KAT LOMB (1909-2003) was one of the great polyglots of the 20th century. A translator and one of the first simultaneous interpreters in the world, Lomb worked in 16 languages for state and business concerns in her native Hungary. She achieved further fame by writing books on languages, interpreting, and polyglots. Polyglot: How I Learn Languages, first published in 1970, is a collection of anecdotes and reflections on language learning. Because Dr. Lomb learned her languages as an adult, after getting a PhD in chemistry, the methods she used will be of particular interest to adult learners who want to master a foreign language.
Continuing the case for free voluntary reading set out in the book's 1993 first edition, this new, updated, and much-looked-for second edition explores new research done on the topic in the last ten years as well as looking anew at some of the original research reviewed. Krashen also explores research surrounding the role of school and public libraries and the research indicating the necessity of a print-rich environment that provides light reading (comics, teen romances, magazines) as well as the best in literature to assist in educating children to read with understanding and in second language acquisition. He looks at the research surrounding reading incentive/rewards programs and specifically at the research on AR (Accelerated Reader) and other electronic reading products.
The Science of Reading: A Handbook brings together state-of-the-art reviews of reading research from leading names in the field, to create a highly authoritative, multidisciplinary overview of contemporary knowledge about reading and related skills. Provides comprehensive coverage of the subject, including theoretical approaches, reading processes, stage models of reading, cross-linguistic studies of reading, reading difficulties, the biology of reading, and reading instruction Divided into seven sections:Word Recognition Processes in Reading; Learning to Read and Spell; Reading Comprehension; Reading in Different Languages; Disorders of Reading and Spelling; Biological Bases of Reading; Teaching Reading Edited by well-respected senior figures in the field
Recognizing the characteristics of children with learning disabilities and deciding how to help them is a problem faced by schools all over the world. Although some disorders are fairly easily recognizable (e.g., mental retardation) or very specific to single components of performance and quite rare (e.g., developmental dyscalculia), schools must consider much larger populations of children with learning difficulties who cannot always be readily classified. These children present high-level learning difficulties that affect their performance on a variety of school tasks, but the underlying problem is often their difficulty in understanding written text. In many instances, despite good intellectual abilities and a superficial ability to cope with written texts and to use language appropriately, some children do not seem to grasp the most important elements, or cannot find the pieces of information they are looking for. Sometimes these difficulties are not immediately detected by the teacher in the early school years. They may be hidden because the most obvious early indicators of reading progress in the teacher's eyes do not involve comprehension of written texts or because the first texts a child encounters are quite simple and reflect only the difficulty level of the oral messages (sentences, short stories, etc.) with which the child is already familiar. However, as years go by and texts get more complex, comprehension difficulties will become increasingly apparent and increasingly detrimental to effective school learning. In turn, studying, assimilating new information, and many other situations requiring text comprehension -- from problem solving to reasoning with linguistic contents -- could be affected. Problems with decoding, dyslexia, and language disorders have attracted more interest from researchers than have specific comprehension problems and have occupied more room in specialized journals. Normal reading comprehension has also been a favorite with researchers. However, scarce interest has been paid to subjects who have comprehension difficulties. This book is an attempt to remedy this situation. In so doing, this volume answers the following questions: * Does a reading comprehension problem exist in schools? * How important and widespread is the problem? * Is the problem specific? * How can a reading comprehension difficulty be defined and identified? * Does the "syndrome" have a single pattern or can different subtypes be identified? * What are the main characteristics associated with a reading comprehension difficulty? * When can other well-identified problems add to our understanding of reading comprehension difficulties? * Which educational strategies are effective in preventing and treating reading comprehension difficulties? * What supplementary information can we get from an international perspective?
The papers in this volume relate to the nature and conditions of classroom learning, with particular emphasis on the cognitive aspects. They are concerned with the question of concept formation and stress the importance of the teacher’s function in ensuring that the child really has assimilated the ideas and not merely the words for the concepts. The role of language is fundamental to this theme, and the interaction of language, thinking and learning is dealt with in the first section of the book. This section also provides a context within which subsequent discussions of classroom learning problems can be viewed. Some problems concerning the elaboration of a general theory of teaching are then examined with particular reference to possible methods of bridging the gap between research and implementation.
The book is a generously sized compendium of articles drawn from NSTA's middle and elementary level journals Science Scope and Science and Children. If you're teaching an introductory science education course in a college or university, Readings in Science Methods, K-8, with its blend of theory, research, and examples of best practices, can serve as your only text, your primary text, or a supplemental text.
Readings in Cognitive Science: A Perspective from Psychology and Artificial Intelligence brings together important studies that fall in the intersection between artificial intelligence and cognitive psychology. This book is composed of six chapters, and begins with the complex anatomy and physiology of the human brain. The next chapters deal with the components of cognitive science, such as the semantic memory, similarity and analogy, and learning. These chapters also consider the application of mental models, which represent the domain-specific knowledge needed to understand a dynamic system or natural physical phenomena. The remaining chapters discuss the concept of reasoning, problem solving, planning, vision, and imagery. This book is of value to psychologists, psychiatrists, neurologists, and researchers who are interested in cognition.
The ability to learn is a fundamental characteristic of intelligent behavior. Consequently, machine learning has been a focus of artificial intelligence since the beginnings of AI in the 1950s. The 1980s saw tremendous growth in the field, and this growth promises to continue with valuable contributions to science, engineering, and business. Readings in Machine Learning collects the best of the published machine learning literature, including papers that address a wide range of learning tasks, and that introduce a variety of techniques for giving machines the ability to learn. The editors, in cooperation with a group of expert referees, have chosen important papers that empirically study, theoretically analyze, or psychologically justify machine learning algorithms. The papers are grouped into a dozen categories, each of which is introduced by the editors.
First Published in 1979. These volumes explore the range and depth of our theoretical and practical knowledge about early reading instruction. Contributors-psychologists, linguists, instructional designers, reading and special education experts were asked to address three questions: (1) What is the nature of skilled reading? (2) How is reading skill acquired? (3) What do the nature of skilled reading and the process of acquiring reading skill jointly suggest for reading instruction? This is Volume I of a collection of essays looking at topics such as reading stages, coding and comprehension skills, word recognition, language skills, instruction and teaching theories and an analysis of reading two beginning reading programs.
In the words of Aldous Huxley, "Every man who knows how to read has it in his power to magnify himself, to multiply the ways in which he exists, to make his life full, significant and interesting." Few people question the value of reading; in fact, most extol its virtues. As our culture becomes more complex, reading plays an increasingly greater role in satisfying personal needs and in promoting social awareness and growth. In the last 20 years, the teaching of this invaluable skill has focused so intensely on comprehension and prediction from context that it has lost sight of the significance of automaticity and fluency in the word-identification process. Reading is a synthesis of word recognition and comprehension; thus, this text is about these basic processes and their integration. A common plea from teachers today is that research and psychology be translated into teaching behavior. Therefore, the aim of this book is twofold: one, to identify, report, organize, and discuss those bits of data, research and theory that are most relevant to the teacher's understanding of the reading process; and two, to help educators to interpret and apply theory and research data to everyday classroom teaching, as well as to the problems encountered frequently in developmental and remedial teaching.
