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This book provides a simple means of observing and recording a child's level of language performance, measuring progress, and isolating areas of difficulty. Any teacher concerned about observing children's language development will find the volume invaluable.
Proficiency in oral language has long been considered important by teachers for self-expression and for communicating ideas. Children who are learning to speak English catch on to the rules: first by grasping the early structures then those of medium difficulty and finally those of greater difficulty. Awareness of features that will allow a learner to master a wide range of structural knowledge about English sentences should help teachers develop more powerful language programmes. This book describes a technique for recording and assessing change in children's oral language development. It was developed for research studies of young children from three ethnic groups but has been widely used in New Zealand, Australia, Britain, and the United States. Experience has shown that Record of Oral Language helps practising teachers to observe and understand changes in young children's language. The book is directed towards teachers who wish to do this. Young children's control of English is assumed to increase gradually over most of their school years. The changes occurring can be monitored through the use of this Record of Oral Language and of another assessment called Biks and Gutches, which you will find in a companion volume. Teachers could judge from either or both of these assessments which children have made poor, average, or good progress. These techniques are appropriate: for children of four to seven years of age with English as a mother tongue for up to five years after children begin to learn English as another language. Performance on these tasks can be used to select children for more intensive attention to oral language learning or to check what changes have occurred in children's language as a result of particular instruction. Change over time can be an important indicator of whether a particular child will know how to learn more about language for themselves in the future.
This guide helps teachers to observe and understand the changes in young children's language. It helps practitioners and literacy leaders to create powerful language programmes and to improve techniques for recording and assessing change in children's oral language development.
Biks and Gutches is an easy-to-administer-and-score task. It looks too simple to be very useful but with it we can easily predict which young children need extra help with learning English. Giving this assessment to individual children will help the teacher become a better judge of how a child's oral language is changing. The items can be used to evaluate whether a new teaching programme is having any effect. Change can be captured over two points in time. If the school has introduced some new or special instruction, Biks and Gutches can be used to evaluate its effectiveness. Results could point to the rate and kind of change that has occurred as a result of special attention. For children who speak a dialect of English the test can answer questions like this: Has the children's control over the rules for inflections of the standard dialect increased? Children usually learn and use both school and 'home' versions of English and they know when to use either version. Sometimes the nonstandard usage dominates, and this can have consequences for school assessments in standard English. Compare the test and retest scores to see the rates of change and any persistent problems. The items in Biks and Gutches were designed for the five- to seven-year-old age group but have been used successfully in research with children up to ten years old.
A New York Times Notable Book of 2020 A Bloomberg Best Non-Fiction Book of 2020 A Behavioral Scientist Notable Book of 2020 A Human Behavior & Evolution Society Must-Read Popular Evolution Book of 2020 A bold, epic account of how the co-evolution of psychology and culture created the peculiar Western mind that has profoundly shaped the modern world. Perhaps you are WEIRD: raised in a society that is Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic. If so, you’re rather psychologically peculiar. Unlike much of the world today, and most people who have ever lived, WEIRD people are highly individualistic, self-obsessed, control-oriented, nonconformist, and analytical. They focus on themselves—their attributes, accomplishments, and aspirations—over their relationships and social roles. How did WEIRD populations become so psychologically distinct? What role did these psychological differences play in the industrial revolution and the global expansion of Europe during the last few centuries? In The WEIRDest People in the World, Joseph Henrich draws on cutting-edge research in anthropology, psychology, economics, and evolutionary biology to explore these questions and more. He illuminates the origins and evolution of family structures, marriage, and religion, and the profound impact these cultural transformations had on human psychology. Mapping these shifts through ancient history and late antiquity, Henrich reveals that the most fundamental institutions of kinship and marriage changed dramatically under pressure from the Roman Catholic Church. It was these changes that gave rise to the WEIRD psychology that would coevolve with impersonal markets, occupational specialization, and free competition—laying the foundation for the modern world. Provocative and engaging in both its broad scope and its surprising details, The WEIRDest People in the World explores how culture, institutions, and psychology shape one another, and explains what this means for both our most personal sense of who we are as individuals and also the large-scale social, political, and economic forces that drive human history. Includes black-and-white illustrations.
Developing early literacy: Assessment and teaching, third edition, updates the research and practical implications for teaching reading, writing, speaking and listening. It provides a comprehensive resource for teacher education students and practising teachers working with children from birth to eight years in early childhood settings, including preschools and the first years of school.There are new chapters on vocabulary and fluency to provide teacher education students and practising teachers with the latest knowledge and practical application in these areas.It explores:-developmental phases of literacy-ways of assessing children's literacy development-research into oral language, home and community languages and literacy, play and literacy, reading and writing -the importance of children's literature and reading aloud using different text types for scaffolding children's reading and writing-phonemic awareness, phonics scope and sequences and high-frequency words -teacher scaffolding by modelling, sharing, guiding and encouraging independent activities-practical ideas for planning, teaching and managing the literacy program.
