1,721,093 research outputs found
Key themes in implementation science for psychology in education
No full textDiscusses the key themes in implementation science for psychology in education
Implementation science for psychology in education
No full textChapter focusing on implementation science for psychology in education
Implementation science and enhancing delivery and practice in school psychology services: some lessons from the Scottish context
No full textChapter reviewing how implementation science is used to enhance the delivery and practice in school psychology services in Scotland
Acquiring a polysynthetic Australian language: From infancy to school
No full textWadeye (Port Keats), a community of approximately 2500 people in the Northern Territory of Australia, is one of a small number of communities in which the traditional indigenous language is still being acquired by children as their first language. Children in this community speak Murrinh-Patha prior to attending a bilingual school where they begin learning English.
This paper investigates the Murrinh-Patha input to and production of infants and pre-schoolers and examines attitudes to language learning from the early years at home through the transition to school. Longitudinal language sampling was used to explore how children acquire complex verbal structures. Data were collected from five children (four girls; one boy), starting at age 2;7 over a two-year period.
Murrinh-Patha is a polysynthetic language, with complex verbal predicates which are formed with discontinuous stem elements and are semantically noncompositional. In languages like English, these words would require entire phrases to express. For example, the Murrinh-Patha word WURDAMnginthaDHAWIWEPERLwardagathu means “then the two non-siblings, at least one of whom was female, spoke out in unison”, with the two bolded elements jointly providing the predicate ‘speak out in unison’.
Courtney and Saville-Troike (2002), investigating the acquisition of the polysynthetic languages Navajo and Quechua, found that children extracted the verb roots first, before acquiring affixes. Yet how are Murrinh-Patha children to do this when the verb root is itself complex and distributed across the verbal word? Little is known about the acquisition of polysynthetic languages and the linguistic and pedagogical theory for creating tools to support language practice and literacy is based on vastly different language and socio-cultural foundations.
A major motivation for this study is that the school bilingual program is developing educational materials in Murrinh-Patha, but with no knowledge of how children actually learn the language. Much of the pedagogical foundation for materials development comes from research based on widely spoken, more isolating languages such as English, Spanish and French. In these languages children learn literacy through whole word or syllabic teaching methods (Moats 2000). In Murrinh-Patha, where words are very long, it is possible that a syllabic approach to literacy-teaching would be successful. However, with little knowledge of foundational language learning in the language it is a challenge to develop appropriate literacy materials. This research will lay the foundation for ongoing investigations into language acquisition in Murrhin-Patha, with an aim to ensure the persistence and vitality of the language for future generations.
References
Courtney, E. H. and M. Saville-Troike (2002) “Learning to construct verbs in Navajo and Quechua” Journal of Child Language Vol. 29(3), pp. 623-654.
Moats, L. Speech to Print: Language Essentials for Teachers. New Jersey, Brookes Publishin
Talking about community
Full text linkSociolinguists and anthropologists have long problematized the term ‘community’, whether it be framed as an ethnic community, speech community, a discourse community, or a community of practice. This paper seeks to examine the notion of community within the framework of field linguistics and language documentation by drawing on interdisciplinary approaches to the use of this term. The call for papers for this conference specifically mentions work that benefits ‘communities’ and current best-practice in linguistic fieldwork is heavily focused on working ‘with the community’. At the first two ICLDC conferences 79 of 146 papers had the word “communities/y” in the title, and 126 in the abstract. As field linguists we focus on “community engagement” and “working with the community”. However, exactly what this constitutes is rarely questioned or critiqued (although see Bowern 2008, Holton 2009).
In this paper we critically examine the meaning of ‘community’ in language documentation and identify some key features of community as discussed in the literature. We then take a more micro-level analytic approach in the context of own fieldwork experiences working with speakers of three Tibeto-Burman languages in Nepal (Sherpa, Lamjung Yolmo and Kagate) and speakers of an indigenous language in Northern Australia (Murrinh Patha). We identify some of the ways in which the notion of community appears to be more complex than at first glance in language documentation and fieldwork literature.
Sherpa, spoken in Solu-Khumbu Nepal, and Lamjung Yolmo, spoken in Lamjung Nepal, are both languages with relatively small speaker numbers and tight-knit groups or clans. However, these communities of language users do not exhibit the socio-cultural features that are typically drawn on in describing relations between linguistic fieldworkers, their practices and communities. There is no culturally-bound hierarchy within the speaker groups, and no village or areal Head who represents the language users as a group or as individuals. In contrast, are many fieldwork situations in Australia where linguistic fieldwork often requires permission from indigenous land councils who represent communities of language users. Even here, however, there are differences between who is a speaker and who is an owner, and often the most fluent speakers are not appropriate members of the community to be working with (Evans 2001).
In critically examining ideas around ‘community’ within a language documentation and fieldwork framework, we hope to encourage discussion of this issue and to create a more open frame of reference for what people mean when talking about working “with the community”
Frameworks for practice in educational psychology: coherent perspectives for a developing profession
No full textChapter introducing coherent perspectives for a developing profession in educational psychology
Developing a system of complementary frameworks
No full textThis chapter discusses developing a system of complementary frameworks
The role of evidence in educational psychology
Full text linkEvidence has a key underlying role in the practice of educational psychology in defining ‘change’, one of the central themes of this volume. The success of the Educational and School Psychologist as an agent of change across the core functions of consultation, assessment, intervention, training and practitioner research (Birch, Frederickson, & Miller, 2015; Boyle, 2011; Dunsmuir & Kratochwill, 2013) hinges upon an understanding of the nature of ‘evidence’ and how it informs practice. In this chapter, we will consider the nature of evidence and its relationship to professional practice. Educational and School Psychologists not only generate evidence themselves about underlying processes, outcomes, and the acceptability, feasibility and impact of the implementation of interventions, but are also ‘consumers’ of research findings (Frederickson, 2002) as they engage with the literature to determine the best available evidence for practice
Putting practice into words: Fieldwork methodology in grammatical descriptions
Full text linkLanguage documentation and description are closely related tasks, often performed as part of the same fieldwork project on an un(der)-studied language. However, since Himmelmann (1998) we have been encouraged to consider that documentation and description are methodologically different, and that data collected with documentary methods can enable verification of descriptive claims based upon them. The last decade has seen a surge in the literature on good fieldwork methodology, including Gippert, Himmelmann & Mosel (2006), Crowley (2007), Bowern (2008), Chelliah & De Reuse (2011) and Thieberger (2012). The result is that linguists are more aware of good methodological practices for data collection than ever. These include attention to metadata about speaker demographics, setting, linguistic and discourse types; information about tools, equipment, and stimuli; a description of the fieldwork conditions including time spent among speakers; and a description of archiving practices and locatability of data.
However, it is not clear that linguists' awareness of the importance of robust data-collection methods is translating into transparency about those methods in resultant publications. Clear methodological description is a hallmark of reproducible and reliable scientific research (Author 2014, Authors In Prep), but documentary and descriptive linguists rarely receive clear advice on how to discuss the methods they use.
In this paper we present a survey of 50 published grammars, 50 grammar-based dissertations and 200+ journal articles with regard to how explicitly authors discuss their data collection methods, and what kinds of information they include. The publications surveyed were selected from a ten-year period beginning five years after Himmelmann 1998 encouraged the use of language documentation to provide verification for language description; journal articles come from nine journals selected for breadth of geography, linguistic subfield, and theoretical approach. We find that while there are some examples of strong methodologically-driven writing, the majority of authors do not include key documentary metadata or methodological information. The result is that it is often difficult or impossible to verify or reproduce descriptive linguistic claims, making descriptive linguistics one of the few social sciences to not require researchers to back up claims with an explicit statement of methodology.
We acknowledge that descriptive linguists often practice good methodology in data collection, but need encouragement to make this clear in their writing. Thus we conclude with clear benchmarks for the kind of information we believe is vital for creating a rich and useful research methodology in both long and short format descriptive research writing.
References
Author. 2014. [Title omitted for anonymity]. In Amanda Harris, Nick Thieberger & Linda Barwick (eds.), Research, records, and responsibility: Ten years of the Pacific and Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures. Sydney: University of Sydney Press.
Authors. In prep. Citation and transparency in descriptive linguistics.
Bowern, Claire. 2008. Linguistic fieldwork: a practical guide. Basingstoke [England] ; New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Chelliah, Shobhana L., and Willem J. De Reuse. 2011. Handbook of descriptive linguistic fieldwork. London: Springer.
Crowley, Terry. 2007. Field linguistics: a beginner's guide. Edited by Nicholas Thieberger, Oxford linguistics. Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press.
Gippert, Jost, Nikolaus P. Himmelmann, & Ulrike Mosel. 2006. Essentials of language documentation. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Himmelmann, Nikolaus P. 1998. "Documentary and descriptive linguistics." Linguistics no. 36:161–195.
Thieberger, Nicholas. 2012. The Oxford handbook of linguistic fieldwork. Oxford: Oxford University Press
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