A student-centred approach : the english language support service for international students
- Authors: Pantelich, Melania
- Date: 2021
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Journal of Academic Language and Learning Vol. 15, no. 1 (2021), p. 72-84
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- Description: This article outlines the purpose, development and delivery of the English Language Support Service (ELSS), which is offered to international students in their first year of study at a medium-sized university in regional Victoria, Australia. Additionally, this article explains how the support provided is contextualised, timely and appropriate to student needs, allowing students to take on new concepts with meaning and immediate application, in conjunction with their degree coursework. ELSS has been specifically designed to aid international students with their initial exposure and transition to studying in an Australian context. It aims to help international students become more assured in their place at university, and acclimatise to the Australian academic language, culture and landscape enough in order to subsequently engage confidently with their assignments and the remainder of their degree.
Getting into the “Dad Zone” : how do primary caregiving fathers of young children experience social support?
- Authors: Gill, Peter , Scacco, Sarina , De Haan, Sarah , Gent, Angela , Chapin, Laurie , Ganci, Michael , Morda, Romana
- Date: 2021
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Journal of Child and Family Studies Vol. 30, no. 4 (2021), p. 1028-1042
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- Description: Primary caregiving fathers (PCGFs) are a growing population that experience unique struggles on a day-to-day basis. The current study aimed to explore how fathers interpret and experience their daily responsibilities and interactions with social support, as they undertake their roles as primary caregivers. Using grounded theory, 14 PCGFs defined as those providing sole care for their 1–10 year olds for at least 25 h per week, participated in semi-structured interviews regarding their experiences of fatherhood and social supports. Participants highlighted the ways in which social support, particularly adult companionship, helped them find a social balance and allowed them to re-energise and be better fathers. In particular, the men reported that interaction with people with similar experiences was important in helping them to discursively negotiate their non-traditional roles. Analysis revealed a three-stage identity transition process where the men initially took on primary responsibility, then began to embody the primary care giver role, and finally transitioned to a new normal. The PCGFs in the study provide evidence that we may be observing a shift from what may be classed as outdated notions of one-dimensional fathering to a more well-informed masculine ideal that embraces caring and nurturing qualities. However, providing further avenues of support for PCFGs is important in order to mitigate possible social isolation and to enhance their wellbeing. © 2021, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC part of Springer Nature.
Extensive reading and viewing as input for academic vocabulary : a large-scale vocabulary profile coverage study of students’ reading and writing across multiple secondary school subjects
- Authors: Green, Clarence
- Date: 2020
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Lingua Vol. 239, no. (2020), p.
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- Description: The extent to which extensive reading (ER) and extensive viewing (EV) support academic literacy in secondary school, particularly for L2 students, through relevant vocabulary input has yet to be established. This study undertakes a lexical profile coverage study providing information on how much coverage is afforded by ER/EV vocabulary constructs for reading and writing in biology, physics, chemistry, mathematics and English (as a subject area). It operationalizes ER/EV as vocabulary input constructs through corpora representing general fiction, science fiction, juvenile fiction, television and movies. It computes coverage provided by this input at different frequency bands (e.g. ER/EV's 1st 1000 most frequent word families, 2nd 1000 etc.) in secondary school textbooks and student writing. It finds ER/EV input appears very valuable for English as a subject area, and provides within the first 11–12,000 most frequent word families substantial coverage of receptive and productive vocabulary in secondary school science. Science-fiction provides more coverage, and juvenile fiction less. EV does not appear to offer impoverished coverage to ER. The study suggests that additional vocabulary pedagogy is nevertheless going to be needed, to cover from about 1 in 10 to 1 in 20 vocabulary items in the target subject areas. © 2020 Elsevier B.V.
Speech-language pathology intervention in a youth justice setting : Benefits perceived by staff extend beyond communication
- Authors: Snow, Pamela , Bagley, Kerryn , White, Donna
- Date: 2018
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: International Journal of Speech-Language Pathology Vol. 20, no. 4 (2018), p. 458-467
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- Description: Purpose: Young people in youth justice (YJ) settings face high-risk for unidentified language disorder, however, speech-language pathology (SLP) services are not routinely offered in such settings. The aim of this study was to explore and describe the perceptions and experiences of YJ staff in a custodial centre of the utility of having a speech-language pathologist working with young offenders. Method: Following a SLP intervention trial, two staff focus groups were conducted by an independent SLP. Interview probes were developed through review of the literature and consultation with the practitioner who conducted the clinical intervention. Focus groups were digitally recorded for thematic analysis, which was carried out by the three authors independently. Result: YJ staff expressed consistently positive views about the SLP intervention trial in their centre. Staff indicated that they learnt a great deal about the complexity of communication difficulties in this population, and that this information informed and guided their own practices. They expressed surprise at the engagement of young people in the SLP service, and supported its embedding in the YJ setting. Conclusion: YJ staff endorsed the value of a SLP service in a custodial setting. Further research should focus on refining measurement of this service and its impact. © 2017,
Conjunctive howeveritis : A corpus-based analysis of however used as a conjunction
- Authors: Hamilton, Andrew
- Date: 2016
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: English Today Vol. 32, no. 4 (2016), p. 19-26
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- Description: The word however is an adverb and an adverb alone. The current online Oxford (Oxford English Dictionary Online, n.d.) and Cambridge (Cambridge English Dictionary Online, n.d. a) English dictionaries both have it listed solely as an adverb for British English. At the risk of awakening yet another descriptivist versus prescriptivist war, it must however be acknowledged that however is often used as a conjunction. This can, and frequently does, lead to confusion though, as the reader has to read on before realising that in fact that however was actually being used as a conjunction (or connective' in modern grammatical parlance). However the cat walked down the street ...' surely has the reader thinking something along the lines of In whatever manner the cat walked down the street ...' But a typical case of what I shall in this article call conjunctive howeveritis would reveal a complete (well, incomplete actually) sentence along the lines of, However the cat walked down the street, even though it rarely ventured from the house.' Not only are we now left with a sentence fragment, but in such an instance the reader would have to backtrack and subsequently assume the However was in fact being used as a coordinating conjunction. To me this is inefficient and an enemy of lucid writing. The Cambridge English Dictionary raises the warning flag high with the following example (Cambridge English Dictionary Online, n.d. b): We can't use however as a conjunction instead of but to connect words and phrases:
Promoting alphabet knowledge and phonological awareness in low socioeconomic child care settings: A quasi experimental study in five New Zealand centers
- Authors: McLachlan, Claire , Arrow, Alison
- Date: 2014
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Reading and Writing Vol. 27, no. 5 (2014), p. 819-839
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- Description: This study examined if professional development with teachers would increase children's literacy skills in low socioeconomic early childhood settings in New Zealand and would lead to changes in teachers' beliefs and practices and children's abilities over an 8 week intervention period. Research indicates that children who have alphabetic and phonological awareness on school entry are well positioned to transition from emergent to conventional literacy (Whitehurst & Lonigan, 1998). Although most children develop requisite knowledge and skills as part of early education in New Zealand, about 25 % of children do not (Nicholson, 2005) and struggle with beginning reading. One of the challenges is how teachers can foster emergent literacy within a holistic curriculum such as Te Whāriki (Ministry of Education, 1996), the New Zealand early childhood curriculum. A quasi experimental design was used in which teachers' and children's knowledge was pre and post tested in five early childhood centers. Teachers' (n = 32) beliefs and phonemic awareness were tested using a questionnaire. A range of literacy measures which tested alphabet knowledge, phonemic awareness, ability to recognise and write their own name and the British Picture Vocabulary Test were used with children aged 3-5 years (n = 103). Professional development was offered to teachers at the beginning of the study in four centers; the fifth center was a control. In addition, teachers' logbooks of how they promoted literacy were collected. Some changes in children's skills were found, along with some differences in teachers' beliefs and practices. The results suggest professional development with teachers to support children's literacy needs to involve more intensive coaching and guiding. © 2013 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht.
The development of phonological awareness and letter knowledge in young New Zealand children
- Authors: Arrow, Alison , McLachlan, Claire
- Date: 2014
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Speech, Language and Hearing Vol. 17, no. 1 (2014), p. 49-57
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- Description: The predictive nature of phonological awareness for the development of literacy skills has been replicated frequently. While the conclusions of these studies have been overwhelmingly supportive of phonological awareness being important for early literacy, there has been less groundswell in terms of its application, particularly in early childhood settings. This paper examines the nature of phonological awareness, letter knowledge, and own name knowledge in a sample of 98 New Zealand children, aged between 3 and 5 years. It examines the development of emergent literacy skills over a 3-month period, with assessments carried out at the start of that time and the end. The nature of the relationships between the emergent literacy skills of phonological awareness, letter name knowledge, and own name knowledge was also examined. A developmental pattern from own name spelling ability to letter knowledge to initial phoneme awareness was found. Support for the lexical restructuring hypothesis was also found with the relationship between vocabulary and rime awareness. Rime awareness and initial phoneme awareness also appeared to be different forms of phonological awareness, with a lack of correlation between them. © W. S. Maney & Son Ltd 2014.
Automated unsupervised authorship analysis using evidence accumulation clustering
- Authors: Layton, Robert , Watters, Paul , Dazeley, Richard
- Date: 2013
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Natural Language Engineering Vol. 19, no. 1 (2013), p. 95-120
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- Description: Authorship Analysis aims to extract information about the authorship of documents from features within those documents. Typically, this is performed as a classification task with the aim of identifying the author of a document, given a set of documents of known authorship. Alternatively, unsupervised methods have been developed primarily as visualisation tools to assist the manual discovery of clusters of authorship within a corpus by analysts. However, there is a need in many fields for more sophisticated unsupervised methods to automate the discovery, profiling and organisation of related information through clustering of documents by authorship. An automated and unsupervised methodology for clustering documents by authorship is proposed in this paper. The methodology is named NUANCE, for n-gram Unsupervised Automated Natural Cluster Ensemble. Testing indicates that the derived clusters have a strong correlation to the true authorship of unseen documents. © 2011 Cambridge University Press.
- Description: 2003010584
Evaluating authorship distance methods using the positive Silhouette coefficient
- Authors: Layton, Robert , Watters, Paul , Dazeley, Richard
- Date: 2013
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Natural Language Engineering Vol. 19, no. 4 (2013), p. 517-535
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- Description: Unsupervised Authorship Analysis (UAA) aims to cluster documents by authorship without knowing the authorship of any documents. An important factor in UAA is the method for calculating the distance between documents. This choice of the authorship distance method is considered more critical to the end result than the choice of cluster analysis algorithm. One method for measuring the correlation between a distance metric and a labelling (such as class values or clusters) is the Silhouette Coefficient (SC). The SC can be leveraged by measuring the correlation between the authorship distance method and the true authorship, evaluating the quality of the distance method. However, we show that the SC can be severely affected by outliers. To address this issue, we introduce the Positive Silhouette Coefficient, given as the proportion of instances with a positive SC value. This metric is not easily altered by outliers and produces a more robust metric. A large number of authorship distance methods are then compared using the PSC, and the findings are presented. This research provides an insight into the efficacy of methods for UAA and presents a framework for testing authorship distance methods.
- Description: C1
The critical discourse analysis paradox : a brief research reflection
- Authors: Terry, Daniel
- Date: 2013
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Internet Journal of Language, Culture and Society Vol. 38, no. (2013), p. 42-44
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- Description: Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) is a means of criticising or critiquing the social order of power, inequality and hegemony in language. Within a doctoral study CDA was used to determine if social power, dominance, and inequality are enacted and reproduced through the text and talk of key participants. A reflection of the researcher experiences is provided as the results were analysed and prepared for publication. The discussion highlights there are other also discourses of power and hegemony which may impact researchers and authors themselves as they report and discuss discourse which marginalises those individuals and groups for whom the research is being conducted. As researchers and academics attempt to articulate and discuss discourse which marginalise and stigmatise, they need to acknowledge and recognise the discourse, which impacts their own ability to advocate for change, adjustment and empowerment.
Recentred local profiles for authorship attribution
- Authors: Layton, Robert , Watters, Paul , Dazeley, Richard
- Date: 2012
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Natural Language Engineering Vol. 18, no. 3 (2012), p. 293-312
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- Description: Authorship attribution methods aim to determine the author of a document, by using information gathered from a set of documents with known authors. One method of performing this task is to create profiles containing distinctive features known to be used by each author. In this paper, a new method of creating an author or document profile is presented that detects features considered distinctive, compared to normal language usage. This recentreing approach creates more accurate profiles than previous methods, as demonstrated empirically using a known corpus of authorship problems. This method, named recentred local profiles, determines authorship accurately using a simple 'best matching author' approach to classification, compared to other methods in the literature. The proposed method is shown to be more stable than related methods as parameter values change. Using a weighted voting scheme, recentred local profiles is shown to outperform other methods in authorship attribution, with an overall accuracy of 69.9% on the ad-hoc authorship attribution competition corpus, representing a significant improvement over related methods. Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2011.
- Description: 2003010688
Stuttering, disability and the higher education sector in Australia
- Authors: Meredith, Grant , Packman, Ann , Marks, Genee
- Date: 2012
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: International Journal of Speech-Language Pathology Vol. 14, no. 4 (2012), p. 370-376
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- Description: The aim of this study was to ascertain the extent to which Australian public universities and their associated disability liaison services offer web-based information for current or prospective students who stutter. The disability pages of the websites of all 39 public universities in Australia were visited and the information about disability services assessed according to 12 criteria developed by the authors. Results indicate that there is a dearth of information on Australian university websites available for students or prospective students who stutter. Only 13% of the sites reported any form of alternative teaching and assessment procedures for speech-impaired students and only 51% of 39 disability liaison officers responded when contacted by email. Such a student could not make an informed choice to enrol in a university based upon the information on disability services available on public Australian university websites. © 2012 The Speech Pathology Association of Australia Limited.
Signs of the times: Changing names and cultural values in Australia
- Authors: Kostanski, Laura
- Date: 2011
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Onoma Vol. 46, no. (2011), p. 251-274
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- Description: Naming is claiming. Ipso Facto- to sign is to reinforce the party line. Toponyms play multiple roles in the cerebral world: they represent histories; connect communities; identify cultural heritage; locate areas; and, define places in the landscape. Within the natural and constructed landscape they also have a role in written form: they appear as words on signposts, names on banners and markings on walls. Their physical appearance and existence (in some cases also non-existence) speaks volumes for the cultural, political and social fabric surrounding the area of their location. If a painted picture can say 1000 words, then so too the constructed and written toponym can evoke discussions about its landscape. This paper explores various aspects of the linguistic landscape in Australia. Examples are provided from naming and signage programs in the State of Victoria. A particular emphasis is given to exploring the changing dynamics of the linguistic landscape whereby contemporary communities develop 'welcome to country' signage as contrasted against the actions of communities in the 1990s who removed dual-name signs. Thought will be given to the serious nature of politically-motivated toponymic practices, and time will be spent exploring the nature of community-defined 'acknowledgement' linguistic landscapes. © Onoma. All rights reserved.
- Description: C1
Technology and the evolution of clinical methods for stuttering
- Authors: Packman, Ann , Meredith, Grant
- Date: 2011
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Journal of Fluency Disorders Vol. 36, no. 2 (2011), p. 75-85
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- Description: The World Wide Web (WWW) was 20 years old last year. Enormous amounts of information about stuttering are now available to anyone who can access the Internet. Compared to 20 years ago, people who stutter and their families can now make more informed choices about speech-language interventions, from a distance. Blogs and chat rooms provide opportunities for people who stutter to share their experiences from a distance and to support one another. New technologies are also being adopted into speech-language pathology practice and service delivery. Telehealth is an exciting development as it means that treatment can now be made available to many rural and remotely located people who previously did not have access to it. Possible future technological developments for speech-language pathology practice include Internet based treatments and the use of Virtual Reality. Having speech and CBT treatments for stuttering available on the Internet would greatly increase their accessibility. Second Life also has exciting possibilities for people who stutter.Educational objectives: The reader will (1) explain how people who stutter and their families can get information about stuttering from the World Wide Web, (2) discuss how new technologies have been applied in speech-language pathology practice, and (3) summarize the principles and practice of telehealth delivery of services for people who stutter and their families. © 2011 Elsevier Inc.
Three nineteenth century colonial travellers to Victoria, Australia, and their preference for Aboriginal place names - An exploration
- Authors: Clark, Ian
- Date: 2011
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Onoma Vol. 46, no. (2011), p. 151-165
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- Description: This paper presents the results of research into a literary triptych of accounts of travelling through colonial Victoria, Australia that cover the period from 1839 until 1872. In particular, a shared interest in Aboriginal toponymy is highlighted despite the fact that all three writers did not share a common interest in Aboriginal peoples themselves. The tourist gaze and avowed interest in the Aboriginal toponymic landscape is moderated by the dissonance felt by many colonial settlers who often sought to erase Indigenous names by transplanting British place names. © Onoma. All rights reserved.
Attendance, performance and the acquisition of early literacy skills: A comparison of Indigenous and non-Indigenous school children
- Authors: Ehrich, John , Wolgemuth, Jennifer , Helmer, Janet , Oteng, Georges , Lea, Tess , Bartlett, Claire , Smith, Heather , Emmett, Susan
- Date: 2010
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Australian Journal of Learning Difficulties Vol. 15, no. 2 (2010), p. 131-149
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- Description: As part of an evaluation of a web-based early literacy intervention, ABRACADABRA, a small exploratory study was conducted over one term in three primary schools in the Northern Territory. Of particular concern was the relationship between attendance and the acquisition of early literacy skills of Indigenous and non-Indigenous children. Using the GRADE literacy assessment, it was found that students made significant gains in a number of early literacy skills (e.g. phonological awareness skills and vocabulary processing). Classroom attendance was strongly and positively correlated with the acquisition of phonological awareness skills and early literacy skills (e.g. letter recognition, word identification processing). Indigenous children attended class significantly less frequently than non-Indigenous children and performed significantly worse overall, particularly with regard to phonological processing tasks. In light of these findings, it is suggested irregular attendance contributed to the Indigenous students' lowered literacy acquisition.
Focus groups and ELICOS evaluation
- Authors: Zeegers, Margaret
- Date: 2002
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: English Australia Journal Vol. 20, no. 1 (2002), p. 17-23
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- Description: C1
- Description: 2003000125