Phonics method 'gets results'
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Children read better when taught with a new system of phonics that builds on their own diction, researchers say.
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NORTH READING -- North Reading kept the pressure on undefeated Ipswich yesterday late into the fourth quarter, but a forced fumble by Chris Fitzgerald and the recovery by Kevis Reid sealed a 28-14 win for the Tigers in a Cape Ann League matchup.
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Elementary and middle-school students are making across-the-board gains in math and more modest progress in reading, national test results out Tuesday show.
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I've been a linguophile for a long time, and I'm always studying a little bit of some language or another. However, it's only recently that I've finally figured out the way that works best for me, with the help of modern technology. Perhaps this might help those of you who have been planning on learning a language some day.
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For nearly six years, the federal government has defined school success mainly by how many students pass state reading and math tests. But a growing number of educators and lawmakers are pushing to give more weight to graduation rates, achievement in science and history and even physical education.
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A federal program to teach reading pressured schools to adopt a specific approach in order to receive funding.
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(InfoWorld) - On Tuesday, Nexidia, an ISV that uses phonetic technology for audio and video search, will announce Language Assessor, an application that can test the verbal proficiency of non-native speakers. Nexidia uses what it calls Phonetic Search Engine (PSE) technology to do phoneme pattern matching that can find individual words in a broadcast. A phoneme is usually defined as the smallest phonetic unit in a language that is capable of conveying a distinct meaning, such as the m in mitt and the b in bit.Â Â  Language Assessor will use the same PSE technology to test speakers by identifying and rating the clarity of their pronunciation of words, phrases, proper names, slang, and nonstandard grammar patterns. Because there are a finite number of phonemes in any speech, Language Assessor is easily ported to languages other than English. The target market for Language Assessor, also known as an accent analyzer, are companies considering offshore tech support sites where English is either not native to the population or the spoken English accent might be difficult for a North American native speaker to understand. Elizabeth Herrell, both a contact center and voice communications specialist for Forrester Research, said this will be a useful tool and technology for companies who use agents where English is their second language. Up until now, many companies make the mistake of giving only reading and writing tests, not realizing an agent can achieve a high score in written skills while at the same time speaking heavily accented English. In addition, Herrell noted that some companies may want to use this assessor to offer levels of customer service. Dubbed "right shoring" or "best shoring," these kinds of service-level offerings typically connect premier customers needing help to native speakers, while individuals may only get to talk to agents located offshore. The Language Assessor gives offshoring companies pitching a company for a customer service contract a script that is read by candidates and recorded. The program takes the recording and searches for keywords, scoring the reader by the ease in which the keyword can be found. The second part of the assessment matches the speaker's phonetic pronunciation against the North American English phonetic model. The third component measures the pace at which the script is read. Following the tests, an aggregate score is given, allowing a company to select only the top performers, said Anna Convery, a senior vice president and product manager at Nexidia. The problem with using live language screeners, according to Convery, is that they may be strict at first, but as time goes on, they tend to relax and get listener fatigue. Currently the company offers 33 language models. The audio search engine can index one hour of audio in 17 seconds, after which an actual audio search would take a fraction of a second. According to Herrell at Forrester Research, there is currently no other company offering a similar language assessment capability.
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John Lim has posted about an interesting bug he's come across when working with the output of two strings that should look the same:   Someone reported a bug in ADOdb, the open source db library i maintain. I went crazy for half an hour until i realised the problem.   According to him, "if you expect the above code to produce the same values, you are sadly mistaken". His example gives an interesting result for the first echo statement - not echoing the 9 in the first character like it seems would make sense. Check out his post for the code and try it out for yourself.
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The other day Tim Bray wrote up an interesting piece on java.util.regex.  I sent him off a quick email detailing my past experiences  and he just blogged his feedback .  "Well... yeah, but here's a story. I was kind of surprised at the results on my OS X box, so I took the code and data over to a nearby Windows XP box and got similar results, so I took 'em to a Debian-stable box I had handy and once again, about the same story. "  "Only, not quite the same. Because it was Perl 5.8.1 on one box and 5.8.3 on another and 5.6.1 on the third, and the i18n/regex code was slightly different in each version, and no two of them gave quite the same results. "  "Now, I'll grant that Unicode/i18n is one ...
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Families with autistic children are finding that techniques that have proved successful in the class can be tried at home.
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Teachers are urged to adopt new strategies to help children who fall behind in English and maths.
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DevShed is starting up another new series today, this time looking at the DirectoryIterator methods out of the Standard PHP Library functionality.   Because this class might be handy to use in projects where handling directories is a must, in this new series I'll be taking a close look at some of its most important methods. We will explore these methods appropriately in conjunction with the corresponding code samples.    They introduce the class, noting why it's handy to use and where's the best place to use it - including an example. They get into a bit more detail, looking at the key() and current() methods as well as using the rewind() method to reset the pointer for the directory.
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The length of children&#39;s  fingers may hint at their natural abilities in math and  language, a new study suggests.
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By Michaela Saunders, Omaha World-Herald, Neb.  Dec. 19--Does having their own computers during the day help elementary students become better writers? Or better understand what they read?   Omaha Public Schools began a program to test those questions last year.
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A head teachers' group believes online marking of papers is contributing to inaccurate exam results.
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On the LivePipe blog today, there's a quick new article demonstrating a sorting method that can be used for more than just simple datasources:   Most often when I need to sort complex data sets, I'm using some sort of SQL backend. Today I needed to do complex sorting of Reflection objects for some auto generating documentation I'm working on for the upcoming Picora release. [...] In the usort() examples, I had always been under the assumption that the return values had to be 0, 1 or -1. Today I learned that is not true at all, and you can come up with your own scoring system with any range, negative or positive.   He illustrates the point with a simple example showing the sorting of the documentation for Picora. In his protected function, scoreFromMethod, he defines the return array with several values instead of just the one.
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Languages should become a standard part of the English primary school curriculum, a report is expected to say.