This study investigated the relationship between children's attendance at different types of early childhood education and care programmes and their mathematical and verbal skills. Analyses of data from 1314 children participating in an Australian longitudinal study, the E4Kids project, revealed no relationship between children's verbal ability…

How to compute and report subscores for a test that was originally designed for reporting scores on a unidimensional scale has been a topic of interest in recent years. In the research reported here, we describe an application of multidimensional item response theory to identify a subscore structure in a test designed for reporting results using a…

This paper investigates the oracy (listening/speaking) genres enacted in an undergraduate entry point unit in the internationalised university and the kind of knowledges these genres elicit and perform. Focusing on a series of lectures in a business studies unit, it explores how anecdotal knowledge from both the lecturer's and the students' lived…

The research reported in this book was based on the belief that Australian schools should develop the speech communication as well as the reading and writing skills of their students. The book is designed to provide educators and researchers with guidelines for future work on oral language assessment and on curriculum development. The first…

This is the first report arising from a large-scale research project on the development of skills in English in the primary schools of Sydney, Australia. Specifically, it reports on a study of the extent of the relationship among the four communication skills (reading, writing, listening, and speaking) in a sample of 314 children and on a…

Describes the development and evaluation of a communication program which, through speaker-listener settings, aims to give children strategies for recognizing and conveying critical attributes, ignoring redundant information, and sequencing information. (Author/BW)

This selection of papers from the First Conference on Tertiary Literacy, which examined the role of literacy as a foundation for knowledge acquisition and dissemination that influences the academic success of tertiary students, presents a number of case studies of policy and practice in Australian universities. Keynote addresses included:…

These selected papers from the First Conference on Tertiary Literacy focus on communication across differences of culture and discipline in Australian universities. Many of the papers have resulted from cooperation between applied linguists and specialist lecturers and describe cooperative models of literacy education based on interdisciplinary…