the acquisition of "ser" and "estar" (e.g., VanPatten 1985, 1987). Using insights from Roby and Schmitt ("Semi-Copulas"), for example, I argue that the acquisition of the copular verbs is an issue of the acquisition of their aspectual properties (see also Bruhn de…

We tested the magnitude of the face identity aftereffect following adaptation to different modes of adaptors in four experiments. The perceptual midpoint between two morphed famous faces was measured pre- and post-adaptation. Significant aftereffects were observed for visual (faces) and nonvisual adaptors (voices and names) but not nonspecific…