The link below is to a book review of ‘Calvin’s Company of Pastors – Pastoral Care and the Emerging Reformed Church 1536-1609,’ by Scott M. Manetsch.
For more visit:
https://9marks.org/review/calvinscompany/
Monthly Archives: May 2016
Is there a right way to learn to read?
Emily Harrison, Birmingham City University
Phonics teaching in UK primary schools is rightly recognised as giving children the essential building blocks needed to become successful readers. Indeed, we are so pro-phonics that little is done to raise awareness about other methods, even those which might be seen as an accompaniment to phonics, not a replacement for it.
Schools tend to stick to what they know and, with more and more demand being put on teachers to raise standards and achieve excellent Ofsted reports, there is little in the way of “free time” to be allocated to testing out new methods, even those aimed at children who have had phonics training but who still have reading difficulties.
Phonics is based on training children’s “segmental phonological awareness” (that is, raising their awareness of letters and sounds and teaching them segmenting and blending skills). But there is a second part to phonological awareness known as “suprasegmental phonology”. It refers to the rhythmic components of spoken language that accompany the segmental elements, such as stress placement, intonation or pitch, and timing.
There is a growing body of evidence which supports the idea that awareness of, or sensitivity to, these rhythmic components is related to reading at various levels, including reading acquisition, comprehension and, more interestingly, reading difficulties. What this means is that children who have reading difficulties also tend to have poor speech rhythm sensitivity – and the better a child’s speech rhythm sensitivity is, the better their reading skills tend to be.
Surely, if we can somehow improve childrens’ speech rhythm sensitivity, their reading skills will also improve, right?
During my time at Coventry University, this question interested us enormously, yet there was no intervention that had attempted to train children on their awareness of speech rhythm as a possible way of enhancing literacy skills. So we set about designing a set of materials to help children gain better awareness of these rhythmic elements of spoken language.
We wanted the intervention to be suitable for children who were non-verbal – that is, children who do not speak, whether this is due to a disorder or just shyness – as well as children across a range of ability levels, so we decided on a picture and sound format, where children were presented with a picture card and a corresponding prerecorded audio sound for each item. This meant that children didn’t have to give a verbal response and that the format of delivery was repetitive to ensure some level of understanding between sessions. The intervention was designed to run for ten weeks, giving time for pre and post-test assessments to be administered within a school term.
We ran two experiments, one with reception children, age four to five years of age, who were just starting to learn to read – and one with children in year three, aged seven to eight years, who were falling behind in their reading. In each study, the intervention was compared to a traditional phonological awareness intervention and a control.
Reading rhythms
The results were very promising. In both the beginners and the older struggling readers, the speech rhythm intervention resulted in significantly greater gains in reading than the control intervention. This means that speech rhythm training is effective both at the beginning of reading tuition and once children have already received some formal training.
One of the things that interested us most is that the children in the second study were categorised as being struggling readers. For the speech rhythm intervention to work for these children is heartening and important. It means that this could be an alternative way in to teaching these children the skills they need to become successful readers.
Two papers describing similar findings, supporting the notion of speech rhythm training in struggling readers, have also since been published. However, there are no other studies to date which have investigated the effects of such training methods for beginner readers.
What our research adds is that speech rhythm training can also be effective in children who have yet to receive formal reading tuition, meaning that it can be implemented effectively from the start of primary education.
This is an exciting prospect for reading researchers – and it opens many doors for further investigation. It also has the potential to significantly improve reading instruction in schools – and will in fact soon be doing so, through a new programme which incorporates this speech rhythm sensitivity training.
Emily Harrison, Lecturer in Applied Psychology, Birmingham City University
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
20 Signs You’re a Big Book Nerd
The link below is to an article that looks at 20 signs indicating that you’re a big book nerd.
For more visit:
http://www.barnesandnoble.com/blog/20-signs-youre-the-biggest-book-nerd-in-your-friend-group/
Not My Review: A Court of Mist and Fury, by Sarah J. Maas
Not My Review: The Story of My Teeth, by Valeria Luiselli
Not My Review: The Cranes Dance, by Meg Howrey
Not My Review: Confessing the Faith, by Chad Van Dixhoorn
The link below is to a book review of ‘Confessing the Faith – A Reader’s Guide to the Westminster Confession of Faith,’ by Chad Van Dixhoorn.
For more visit:
https://9marks.org/review/book-review-confessing-the-faith-by-chad-van-dixhoorn/
Why some newspaper paywalls are simply unsustainable
Merja Myllylahti, Auckland University of Technology
Despite the shift to digital newsrooms, it is fair to say that Australian newspapers are still reliant on print for their advertising revenue.
The largest newspaper groups, representing 90% of the Australian market, made 80% of their advertising revenue from print in 2015, according to industry data. The data shows the combined advertising revenue of News Corp Australia, Fairfax Media, West Australian Newspapers and APN News & Media in 2015 was A$2.4 billion, of which print brought in A$1.9 billion.
As newspapers manage declines in print circulation and advertising revenue, many have turned to paywalls. These range from hard paywalls which The Australian has, to “freemium” models, such as that offered by the Australian Financial Review and the National Business Review. Freemium paywalls allows readers to access some content, but the papers charge for “premium content”.
My study recently published in the journal Digital Journalism confirms the Australian Financial Review (AFR) has, actually, a very hard paywall. A content analysis conducted of AFR’s homepage alongside the National Business Review (NBR) in New Zealand, reveals the AFR locks 86% of its homepage content. The number of its paywalled articles is twice as high as NBR’s.
The most locked content on afr.com and nbr.co.nz includes hard news and opinion pieces. However, both mastheads give readers a greater access to technology news, and free articles are obviously used to pull in visitors as they try to turn them into digital subscribers. Interestingly, NBR also allows people to read routine market news – such as stock and currency market reports – for free. Similarly, The Wall Street Journal lets its readers access such content without a subscription. Meanwhile, the AFR paywalls all market news.
Digital media experts Chris Anderson, Emily Bell and Clay Shirky argue that in order to survive, news publishers have to commodify production of ordinary news to “free up resources for more complex work elsewhere”. It seems that NBR has followed this advice as it has outsourced production of content which is also freely available elsewhere. A majority of the paper’s routine market news comes from the local business newswire BusinessDesk.
Print dependency behind the hard paywall
The different paywall strategies of AFR and NBR are linked to their publishing models. NBR is mainly published online as its print version is only published once a week. In contrast, the AFR is published in print six days a week (although its weekend print edition may soon disappear).
NBR’s income is more dependent on digital subscriptions and advertising than the AFR’s, and its hard paywall is most likely linked to print reliance in terms of revenue. In contrast to NBR, AFR’s digital subscriptions are mostly linked to its print newspapers as they are sold as a bundle. In her research paper, Andrea Carson estimates that digital subscriptions make up 33% of the the AFR’s total circulation.
However, the AFR’s readership has clearly moved to digital platforms. This suggests the paper may be wiser to have a less strict paywall. Its paywall is currently among the most expensive in the world. The latest Roy Morgan figures show that in March 2016 the AFR had 417,000 print readers and 938,000 digital readers.
Commenting on the figures, Roy Morgan Research chief executive officer Michele Levine said that “in balancing the pros and cons of reaching print and digital audiences, publishers and advertisers clearly need to have a thorough understanding of who reads only one platform or the other, who reads both, and what the proportions means”.
Yes indeed.
But do they make money?
Fairfax doesn’t publish digital-only subscription figures for the AFR even though it does so for The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald. Perhaps this itself is telling. It is impossible to know if the AFR is profitable or not, and how much its digital-only subscriptions contribute to its revenue. What we do know is that Fairfax is cutting 100 jobs from its Sydney and Melbourne newsrooms, and these cuts include staff from the AFR.
Fairfax chief executive Greg Hywood recently said that for the Fairfax mastheads, 65% of advertising revenue is generated on the weekend, except for the AFR which was “profitable on weekdays only”.
Paywalls are not a saviour of newspapers, and even the Financial Times, which has been hailed as an example of successful paywall structure, is struggling. The paper is now facing cost cuts in its newsrooms and production despite the fact that it has 566,000 digital subscribers and growing digital revenues.
As a Fortune article points out, “the reality is that, despite its digital growth, the Financial Times is facing the same challenge as thousands of newspapers, magazines, and other traditional print publications around the world. Namely, the fact that print advertising, which still generates far more revenue than digital, continues to shrink”.
Regional newspapers next
Paywalls continue to emerging, disappear and evolve. Last year, News Corp’s British tabloid The Sun abolished its hard paywall, and its traffic grew 26% as a consequence. Its experiment with the paywall was doomed.
APN’s Australian regional newspapers started to charge for digital news content last year. In New Zealand, a handful of regional newspapers have also introduced fees for their digital content.
Most recently, The Otago Daily Times (in Dunedin) introduced a metered paywall. The paper’s editor Barry Stewart commented that “we cannot win the clickbait war. We are investing in what we do best. We want to protect our journalism and this paywall is the logical way to do that”.
Perhaps the model will work better for regional papers?
Merja Myllylahti, Project manager and author for Journalism, Media and Democracy (JMAD) Research Center, Auckland University of Technology
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
So You Want To Write A Novel
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