Research Textbooks Research Articles

The research of Korean traditional elementary textbooks - Focusing on the analysis of character species -

The research of Korean traditional elementary textbooks - Focusing on the analysis of character species -

BETWEEN APOLOGY AND REFUSAL, BETWEEN PERSUASION AND MANIPULATION - ANDREJ HLINKA IN THE FORMING OF THE INSTITUTIONALIZED MEMORY OF THE SLOVAK COMMUNITY II

Changes in evaluation of Andrej Hlinka when making eff orts to form systemically the thinking of children and adolescents have in principle the same stages and milestones as the milestones of writing about Hlinka in the Slovak historical science, however, the dispute with respect to Hlinka in the area of education reached more remarkable even bizarre dimensions. Th is is proven by diff erences between offi cial texts of school textbooks, teaching aids published in the period of 1919-2013 and individual memory of adolescents which can be found in the whole above mentioned period in spite of the absence of relevant sources. Textbooks of interwar national (state) schools are characterized in particular by neglecting Hlinka, which is clearly visible when comparing the representation of other much less signifi - cant personalities of the modern Slovak history in their texts; however, we cannot state that this fact was aff ected only by the period doctrine (Czechoslovakism and republicanism). Moreover, we are still less aware of the impact of church schools of that period. A principal change of the paradigm in the image of Andrej Hlinka created for the young generation (aft er a typical boom of interim period of the First Slovak Republic) took place only aft er 1948 (and lasted until 1989). The analysis of texts in the textbooks of the related subjects should be included in the research of history textbooks; however, even now we can notice typical features of the displacement even elimination of Hlinka’s personality from curricula, as well as its methodologically and didactically incorrect form (the use of Hlinka’s Slovak National Party without explanation of the notion “A.H.” etc.). It is still questionable to what extent this image, similarly as in historiography, has been formed besides ideological factors by the weakness of the Slovak methodology of history. Another even more serious question is a suffi ciently verifi ed analysis of Andrej Hlinka’s popularity which is apparent among young generations of the period before and aft er revolution having minimum information about his personality acquired from offi cial (formal) education.

Multidirectional war narratives in history textbooks

This article aims to contribute to the field of textbook research by exploring a new approach in textbook analysis. Inspired by Michael Rothberg’s concept of multidirectional memory, this article examines multidirectional narratives in history textbooks: narratives that combine different histories, places and times in a productive way. They generate new meanings by combining histories and help us understand new, unknown situations by putting them in familiar frames of reference. The study of multidirectional textbook narratives precisely brings to light how authors make sense of the past and how continuity and meaning interact with interpretations of the present and the future. The analysis of multidirectional textbook narratives enables textbook researchers to examine how past experiences and future expectations are organised. To illustrate this, this article examines how textbook authors generated continuity and meaning by establishing narrative links between the past, the present and the future in English history textbooks for 11- to 14-year-old students in the 1920–1960 period. A case study presents the English defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588: how and why does the narration of the 1588 event interact with the narration of other historical events, and do these interactions change after the Second World War?

Textbook research and the pedagogical past: An outline of contemporary methodological approaches

The paper presents two contemporary methodological approaches to the historicalpedagogical study of textbooks, based on a concept of textbooks underpinned by hermeneutics and critical theory. In the first part of the paper, a textbook is defined as a medium of socio-cultural knowledge representing an image of a given society that is in many ways filtered, restructured and controlled. The paper considers the implications of such a position for the study of the pedagogical past. The main section of the paper presents methodological guidelines for a broader understanding of textbooks based on the above-mentioned theoretical concepts. It is suggested that the study of textbooks should take into consideration its contextual determinants. This involves, on the one hand, collecting data about the processes of textbook creation, that is, about the production within which the selection, legitimization and pedagogical-didactic transformation of socio-cultural knowledge occurs, and also, on the other hand, collecting data about the processes of textbook use, i.e. the transmission and reception of knowledge. In addition, guidelines for the study of internal textbook organization are given. The conclusion of the paper highlights the importance of the approaches presented, and points to a number of thematic areas for studying the pedagogical past which are opened up through the adoption of the presented views on textbooks presented in the paper.

A Timeline of Biological Assessments: Our Nonspatial Continuum

Much of our dental history is recognized through oral tradition, which has led to myths and misconceptions regarding the efficacy of early restorative agents. Dental biomaterial history has tended to report only certain aspects research in a few textbooks that are expensive and not readily available to the larger dental audience. Our purpose is to provide a detailed peer-reviewed document, which provides a chronological account of our in vitro and in vitro biological continuum. This document follows a published historical chronological timeline of biomaterial testing literature beginning with its little known inception in 1779. Many of the early dental restorative agents evolved due to their anodyne capacity to alleviate tooth pain and provide a modest bacteriostatic capacity. Those that were successful were modified as temporary cavity filling agents and evolved to more permanent fillings. Unfortunately, many of the early agents e.g. antimony, arsenic, asbestos, canthrides, formalin, mercury, mustard, phenol to name a few were toxic to the tooth and supporting periodontal tissues as well as failing to support lost tooth structure. The National Institute of Dental Research required biomaterial testing in the late 1940’s. Even today, the agency permits many pre-1950 agents via the grandfather clause for commercial inclusion and clinical use, while requiring all new post-1958 agents to pass both in-vitro and in vivo testing hurdles. We routinely place restorative agents that infiltrate in graded interphases to interdiffuse into vital enamel, dentine and even cementum by forming a unique biomimetic substrate that mimics the color and opacity of the human tooth. Our biological continuum is still evolving with technologies that will continue to change our clinical future. Our profession has been the global benefactor of dynamic change. Unfortunately, our biomaterials testing status quo is not acceptable as many toxic agents e.g. formalin still remain in our clinics.

COMPREHENSION OF MARKETING RESEARCH TEXTS AMONG SOUTH AFRICAN STUDENTS: AN INVESTIGATION

Reading is a skill people require in order to operate successfully in all spheres of life. Mastering this skill is even more critical when pursuing academic studies. This study investigated the reading comprehension of final year undergraduate marketing students at a South African higher education institution (HEI) relating to their comprehension of marketing research textbooks. Two measurement instruments were used to test their reading comprehension. One instrument contained two passages from the respondents’ prescribed marketing research textbook and the other two passages from a comparative international textbook. Following the Cloze procedure, every 9th word was removed from the passages and respondents were subsequently required to complete the non-subject related words in one of the instruments fielded on a random basis. The results indicated that the majority of respondents exhibited a reading comprehension that is at the frustration reading level. A further evaluation that allowed for synonyms (Semantically Acceptable Scoring Method or SEMAC) to be included, did not impact meaningfully on the classification of respondents. Significant differences in reading comprehension could also not be uncovered based upon the respondents’ gender and home language. The results furthermore presented challenges for all those involved in higher education (HE), more specifically impacting on textbook choice as well as assessment and performance practices.

Japanese Language and "Characters": From the Perspective of Teaching Japanese as a Foreign Language

This paper introduces current status of "role language" and the "speaker's character" and their applications in Japanese teaching materials. Besides it studies the knowledge of Russian learners of Japanese and carefully examines their knowledge of four typical kinds of "role language" in Japanese anime and manga by using a questionnaire and follow-up interviews. From the results of the textbook research, the following two things are revealed; (a) first person pronouns except for watashi are rarely used, (b) there is not enough explanations about different "speaker's characters" in detail. Furthermore, findings of the questionnaire show that some of the learners who have the same impression of the characters as Japanese native speakers, wrongly connect a certain "role language" to illustrations of a character, and results of as much as three kinds of "role language" have a low positive correlation with the learners' results of the Japanese Language Proficiency Test. Results also reveal that all four kinds of "role language" have no correlation with other factors, such as student's duration of learning Japanese, or frequency of the use of Japanese outside the classroom.

The Research of Korean Listening Textbooks’ Organizing Dialogues in China from a Computational Linguistics Perspective - Focusing on the Adverb

The Research of Korean Listening Textbooks’ Organizing Dialogues in China from a Computational Linguistics Perspective - Focusing on the Adverb

Epistemological and Methodological Considerations in International School Textbook Research

Many acknowledge a dearth of research regarding Lithuanian school textbooks. Educational institutions rely on reviews by select experts who provide advice during the approval process. Most extant research analyses content and its relationship to curriculum. Some have examined multicultural tolerance issues. Very few field studies have been done on the actual use of textbooks by teachers and pupils. On the other hand, Lithuanian teachers’ reliance on textbook material for the delivery of instruction is greater than in other European countries, according to international research. Therefore, an increase of formative or development research regarding textbooks is necessary. This article presents the need for an epistemological stance in textbook inquiry. It has been argued that you cannot construct convincing textbook research methodologies without a theoretical stance and that textbook research has been “underphilosophised”. Various philosophical positions have been proposed for textbook research, including positivism, critical theory, postmodernism, hermeneutics, neo-hermeneutics, post-colonialism, post-postmodernism, and others. Each dictates its own view of content, narrative, marginalization, point of view, prejudice and tradition. In terms of methodologies, traditional content analysis has been supplemented by hermeneutic, linguistic, discourse, semiotic, narrative, historiographic, cross-cultural, critical analysis. Contingency analysis is a relatively new mixed method that examines the relationship between text and image. Others analyze textbook questioning techniques, visual materials or the process of textbook production. One of the greatest shift in textbook research is the realization that users are the arbiters of knowledge and meaning, and their role as intermediaries must be examined in context. For these types of studies to flourish partnerships need to emerge between universities, textbook publishers, schools, and educational policy makers.

Results and Prospects of Textbook Research in the Czech Republic

The paper presents a survey of studies and research approaches concerning Czech textbooks that have been performed to date. In fact, the first analyses of school textbooks and primers were accomplished during the 1930s by Czech educationists and psychologists (V. Přihoda and others). Recently, this analytical trend has continued, and is being intensively further developed in a number of studies. This is evidenced in a number of monographs and papers published by Czech researchers in several faculties of education, among them at the University of Ostrava. The most remarkable research findings concern the following topics: Parameters of textual components of textbooks; measuring text difficulty for pupils; content representation in textbooks; utilization of textbooks in learning and teaching; selection of textbooks by teachers and schools. However, some new problems have arisen that have as yet not been profoundly studied, among them especially the role of printed textbooks vs. new educational ICT media.

South African history textbook research - A review of the scholarly literature

School history textbooks are seen to embody ideological messages about whose history is important, as they aim both to develop an ‘ideal’ citizen and teach the subject of history. Since the 1940s, when the first study was done, there have been studies of South African history textbooks that have analysed different aspects of textbooks. These studies often happen at a time of political change (for example, after South Africa became a republic in 1961 or post-apartheid) which often coincides with a time of curriculum change. This article provides an overview of all the studies of South African history textbooks since the 1940s. We compiled a data base of all studies conducted on history textbooks, including post graduate dissertations, published journal articles, books and book chapters. This article firstly provides a broad overview of all the peer-reviewed studies, noting in particular how the number of studies has increased since 2000. The second section then engages in a more detailed analysis of the studies that did content analysis of textbooks. We compare how each study has engaged with the following issues: the object of study, the methodological approach, the sample of textbooks and the theoretical or philosophical orientation. The aim is to provide a broad picture of the state of textbook analysis studies over the past 75 years, and to build up a database of these studies so as to provide an overview of the nature of history textbook research in South Africa.

Lexical bundles in Biology

On the basis of previous lexical bundle studies, this paper examines the forms, structures and functions of 4-word bundles in a corpus of textbooks and a corpus of research articles in Biology. The study includes the main biological disciplines and focuses on three major features: the overall distribution of bundles, their typical structures, and their functions in discourse in Biology. The findings support the idea that lexical bundles are a basic linguistic construct with important functions for the construction of discourse in this area. Concluding discussion highlights the pedagogical implications of using research journals and/or textbooks to teach English to biologists in a second language context. Furthermore, the importance of explicit instruction in these word combinations in courses on English for Biologists is emphasized.

Review of Harwood, Nigel (2014). English Language Teaching Textbooks: Content, Consumption, Production. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan

In Chapter 1 Nigel Harwood stresses the need for “more theoretical and methodological rigour” (2) in textbook research and recommends that ELT textbook researchers should learn from the “more developed, rigorous and sophisticated” (2) research which has been conducted in mainstream education. He then surveys the published research in ELT and other fields on textbook content, textbook consumption and textbook production. (...)

The Curricular Indian Agent: Discursive Colonization and Indigenous (Dys)Agency in U.S. History Textbooks

In the 1800s and early 1900s, the United States assigned Indian Agents—non‐Native employees of the federal government—to coordinate intergovernmental efforts, to encourage the assimilation of Native peoples into European‐American society, and to serve as advocates for individual tribes. Although Indian Agents no longer exist in an official capacity in the United States, the potentially contradictory expectations that informed their work continue to influence communities across the country. Instead of decolonizing education, today’s curricular agents typically misrepresent the historical and future agency of Native peoples while reinforcing the patronizing, normative, dominant‐culture narrative. This article outlines the critical discourse analysis of five widely adopted U.S. history textbooks, as situated within the broader scope of textbook research and emerging educational movements. Findings show that textbook authors and other curricular agents use strategies of exclusion and passivation to control the historical and curricular agency of Indigenous peoples. Given the influence of educational reform efforts such as those related to the Common Core Standards, now is the critical time to retheorize curriculum design and inquiry as dialogic, dynamic, transformational, and agentive processes. The project’s conclusions demonstrate the need to confront the biases of curricular agents in order to guide the decolonization of curriculum materials.

English Language Teaching Textbooks: Content, Consumption, Production

‘ELT textbook research is on the rise’ writes Nigel Harwood in the Introduction to this new collection. It is true: this book is one of a number that have come out in the last year or so (see, for example, Garton and Graves 2013; Gray 2013; Tomlinson 2013); an overdue response, perhaps, to the fact that so many teachers’ professional lives are, if not dominated, at least mediated, by published textbooks (accounting for up to 90 per cent of classroom time, according to one of Harwood’s sources). As Akbari (2008: 647) notes, ‘What the majority of teachers teach and how they teach [...] are now determined by textbooks’. Despite this, we still know little about their actual effectiveness in terms of learning outcomes, and it is curious, to say the least, that textbooks rarely if ever feature in discussions of factors that influence second language acquisition (SLA). Ellis (2008), in over 1,000 pages, makes no mention of them. Nor do Doughty and Long (2003). A novice teacher might be forgiven for wondering why, with so much of her waking life devoted to preparing and delivering coursebook-based lessons, their impact on language learning should be of such scant interest to researchers.

Artistic Method in Research as a Flexible Architecture for Theory-Building

This paper lays out some working tenets for an artistic method of research, one that arguably predates the scientific method and yields multiple strategies for the improvisatory address of researchable ideas and problems. Four overlapping domains of arts-based knowledge, creative practice, and teaching will be outlined along with derivative research methodologies that can be alternately framed as critical-activist, synthetic, analytic, and/or improvisatory. In this writing, the author lays out the basic framework for an Arts-Based Research Primer (2013), an introductory research textbook that aims to reveal how the arts lend themselves to blended spaces of naturalistic inquiry, aiding artists and scientists alike in their conduct of research.

An Exemplar for Combining the Collection, Analysis, and Interpretations of Verbal and Nonverbal Data in Qualitative Research

Denham and Onwuegbuzie (2013) provided evidence that relatively few qualitative researchers include any mention of nonverbal communication in their empirical articles. Of those who do include this information, the vast majority of qualitative researchers devote as little as one sentence to nonverbal communication data in their published articles. However, this lack of reporting of nonverbal communication data likely stems from the scant guidance in this area given by authors of qualitative research textbooks. Thus, the purpose of the present article is to provide a framework for collecting, analyzing, and interpreting nonverbal communication behavior. This framework yields guidelines for students to collect, to analyze, to interpret, and to report nonverbal communication data. Underlying this framework is a 13-step nonverbal communication process that serves as a conceptual framework that we use in our qualitative research methodology courses to help students develop a nonverbal communication way of thinking. This 13-step nonverbal communication process occurs at the following three stages: the Conceptualization Stage, the Planning Stage, and the Implementation Phase. Rather than representing a linear process, the nonverbal communication methodological steps within each stage and across stages are interactive and recursive. After providing this framework, we present an exemplar for reporting nonverbal communication data.

Schulbuchforschung interreligiös. Erfahrungen und Perspektiven

Abstract Based on the research project, “the representation of Christianity in textbooks of countries with an Islamic tradition”, the article describes experiences, possibilities and insights in the field of Interreligious Textbook Research and Development. Interreligious Textbook Research is of particular relevance in the face of sweeping generalisations, prejudice and stereotypes regarding other religions and cultures (“Islam is like this”, “the West is like that”) that were, and still are, to be found in school textbooks. Within the project discussions between scholars and education authorities in different countries have taken place. The main results are summarised in a proposal for a series of standards as possible guidelines for author teams and publishers, for education authorities and curriculum planners.

Analyzing Compliance Rate of Intended Andimplemented Curriculum Of Research And Thinking Textbook In Sixth Elementary Grade In Maidenly Schools Of Urmia City In Iran

This research tries to present a general image of compliance and consistency rate of implemented and intended curriculum in research and thinking textbook of elementary sixth grade in Iran according to its four major elements. Research is descriptive- survey type. Statisti- cal population contains all elementary sixth grade teachers of maidenly schools in Urmia city. Research's statistical samples are 102 el- ementary sixth grade teachers that are selected as simple random- classified sampling. Reaching to intend curriculum was realized through analysis of thinking and research textbook's content (textbook's all sentences analysis unit). To reach implemented curriculum a researcher made questionnaire was used that contains 43 answer packs and is adjusted based on Likret scale. Research results show that in terms of intended and implemented curriculum of thinking and research textbook, knowledge goals are higher than average. In terms of intended and implemented curriculum, attitudinal goals are higher than knowledge goals average. According to teachers' statement in terms of intended and implemented curriculum, skill goals are reported higher than 4. Also results show that attention is not paid to all curriculum components in implemented curriculum namely from teachers' view point intended curriculum of elementary sixth grade thinking and research textbook in maidenly schools of Urmia city is not available about all components of curriculum in specified notes performing.

Evaluating the readability of marketing research textbooks: an international comparison

Purpose– Locally authored textbooks are used at tertiary South African institutions to assist in marketing research studies. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the readability of locally authored marketing research textbooks in South Africa and compare them with international (USA) texts.Design/methodology/approach– South African marketing research textbooks (authored locally) used at South African institutions were identified. Electronic versions of the textbooks were used and analysed using accepted readability formulae. The same procedure was used with texts produced in the USA and the findings of each were compared.Findings– The South Africa texts scored higher on the Flesch Reading Ease score than US texts, which links to the target audience of these books (undergraduate students), while also being cognisant of the reading skills of the target audience but their score still describes them as “difficult”.Research limitations/implications– The original formulae and theory tend to be dated, though there are recent studies into readability in other areas of business studies. There are also those that question the applicability of readability formulae in the tertiary environment.Practical implications– Instructors need to ensure that material is at a suitable reading level to maximise the student's learning. For publishers and authors, this means that the examples and illustrations used need to be linked to the context in which the student lives and functions, and not just focus on the English used in the text.Originality/value– While studies have been conducted into the readability of US textbooks, there is little published research into the readability of regional marketing research textbooks in other contexts to facilitate comparison.