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The teaching of reading in English is fraught with challenges that influence teachers' practices in Papua New Guinea (PNG). There are a plethora of linguistic issues regarding teaching in both the vernacular languages and English. Postcolonial education in PNG has continued to promote English as the medium of instruction while also promoting the use of vernacular and mother tongue. The outcomes-based education reform in the Language and Literacy Policy (1993–2014) supported the use of vernacular languages in the elementary years with the gradual bridging to English in Grade 3. In 2015, the Language and Literacy policy changed to standards-based education. One major shift was from the use of vernacular languages to English as a medium of instruction at all levels of formal education.

In this chapter, we use Tierney's concept of decolonizing spaces to investigate teachers' perspectives on implementing the English standards-based curriculum and the role the vernacular, mother tongue, and translanguaging plays in the classroom as Year 4 teachers grapple with the teaching of reading. It will problematize the colonization of English, the place of translanguaging, and the benefits and challenges for teachers when the classroom teacher most likely is not a native speaker of the children's dialect or English.

Contemporary comparative pedagogical discourses are becoming increasingly popular and strongly modify the policy and practice of education worldwide. Intensification of empirical studies naturally leads to the decrease of the research interest in purely methodological issues that stand apart from practical application of comparative analysis and comparative method. This chapter attempts to fill in the methodological lacuna in the study of comparative method and its potential when doing research determined by the ideological context. The authors state two main research questions, the first one concerning the potential of comparative analysis for the detection of the technologies and facts of ideological indoctrination and the second one focusing on its functional possibilities in revealing the transformations in the vision of pedagogical reality by the theorist under the influence of the complete change of the state’s ideology. Statistical analysis of the units, content and comparative analysis, quantification, interpretation, and analogy were used for the comprehensive comparative study of the small volume of text by A. S. Makarenko Beseda s rabochim aktivom na zavode ‘Sharikopodshipnik’ (Conversation with Working Active Members at the Plant ‘Ball-bearing’) with comments published in Russian and its analogue issued in German by Makarenko-Referat laboratory and two text versions of “Zadachi i metody narodnoj shkoly” (“Objectives and Methods of National School”) by P. P. Blonsky issued under the same title in 1916 and 1917. General outcomes of the research vividly demonstrate how micro- and macro contexts may widen the horizons of the comparative method and significantly differentiate comparative research schemes.

A growing body of research outlines how to best facilitate and ensure methodological rigor when using dictionary-based computerized text analyses (DBCTA) in organizational research. However, these best practices are currently scattered across several methodological and empirical manuscripts, making it difficult for scholars new to the technique to implement DBCTA in their own research. To better equip researchers looking to leverage this technique, this methodological report consolidates current best practices for applying DBCTA into a single, practical guide. In doing so, we provide direction regarding how to make key design decisions and identify valuable resources to help researchers from the beginning of the research process through final publication. Consequently, we advance DBCTA methods research by providing a one-stop reference for novices and experts alike concerning current best practices and available resources.

The purpose of this chapter is to present key characteristics of early reading text by describing a new series of researcher-developed early reading books that were specifically designed to address multiple criteria, including word structure or decodability, familiarity, repetition, high-frequency, syntax, and text cohesion. We describe the theoretical and empirical rationale that guided the design of the books, how we developed them, and their key features. This is followed by a technical analysis that describes the (1) characteristics of the target words used to guide the writing of the books and (2) characteristics of the text, such as the percentage of words on common high-frequency word lists, word counts, type-token ratio, sentence counts, unique sight words, unique decodable words, and content (i.e., picture-supported) words. The analysis demonstrates that the target words and the text in the books are consistent with our intended goal of simultaneously addressing multiple variables.

Mediated communication can be thought of as a mediated discourse, involving the knowledge of language, symbols, metaphors, and shared meaning. We describe here a funded study where we investigate the effectiveness of text messaging as a learning tool for higher level courses and provide insight into the use of texting as a supplemental, yet critical learning tool in the teaching and learning process. The design, based on the Vygotskian constructivist paradigm, where learning can happen in social and collaborative interactions, assesses three types of communication within student groups, (1) face-to-face (FTF), (2) using only Instant Messenger (IM), and (3) using only cell phone texting. For analyzing the IM and text exchanges we follow the recommendations of Thurlow (2003) using thematic referential coding schemes. Using the concept of Grice (1975), we detect the presence of conversational maxims and implicature and also the presence of adjacency pairs (Sacks, Schegloff, Jefferson, 1974), indicating turn-taking in IM and texting conversations. Results from content and conversational analyses indicate that while there is an innate preference for FTF discussions among participants, participants felt that IM and texting would be useful if used intermittently and as a supplementary learning tool in classrooms to mediate discussions. Participants also felt that IM and texting focused them on tasks and despite any frustrations with the technology they did gain a shared understanding of the subject matter and gained new and conceptual knowledge. The findings from this research can be used to explore the use of an additional dimension of learning in school and university classrooms.

Literacy demands have changed over the years and for success in society it is necessary to handle a wide range of texts and written information. The school has been criticized for not giving their pupils the necessary abilities to handle the kind of information they are faced with in society. One important dimension of literacy is reading comprehension, but even though much written information has the form of tables, drawings, graphs, etc. such presentations are most often accompanied by written text. This chapter focuses the comprehension of different kinds of written information, and data from different tasks are evaluated in light of the simple view of reading. A total of 132 grade 6 readers were given four reading comprehension tasks concurrently with a decoding task and a listening comprehension task. It was found that the sum of decoding and listening comprehension accounted for a larger part of the variance in all the reading comprehension tasks than the product of decoding and listening comprehension. The pupils' results on a naming task and morphological tasks from preschool accounted for significant parts of the variance in the comprehension of both plain text and text combined with tables and graphs over and above the concurrent decoding and listening comprehension results. Speed of orthographic identification in 2nd grade accounted for an additional, significant part of the variance in the plain text reading tasks. These results show that processing speed and linguistic knowledge, such as morphological knowledge, are important contributors to the comprehension of different kinds of written information. Even if speed of orthographic identification is especially important for comprehending plain texts, a broad linguistic and cognitive perspective seems to be important when preparing pupils to comprehend different kinds of written material.

The increasing importance and proliferation of text data provide a unique opportunity and novel lens to study human communication across a myriad of business and marketing applications. For example, consumers compare and review products online, individuals interact with their voice assistants to search, shop, and express their needs, investors seek to extract signals from firms' press releases to improve their investment decisions, and firms analyze sales call transcripts to increase customer satisfaction and conversions. However, extracting meaningful information from unstructured text data is a nontrivial task. In this chapter, we review established natural language processing (NLP) methods for traditional tasks (e.g., LDA for topic modeling and lexicons for sentiment analysis and writing style extraction) and provide an outlook into the future of NLP in marketing, covering recent embedding-based approaches, pretrained language models, and transfer learning for novel tasks such as automated text generation and multi-modal representation learning. These emerging approaches allow the field to improve its ability to perform certain tasks that we have been using for more than a decade (e.g., text classification). But more importantly, they unlock entirely new types of tasks that bring about novel research opportunities (e.g., text summarization, and generative question answering). We conclude with a roadmap and research agenda for promising NLP applications in marketing and provide supplementary code examples to help interested scholars to explore opportunities related to NLP in marketing.