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Classroom Discourse: What Is Conveyed Through Educational Interpretation
Abstract
When a deaf or hard-of-hearing child enters a classroom with an interpreter, the goal, and sometimes the assumption, is that they will be granted full access to the classroom experience. This study focuses on the clarity and completeness with which critical elements of classroom discourse are conveyed through the interpretations of 40 educational interpreters. Elements studied include conveyance of main ideas, directions for assignments, relevance strategies, orienting commentary, participation solicitation, mental state reference, and semantic organization. The interpretations clearly and completely conveyed approximately one-third to two-thirds of the information (M = 48.6%) related to these elements of classroom discourse. Frequent omissions and alterations rendered large parts of the message markedly different. Results suggest a need to improve training of educational interpreters, increase communication between teachers and interpreters, provide students supplementary services, and heighten awareness that the interpretation process is fallible in ways that can impact access to classroom discourse.
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Teachers of the deaf, signed language interpreters, and associated staff (e.g., secretaries and sanitation workers) are a salient part of a deaf child’s community often because hearing parents and other family members of deaf children do not become proficient signers leading many deaf children and adults to feel alienated in the home environment (e.g., dinner table syndrome). Because the school environment provides another way for deaf children to acquire language, professional signed language fluency is critical. Yet, in other second language acquisition contexts, fluency is not necessary for effective teaching and often highly racialized. If perceived fluency is often dependent on proximity to whiteness, and language fluency is not necessary for effective teaching, then why is it necessary to require professionals to be fluent in signed languages before teaching and working with deaf children?
Little literature exists documenting how K-12 American Sign Language-English interpreters are supervised or evaluated, or how supervision and evaluation affect interpreters and deaf and hard of hearing students. To address this gap, the author asked 230 educational interpreters about their experiences of supervision. Using a critical policy analysis framework and transformational leadership lens, the author conducted a Qualtrics online survey consisting of 42 open- and closed-ended items. Descriptive and statistical results are reported. Chi-square tests showed a significant difference in supervisory activities based on whether or not the supervisor was a credentialed interpreter. Supervisors who were interpreters conducted more job evaluations, assessed interpreting skills more often, and organized professional development more frequently than non-interpreters.
This paper examines two kinds of student engagement: "procedural," which concerns classroom rules and regulations; and "substantive," which involves sustained commitment to the content and issues of academic study. It describes the manifestations of these two forms of engagement, explains how they relate differently to student outcomes, and offers some empirical propositions using data collected on literature instruction, collected during 1987-88 from 58 eighth-grade English classes (N=1,041 students). The results provide support for the following three hypotheses: (1) disengagement adversely affects achievement; (2) procedural engagement has an attenuated relationship to achievement because its observable indicators conflate procedural and substantive engagement; and (3) substantive engagement has a strong, positive effect on achievement. Features of substantively engaged instruction include authentic questions or questions that have no prespecified answers; uptake or the incorporation of previous answers into subsequent questions; and high-level teacher evaluation or teacher certification and incorporation of student responses in subsequent discussion. Each of these features is noteworthy because it involves reciprocal interaction and negotiation between students and teachers, which is said to be the hallmark of substantive engagement. (Author/TJH)
Can skill in a language in a visual modality such as American Sign Language (ASL) contribute to the development of literacy in a spoken language such as English? Are there ways that signing can be used to interact with printed text that helps deaf children make connections to print and consequently, learn to read? What specific practices might users of signed languages engage in to promote an environment for reading development in young deaf children? These are ques-tions very much in the minds of educators, parents, and deaf people themselves. The development of English literacy has been a source of great concern to those with an interest in the education of deaf children. The importance of deaf children learning to at least read and write English in order to participate in the social and economic life of the United States is undisputed. But it is also well accepted that, for whatever reason, a large number of deaf children do not achieve a very high level of reading fluency. The historical focus of ideas about how best to foster the learning of English by deaf children has led to several predominant approaches in classrooms. One focus has been on learning English through speech input via the child's residual hearing or lipread-ing ability exclusively. Another has been on learning English via visible representations of English in sign, or in other words, creating sign equivalents of English words and, in theory, "signing English". A third theory has been that deaf children can learn English best by reading and writing it. With the primary focus on English input in whatever form above all else, the classrooms of deaf children have been places largely uninformed by knowledge about ASL and the cultural practices of its users. In recent years, there has been much public discussion of how ASL can be "used" to teach English and these ideas have found their way into some classrooms. Although there are a growing number of teachers who are themselves deaf and native users of ASL and teachers who hear but are fluent in ASL, little is known about the specific contexts and types of interactions of their use of ASL in their classrooms. Since a primary goal of schooling for deaf children is the learning of English and the development of reading and writing ability, the juncture between ASL and English in signing deaf children is of particular interest to educators. One reason for the interest in how ASL and English interact is the evidence of good English reading and writing skills among deaf children of ASL signing deaf parents (Chamberlain & Mayberry, 2000; Geers & Schick, 1988; Mayberry, 1989; Padden, 2000). The frequency of the success that deaf children of deaf families have in learning to read and write English suggests the probability that deaf families where ASL is the primary language must be doing something that provides productive access or experience with English text that enables their deaf children to learn to read and write English well. Regardless of whether this thesis is accepted, there is widespread experimentation with creating specific kinds of interaction between English and forms of sign behavior in classrooms for deaf children. In the past, examples of such experimentation include the use of the "Rochester method" (the exclu-sive use of fingerspelling without signing) and the heavy use of initialized signing (as in SEE I and SEE II, which impose signs on English syntax and invent "new" signs by using a handshape from the manual 84
Frequently, students are skeptical of the significance of the material taught to them in the classroom. A question they often pose to teachers is “What's in it for me?” Making content relevant to students' personal and career goals addresses these concerns. A scale to measure content relevance in the classroom was developed, factor analyzed, and determined to be a valid and reliable unidimensional instrument. Making content relevant to students' personal and career goals was hypothesized to be a factor, in addition to immediacy, that increases students' state motivation. Relevance was found to be associated with state motivation to study. In addition, relevance accounted for a significant amount of variance in state motivation after taking verbal and nonverbal immediacy into consideration.
The concept of empowerment has been used extensively in business, politics, and education in myriad ways and with multiple meanings. In this study, empowerment is conceptualized as a form of motivation (Conger & Kanungo, 1988; Thomas & Velthouse, 1990) which can exist as either a state or a trait. We believe that communication has a major influence on students' empowerment just as communication frequently impacts such conditions as state motivation (Frymier, 1994). The long range goal, for which this research is a first step, is to understand the role of communication in the process of empowerment. The immediate goals of this research are to provide a more specific conceptualization of empowerment as applied to the classroom and to develop an instrument to measure learner empowerment. Drawing heavily on the work of Thomas and Velthouse (1990), two studies were conducted to develop and refine the learner empowerment measure and to establish the construct validity of the instrument.
This research report describes a search for possible relations between children's developing theories of mind and aspects of their social-emotional maturity conducted by comparing the performance of 3-year-olds on measures of false belief understanding with teacher ratings of certain of their social-emotional skills and behaviours. The intuitions guiding this exploratory effort were, not only that a working grasp of the possibility of false belief would prove broadly predictive of social-emotional maturity, but also that such associations would be missing in the specific case of those preschool behaviours largely governed by a simple mastery of social conventions. As a step toward evaluating these possibilities a group of 40 preschoolers were given a battery of six measures of false belief understanding. The preschool teachers of these same children then completed a 40-item questionnaire covering a wide variety of markers of social-emotional maturity. Half of these items (termed “Intentional”) featured behaviours and skills thought to require some measure of insight into the mental lives of others, whereas the remainder (termed “Conventional”) were meant to sample a less heady domain of abilities open to those with no more than a simple grasp of social conventions, or the exercise of self-control. Consistent with the view that individual differences in children's early false belief understanding would express themselves primarily in those areas least governed by heavily routinised social conventions, our own summary measure of false belief understanding correlated positively only with those behavioural items classified as “Intentional”.
Increasing numbers of students who are deaf or hard of hearing are receiving their education in general education settings
with special education support from an itinerant teacher. However, previous research indicates that the majority of teacher
preparation programs do not provide training on the itinerant teaching model or set up field experiences for preservice teachers
as an itinerant teacher. The purpose of this study was to survey a national sample of itinerant teachers of students who are
deaf or hard of hearing to learn about their practices, preparation, perceptions, and the students they serve. Results, recommendations,
and suggestions for future research are provided.
The present study examined whether full access to sign language as a medium for instruction could influence performance in Theory of Mind (ToM) tasks. Three groups of Italian participants (age range: 6-14 years) participated in the study: Two groups of deaf signing children and one group of hearing-speaking children. The two groups of deaf children differed only in their school environment: One group attended a school with a teaching assistant (TA; Sign Language is offered only by the TA to a single deaf child), and the other group attended a bilingual program (Italian Sign Language and Italian). Linguistic abilities and understanding of false belief were assessed using similar materials and procedures in spoken Italian with hearing children and in Italian Sign Language with deaf children. Deaf children attending the bilingual school performed significantly better than deaf children attending school with the TA in tasks assessing lexical comprehension and ToM, whereas the performance of hearing children was in between that of the two deaf groups. As for lexical production, deaf children attending the bilingual school performed significantly better than the two other groups. No significant differences were found between early and late signers or between children with deaf and hearing parents.
This study compared the organization of verbal concept knowledge in deaf and hearing adults. Such organization has been shown to influence performance by hearing adults on language and memory tasks, but comparisons of deaf and hearing individuals' mental lexicons have not been conducted. A semantic association task was used to estimate the mental lexicons of deaf and hearing adults for a sample of words that were either sound related or not sound related. Estimates of the size of the associative set for a given word and the strength of the relationship between the word and its associates were computed. The associative sets of deaf and hearing adults varied in the coherence and accessibility of the lexical concepts but showed generally high agreement in the strengths of the relationships within the associative sets. Observed similarities and differences between deaf and hearing adults were comparable for sound-related and not-sound-related words. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
During a 16-wk period, the motivational strategies used by 30 1st-yr elementary school classroom teachers and the on-task behaviors of their respective students were monitored. The motivational strategies were categorized as either getting attention, emphasizing relevance, building confidence, or imposing rewards and punishments. Although a variety of strategy types were used by each teacher, the frequency of reward and punishment use was significantly greater than the frequency of each of the other types. Data analysis indicated a significant positive correlation between relevance strategies and on-task behaviors, whereas a negative correlation was shown between the on-task behaviors and the reward/punishment strategies. Implications of these findings are discussed in terms of student age and the type, number, and ease of use of the selected strategies. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
A new conceptualization of perceived control was used to test a process model describing the contribution of these perceptions to school achievement for students in elementary school (
N = 220). Three sets of beliefs were distinguished: (a) expectations about whether one can influence success and failure in school (
control beliefs); (b) expectations about the
strategies that are effective in producing academic outcomes; and (c) expectations about one's own
capacities to execute these strategies. Correlational and path analyses were consistent with a process model which predicted that children's perceived control (self-report) influences academic performance (grades and achievement test scores) by promoting or undermining active
engagement in learning activities (as reported by teachers) and that teachers positively influence children's perceived control by provision of
contingency and
involvement (as reported by students). These results have implications for theories of perceived control and also suggest one pathway by which teachers can enhance children's motivation in school. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
On the basis of a new model of motivation, the authors examined the effects of 3 dimensions of teacher (
n = 14) behavior (involvement, structure, and autonomy support) on 144 children's (Grades 3–5) behavioral and emotional engagement across a school year. Correlational and path analyses revealed that teacher involvement was central to children's experiences in the classroom and that teacher provision of both autonomy support and optimal structure predicted children's motivation across the school year. Reciprocal effects of student motivation on teacher behavior were also found. Students who showed higher initial behavioral engagement received subsequently more of all 3 teacher behaviors. These findings suggest that students who are behaviorally disengaged receive teacher responses that should further undermine their motivation. The importance of the student–teacher relationship, especially interpersonal involvement, in optimizing student motivation is highlighted. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Noting the fundamental compatibility between activity, theory, as developed by Leontiev (1981), and the theory of discourse developed in the
[10],
[11],
[12] and [13]; Halliday & Hasan, 1985) tradition, this article attempts to develop an integrated framework for the description and analysis of classroom discourse. Episodes of discourse, it is proposed, are best understood as occurring in the Operationalization of the Actions, and their constituent curricular activities and tasks, through which the participants engage in the Activity of Education. Which genre of discourse is coconstructed in any episode depends on the goal of the task in which it occurs and on choices of register with respect to its Operationalization in the situation. In the second part of this article, this framework is applied to a corpus of data videorecorded over the course of a unit of study on time in a Grade 3 classroom in order to gain a better understanding of the various functions performed by the discourse genre of triadic dialogue, recognized by its characteristic IRF (initiation-response-follow-up) structure.
Deaf youth easily become communicatively isolated in public schools, where they are in a small minority among a majority of hearing peers and teachers. This article examines communicative strategies of deaf children in an American "mainstream" school setting to discover how they creatively manage their casual communicative interactions with hearing peers across multimodal communicative channels, visual and auditory. We argue that unshared sociolinguistic practices and hearing-oriented participation frameworks are crucial aspects of communicative failure in these settings. We also show that what look like "successful" conversational interactions between deaf and hearing children actually contain little real language and few of the complex communication skills vital to cognitive and social development. This study contributes to understanding the social production of communicative isolation of deaf students and implications of mainstream education for this minority group.
Most theory of mind (ToM) tests are designed for subjects with a mental age of 4–6 years. There are very few ToM tests for subjects who are older or more able than this. We report a new test of ToM, designed for children 7–11 years old. The task involves recognizing faux pas. Study 1 tested 7–9, and 11-year-old normal children. Results showed that the ability to detect faux pas developed with age and that there was a differential developmental profile between the two sexes (female superiority). Study 2 tested children with Asperger syndrome (AS) or high-functioning autism (HFA), selected for being able to pass traditional 4- to 6-year level (first- and second-order) false belief tests. Results showed that whereas normal 9- to 11-year-old children were skilled at detecting faux pas, children with AS or HFA were impaired on this task. Study 3 reports a refinement in the test, employing control stimuli. This replicated the results from Study 2. Some patients with AS or HFA were able to recognize faux pas but still produced them. Future research should assess faux pas production.
Deaf education research and practice has not lived up to the ideals of improving the lives of deaf students. To address the issue, we consider supporting deaf pedagogy using pragmatic ethics, which aim to increase benefit and decrease harm to individuals and society. Principally, we explore the ideal of harm reduction. Harm reduction is a concept that asks the pragmatist to pursue the path of action that is least likely to result in injury to others. We argue that in addition to reducing harm, educators must increase benefits for deaf students. We propose that deaf educators should enact deaf-positive and strengths-based classroom interactions. Our analysis presents six arguments that synthesize pragmatic ideals with Vygotskian perspectives. Its primary goal is reducing harm for deaf students, including the significant threat of language deprivation.
Cambridge Core - Sociolinguistics - Ways with Words - by Shirley Brice Heath
Longitudinal tracking of 107 three‐ to‐thirteen‐year‐olds in a cross‐sequential design showed a 6‐step theory of mind (ToM) sequence identified by a few past cross‐sectional studies validly depicted longitudinal ToM development from early to middle childhood for typically developing (TD) children and those with ToM delays owing to deafness or autism. Substantively, all groups showed ToM progress throughout middle childhood. Atypical development was more extended and began and ended at lower levels than for TD children. Yet most children in all groups progressed over the study's mean 1.5 years. Findings help resolve theoretical debates about ToM development for children with and without delay and gain strength and weight via their applicability to three disparate groups varying in ToM timing and sequencing.
A LTHOUGH MANY rural Deaf and Hard of Hearing students attend public schools most of the day and use the services of educational interpreters to gain access to the school environment, little information exists on what interpreters are doing in rural school systems in the absence of credentialing requirements. The researcher used ethnographic interviews and field observations of three educational interpreters with no certification or professional assessment to explore how uncredentialed interpreters were enacting their role in a rural high school. The findings indicate that uncredentialed interpreters in rural settings perform four major functions during their school day: preparing the environment, staff, and materials; interpreting a variety of content; interacting with numerous stakeholders; and directly instructing Deaf and Hard of Hearing students. Generally, educational interpreters in rural districts operate with unregulated autonomy, a situation that warrants further research and a national standard for all educational interpreters.
Composite utterances are utterances that are built from multiple signs of multiple types, meaning that in any conversational “move” speech, gestures, eye-gaze, intonation patterns, physical stance, etc. all participate in the utterance, and the meaning derived from it is constructed by the composite of these participant types. likewise considers utterances as multimodal ensembles. The present study investigates how the notion of composite utterance plays out in a signed language such as ASL. Articulated in the same modality as are gestures, the distinction between language and gesture has seemed less clear, leading some to ask whether signers even gesture at all and some to suggest that gestures and formal signed language are substantively different systems. On the other hand, others have posited a continuity approach to gesture and signed language especially in light of grammaticalization studies. Here I examine topic-comment constructions and perspectivized clauses in ASL through the lens of Enfield’s composite utterances proposal, looking at component parts and how they function to ground elements in the discourse and guide the interlocutor through the textual structure. I use Enfield’s conventional versus non-conventional type categories in examining lexical and prosodic elements in topic and perspective-taking constructions.
This chapter describes how a native signer teaches in a preschool classroom with five deaf children who entered with minimal communicative competence. None of the children had acquired linguistic skills, either in sign language or in English, before entering school at the age of three. This chapter presents the review of a story, Three Little Kittens that had been read to the students. In this review, the teacher does not read the story but rather asks the children about the story. The study demonstrates how the teacher helps the students adapt to the classroom situation. It specifically focuses on how the teacher uses questions; elicits answers; responds to answers; uses classifier predicates, role playing, and miniature signs; adapts signs to the specific actions depicted in pictures; and changes English words that show sound-related concepts to signs that show visual concepts. The findings suggest that to communicate effectively with those students who are prelingually deaf and have minimal language competence, a teacher must be competent in the use of different forms of American Sign Language (ASL).
The population of students who are deaf or hard of hearing is becoming more culturally and/or linguistically diverse. However, there is a paucity of practitioner literature and research available to professionals and families to guide decision making about daily practices with these students and their families. The study identified factors that contribute to the success of students who are deaf or hard of hearing and from culturally and/or linguistically diverse backgrounds who receive the majority of their education in inclusive settings. Students were recruited from two schools in two school districts in a western state. Students, educators, interpreters, and parents participated in individual in-depth, semi-structured interviews. Observations of the students were also done. Analysis of the data included coding the transcribed interviews and the field notes to identify common themes. Seven themes emerged and are reported. Recommendations for future research are provided.
This study was designed to determine (a) the demographic characteristics and responsibilities of educational sign language interpreters within the K-12 public school system in the United States; (b) the mode of communication they use most frequently; and (c) their education and certification levels. Surveys were completed by 222 educational sign language interpreters in three states. Results showed the lack of certification and adequate training for the majority of respondents, as well as inadequate minority/gender representation, among other concerns. The study raised questions about the dependence of students who are deaf or hard of hearing on the educational interpreter support system. Recommendations for educational practice are presented.
School children appear to increase their vocabularies by thousands of words per year. Many have hypothesized that a large proportion of this growth occurs through incidental learning from written context. However, experimental research has until now failed to provide unequivocal support of this hypothesis. The present study attempted to determine whether students do acquire measurable knowledge about unfamiliar words while reading natural text. Fifty-seven eighth-grade students of average and above average reading ability read either an expository or a narrative text about 1,000 words in length. After reading, subjects completed two vocabulary assessment tasks on 15 target words from each passage (thus serving as controls for the passage not read), an individual interview and a multiple-choice test, both designed to tap partial knowledge of word meanings. Results of within-subject, hierarchical regression analyses showed small but statistically reliable gains in word knowledge from context. Tentative extrapolations from the results and current estimates of the volume of children's reading lead us to believe that incidental learning from context accounts for a substantial proportion of the vocabulary growth that occurs during the school years. /// [French] Les écoliers semblent augmenter leur vocabulaire de milliers de mots par an. Nombreux sont ceux qui ont pour hypothèse qu'une large proportion de cette croissance intervient grâce à une acquisition accidentelle à partir d'un contexte écrit. Cependant, la recherche expérimentale n'a pas pu jusqu'à présent fournir un soutient univoque à cette hypothèse. L'étude présente essaie de déterminer si les élèves acquièrent en fait des connaissances mesurables sur les mots qui ne leur sont pas familiers au cours de la lecture de textes naturels. Cinquantesept élèves de quatrième à compétence de lecture moyenne et au-dessus de la moyenne ont lu un texte d'exposition ou de narration d'environ 1000 mots. Après la lecture, les sujets ont complété deux tâches d'évaluation de vocabulaire sur 15 mots cibles à partir de chaque passage (servant ainsi de contrôles pour le passage non lu), un entretien individuel et un test à choix multipes, désignés à aborder la connaissance partielle des significations de mots. Les résultats des analyses de régression hiérarchique de sujet unique ont montré des gains moindres mais statistiquement sûrs en connaissance de mots à partir d'un contexte. Des extrapolations d'essai à partir des résultats et des calculs courants du volume de lecture chez les enfants nous ont menés à croire que la lecture accidentelle à partir d'un contexte compte pour une proportion substantielle de la croissance du vocabulaire qui a lieu au cours des années scolaires. /// [Spanish] Al parecer, alumnos incrementan su vocabulario con miles de palabras cada año. Muchos han avanzado la hipótesis que una gran proporción de este incremento ocurre por medio de aprendizaje incidental del contexto escrito. No obstante, investigación experimental no ha provisto evidencia irrefutable para esta hipótesis. Este estudio trató de determinar si los alumnos adquieren conocimiento medible de palabras desconocidas durante la lectura de textos normales. Cincuenta y siete alumnos de octavo grado, de habilidad normal y superior en lectura, leyeron un texto descriptivo o narrativo, de approximadamente 1000 palabras. Después de la lectura, los alumnos completaron 2 actividades de evaluación de vocabulario sobre 15 palabras específicas de cada pasaje (sirviendo así como control de los pasajes no leídos), una entrevista individual y un test de elección múltiple, ambos diseñados para descubrir conocimiento parcial de significado de palabras. Los resultados por individuo, utilizando análisis de jerarquía de regresión, mostraron pequeño pero estadísticamente fiable progreso en el conocimiento de palabras por medio de contexto. Extrapolaciones tentativas de los resultados y cálculos presentes del volumen de lectura de alumnos, nos llevan a deducir que aprendizaje incidental del contexto da cuenta de una proporción considerable del incremento de vocabulario que ocurre durante los años escolares.
Parental use of simultaneous communication is advocated by many programs serving hearing-impaired students. The purpose of the present study was to describe in detail the input characteristics of five hearing parents, who were attempting to use one such system, Signing Exact English or SEE 2 (Gustason, Pfetzing, & Zawolkow, 1980). The parents were intermediate-level signers, motivated to use SEE 2. Voiced and signed segments from videotaped language samples were transcribed and coded for equivalence and other features of interest. Results were that parents' signed mean lengths of utterance (MLUs) were lower than those of their children although the majority of their sign utterances were syntactically intact. Structures categorized as complex in the Developmental Sentence Scoring procedure (Lee, 1974) and considered abstract in a semantic coding scheme (Lahey, 1988) were seldom used by the parents. Parents provided a narrow range of lexical items in their sign code. Results are discussed in terms of the type of input the parents are providing and the procedures used to identify priorities for parent education.
The notion of 'process' is identified as a prominent idea in systematic reflection on interpreting, and various incarnations of the 'process(ing) supermeme' are reviewed. With reference to selected models of the interpreting process, the need for a broader concept of 'process' in interpreting research is discussed, with special reference to the (inter)action-theoretical approach championed by German translation scholars in the 1980s. Based on an interactant model of the interpreting situation, the author highlights the relevance of contextual as well as cognitive factors and suggests ways in which various conceptual approaches can be reconciled to establish a more comprehensive sort of process-orientation in interpreting studies.
The purpose of this research was to determine the number of distinct words in printed school English. A detailed analysis was done of a 7,260 word sample from the Carroll, Davies and Richman, Word Frequency Book. Projecting from this sample to the total vocabulary of school English, our best estimate is that there are about 88,500 distinct words. Furthermore, for every word a child learns, we estimate that there are an average of one to three additional related words that should also be understandable to the child, the exact number depending on how well the child is able to utilize context and morphology to induce meanings. Based on our analysis, a reconcilation of estimates of children's vocabulary size was undertaken, which showed that the extreme divergence in estimates is due mainly to the definition of "word" adopted. Our findings indicate that even the most ruthlessly systematic direct vocabulary instruction could neither account for a significant proportion of all the words children actually learn, nor cover more than a modest proportion of the words they will encounter in school reading materials. /// [French] Le but de cette recherche était de déterminer le nombre de mots distincts dans l'Anglais scolaire imprimé. Une analyse détaillée a été faite d'un échantillon de 7260 mots à partir du Livre de fréquence de mots Carroll, Davies et Richman. En projetant à partir de cet échantillon jusqu'au vocabulaire total de l'Anglais scolaire, notre estimation meilleure est qu'il y a environ 88500 mots distincts. De plus, pour chaque mot qu'un enfant apprend, nous estimons qu'il y a une moyenne d'un à trois mots additionnels en rapport qui devraient être aussi compris par l'enfant, le nombre exact dépendant de combien l'enfant est capable d'utiliser le contexte et la morphologie pour produire des significations. Basée sur notre analyse, on a entrepris une réconciliation d'estimations de la quantité de vocabulaire des enfants, qui a montré que l'extrême divergence en estimations est due principalement à la définition du "mot" adopté. Nos découvertes indiquent que même l'instruction de vocabulaire directe la plus systématique ne pourrait ni compter pour une proportion significative de tous les mots que les enfants apprennent vraiment, ni couvrir plus qu'une proportion modeste de mots qu'ils rencontreront dans le matériel de lecture scolaire. /// [Spanish] El objetivo de esta investigacion era determinar el número de distintas palabras en el inglés escolar escrito. Se hizo un análisis detallado de una muestra de 7.260 palabras del Word Frequency Book (Libro de Frecuencia de Palabras) de Carroll, Davies y Richman. Reflejando desde esta muestra al vocabulario total del inglés escolar, nuestro mejor cálculo indica que hay aproximadamente 88.500 palabras distintas. Además, por cada palabra que un niño aprende, calculamos que hay un promedio de una a tres palabras relacionadas adicionales que también deberían comprenderse por el niño, dependiendo el número exacto hasta qué punto el niño es capaz de utilizar contexto y morfología para inducir significado. Basado en nuestro análisis, se procedió a una conciliación de cálculos sobre la extensión del vocabulario de los niños, que demostró que la extrema discrepancia en los cálculos se debe principalmente a cuál definición se adopta sobre lo que es "palabra". Nuestros resultados indican que ni siquiera la más rigurosa y sistemática instrucción directa de vocabulario podía justificar una proporción significativa de todas las palabras que los niños realmente aprenden, ni cubrir más que una modesta proporción de las palabras con las que se enfrentarán en materiales de lectura escolares.
Children of 6 to 9 years and adults judged a story protagonist's degree of blame for a traffic accident. All stories depicted a collision between a protagonist, who had the right of way, and another road user. Stories differed, however, in protagonist's second-order belief about the other road-user's knowledge. For instance, in one story, the protagonist mistakenly thought that the other had noticed her coming and that she could therefore rely on him abiding by the priority rule (principle of mutual trust) and grant her the right of way. This story contrasted with one where the protagonist knew that the other had not seen her and so was not justified in claiming priority. Most 7 and 8-year-old children understood the difference in second-order belief and about half of them were also able to make the correct responsibility attribution that the mistaken protagonist, thinking the other character knew, was less to blame for the accident than the one who knew about the other's ignorance. By 9 years, almost all children understood second-order beliefs and three-quarters were also able to make the correct responsibility attribution. The application of second-order beliefs to the principle of mutual trust is discussed in relation to communication failures and cooperative interaction.
The purpose of this research was to investigate the growth of recognition vocabulary during the early and middle elementary school years in relation to the development of morphological knowledge. Six-, 8-, and 10- year-old children from grades 1, 3, and 5 (32 children at each age/grade level) were tested for their knowledge of a relatively large sample of main entry words drawn from a recent unabridged nonhistorical dictionary of the English language. Analyses of the sample of words indicated that it was reasonably representative of the main entry words in the entire dictionary in terms of frequency of occurrence and in terms of the distribution of the words according to morphological type. The children were tested on the words by means of definition, sentence, and multiple-choice questions. By multiplying the proportion of known words in the sample by the number of main entry words in the dictionary, estimates of total main entry recognition vocabulary knowledge were derived suggesting remarkable growth of vocabulary knowledge during the early and middle elementary school years. The focus of the present study, however, was on the contribution made by different morphologically defined word types and by knowledge of morphology and word formation to total recognition vocabulary at different age and grade levels. It was found that comprehension of derived words in particular improved dramatically between grades 1 and 5, contributing relatively little to total recognition vocabulary in grade 1, but contributing more to such knowledge than any other morphologically defined type of word by grade 5. Moreover, it was found that multimorphemic words- words consisting of three or more morphemes-were also associated with particular growth, being not well known in grade 1 but being relatively much better known by grade 5. This is interpreted as supporting the view that lexical development can be characterized in terms of increasing morphological complexity. Further, it was found that the proportion of known complex words for which there was evidence that children figured them out by analyzing their morphological structure increased with age and grade. Qualifications regarding this latter finding are discussed, but it is argued that the data indicate the importance of making a distinction between knowing words because they have been previously learned and knowing them by means of morphological analysis and composition, particularly when trying to interpret the dramatic growth in recognition vocabulary suggested by this and related studies.
In this study I examined teacher-student interactions and relationship quality among poor, urban, African-American children expressing differential school satisfaction. Multiple methods of data collection, including classroom observation, interviews, and self-report questionnaires, were used with 61 third through fifth graders. Results suggested that perceptions of a caring, supportive relationship with a teacher and a positive classroom environment were related to school satisfaction by as early as third grade. A different pattern of behavioral interactions with teachers was noted between students expressing high and low satisfaction with school, although this was not an important contributor to students' satisfaction with school. Results arc discussed in light of theory that posits children's relationships with others as an important variable in learning and in light of contemporary movements within education that stress the importance of relationships in schooling.
A study of two teachers of deaf children demonstrated that eye gaze is an effective mechanism for regulating turn-taking in the classroom. Eye gaze signals were used to invite individual and group response, initiate action, communicate with a particular student, ask questions, and handle distractions or interruptions. (Author/CB)
A study involving 113 children (ages 24-37 months) with hearing impairments found expressive vocabulary was related to the child's age, the age of identification of the child's hearing loss (before or after 6 months), the child's cognitive quotient, and the presence or absence of one or more additional disabilities. (Contains extensive references.) (Author/CR)
Videotaped 32 hrs of classroom sessions and analyzed the spoken and signed language utterances for discrepancies between what was said by the hearing members of each class and what was transmitted to and understood by the deaf student. Seven different interpreters were involved. Numerous misunderstandings led directly to confusion on the part of the deaf student. Confusion occurred with the greatest frequency when interpreters were unfamiliar with the subject and/or were required to interpret diagrams or verbal descriptions. Deaf students also experienced difficulty looking at the board and at the interpreter simultaneously. Strategies are suggested for reducing miscommunication in university classes. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
The study examined the extent to which a highly qualified interpreter remained parallel with or diverged from the original classroom discourse in her interpreting for a 3rd-grade deaf student in science, social studies, and resource room. The interpreter's signed and verbalized expressions were compared to the class participants' expressions for meaning equivalence. Parallel interpreting, occurring 33.2% of the time, closely matched the content of the speaker's message. Divergent interpreting, whereby the interpreter added or dropped elements of meaning, occurred 66.8% of the time. Qualitative analyses of classroom footage as well as interviews with the interpreter and the teachers revealed how, when, and why the interpreter diverged from the message. While the interpreter often made intentional reductions and additions to the discourse to achieve greater student understanding of language and course content, there was little awareness of these changes among individualized educational program team members.
Abstract The child's developing theory of the mind as an interconnected network of beliefs, desires and feelings that govern behaviour provides a cornerstone for social and intellectual life. Recent research has suggested that autistic children have difficulty acquiring such a theory. Although it is speculated that a specific neurological deficit may be responsible for autistic children's difficulties on false belief tasks devised to lest a theory of mind, these may also be due to a lack of exposure to conversation about mental states. In this study we explored the development of a theory of mind in a group of 26 signing, prelingually-deaf Australian children of normal intelligence, aged 8–13 years. Results revealed that 65% of these deaf children failed a simple test of false belief which normal preschoolers, mentally retarded children, and other handicapped groups–apart from children with autism–routinely pass at a mental age of 4–5 years. No significant difference emerged between deaf children's performance and that of autistic children tested on the same task in previous research. We discuss the results in terms of a conversational account of the development of a theory of mind in deaf children, and the extent to which this account is applicable to children with autism.