Customer Reviews (1)

Practical, effective, invaluable advice on education reform.
Preparing A Nation's Teachers: Models For English And Foreign Language Programs is a collection of twelve reports offering educators and administrators insightful perspectives on making departmental colleaguesaware of current concerns in undergraduate preparation in language andliterature, establish relations with specialists in education, develop tieswith local and state secondary school systems, respond to academia'sdiverse student population, and work for change within the financialconstraints of an educational institution's budget. Preparing A Nation'sTeachers also provides models for English and foreign language majors,study-aborad programs, collaborative projects with local secondary schools,and introductory courses and capstone courses for majors. Highlyrecommended for college and university faculty and departmentaladministrators, Preparing A Nation's Teachers is replete with practical,effective, invaluable advice for examining educational programs andinitiating successful reforms. ... Read more

Product Description
Explore the ARL’s initiatives for identifying, formulating, and testing new criteria for evaluating academic libraries in the digital age!

The proliferation of electronic information resources in the past decade has changed the ways in which research libraries evaluate their service and holdings. This collection of articles (thirteen of which previously appeared in ARL’s bimonthly newsletter/report on research issues and actions) examines new measures for library evaluation that are being developed by the Association of Research Libraries. It presents an overview of how the Association of Research Libraries’ “new measures” initiative developed, plus insightful reports on the details of the SERVQUAL, LibQUAL+, and E-metrics projects. Handy flow charts and tables make the information easily accessible and understandable.

From the editor: “The profound changes in library management and collection development brought about by digital technology in the closing decade of the twentieth century have changed the way we think about libraries. If we were to ask librarians who have been in the profession for more than a decade how they evaluated a library, we probably would hear statistics about the number of volumes held and added annually, the number of serial subscriptions, how much money a library has to spend, and how many professionals are on staff. These are the traditional criteria by which libraries have been judged throughout much of the twentieth century. Newer librarians, however, especially those who entered the profession in the late 1980s and 1990s, use a different yardstick and frequently recite different statistics that include terms such as user satisfaction, spending on electronic resources and services, document delivery services, numbers of databases and electronic journals available, and services provided to distance learners.”

In Evaluating the Twenty-First Century Library, you’ll find valuable information on:

• current performance measures for academic libraries
• the continuing search for accurate new performance measures
• the uses of learning outcomes assessment
• SERVQUAL, LibQUAL+, and the ARL LibQUAL+ Pilot Project
• the results of the 2000 Symposium on Measuring Library Service Quality
• the uses of E-metrics in assessing the academic networked environment and accurately measuring use, users, services, resources, and other factors
• an insightful discussion of the rise in spending on electronic information by research libraries

Product Description
Canada is an officially bilingual country. But how do voluntary associations manage linguistic diversity? In the 1960s, a pioneering study by Vincent Lemieux and John Meisel revealed that associations were paralyzed by internal conflicts over language. Language Matters presents case studies of well-established and newer associations to determine whether this has changed. Contributors examine key turning points in the given association's history and highlight how its mandate, leadership, and relationship to the federal and provincial governments shaped its response to linguistic diversity. This book provides a deeper understanding of the language dynamic in Canada and offers solutions to groups and governments trying to manage difference. ... Read more

Product Description
The JACT Reading Greek Course has been written for beginners in the upper school, at university and in adult education. It aims to enable students to read fifth- and fourth-century Attic Greek, Homer and Herodotus, with some fluency and intelligence in one to two years. The main medium of learning is a continuous, graded Greek text, adapted from original sources. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (17)

reading greek
I was disappointed that this used book had too many hand written notes on the pages and it was distracting from the original text and exercises.

Classical Greek Opportunity
The first thing that you should know is that this book is co-ordinated with three other books which together combine to give the student an excellent opportunity to learn classical greek.The other books are:
1. Reading Greek Text-the study texts
2. An independent Study Guide to Reading greek-Answers to exercises
3. The World of Athens- Background study for the texts
4. Reading Greek-Grammar, vocabulary, and exercises to study with the text

These together give you an exellent opportunity to self-study greek.The co-ordination of the texts is a little awkward, but once you learn the routine, the books cover greek inflections in a very detailed way, but one that lends itself to the ambitious student uniquely without the need for a greek expert to help.It is all there!!

There are other, better options
This book was, unfortunately, my first introduction to ancient greek.I do not recommend it.The grammar explanations are extremely brief and entirely inadequate.The book is in now way user-friendly.The only benefit that the book does offer is exposure to some good readings (such as the orations of Demosthenes, passage from Alcestis, etc.).The problem, however, is that these "almost entirely unadapted" readings occur much towards the end of the book, when at least a moderate understanding of grammar is required.This was the required text for my beginning greek course, unfortunately.Even the other classics professors at my university (besides my intro to greek professor) greatly frown upon the book as an introduction to greek.I would recommend Crosby and Schaeffer's 'Introduction to Greek' for the learner who needs a slower, more 'wheelock'-like introduction to Greek.The lessons are short, manageable, and learnable.The only quam that I have with Crosby and Schaeffer is that there is no answer key available.Nevertheless, it is a great book.For the more aggressive/studious learner, I would recommend Hardy Hansen and Gerald Quinn's 'Greek: An Intensive Course.'The grammar explanations are entirely superior to most other books.There are also self-correcting examinations after every three or four units, which greatly helps the self-learner.

The bottom line: do not attempt to learn ancient greek with JACT.I have found it best to employ all of these books in learning ancient greek.After all, ancient greek is a very difficult language.

Not that bad...
This book is not easy. It is definately a book that makes you work to learn the language. Their are two major problems with this book: the forms are set up in the British system (nominative, accusative, genitive, dative) and it does a shotty job of introducing the grammar.

If you have learned Latin in the American system, then it will be an annoying transition to Greek if you use this book, but if you work hard and get the grammar down, this book can be very rewarding.

Another book that I would recommend over this one is Chase and Phillips, which focuses more on grammar then on translation, but does a great job.

Good reading selections, patchy grounding
As other reviewers have noted, the series is ungainly and one needs to have a minimum of three of the books (text, grammar and vocabulary, reader's guide)and possibly a fourth (vocabulary alone)before going on to the intermediate reading selections, of which there are now three.

But more importantly the evident strengths of the series are mixed with equally important weakness.It's indeed exciting to begin to read simplified Greek text from the first lesson, within a very few to be reading only slightly adapted extracts from the great authors, and to end with original passages from Demosthenes, Euripides, Herodotus, and Homer.All the selections (quite a few from Aristophanes and Plato)and settings (adapted from Thucydides for the time of the plague in Athens) are fascinating and authentic.

On the other hand, there are at least two problems apart from the awkwardness of using three or four books together.After the first seven or eight lessons, the level of difficulty gets exponential not so much in absorbing, but in retaining the grammatical complexity.The exercises are just too few to be really helpful in this regard.By the time the student finishes the basic text, the base is insufficient to go on reading other texts with facility.

A second problem is the diffuseness of the texts: a smattering of many different styles and types of ancient Greek does not really provide focus.As the language kept evolving, with the simplest being the koine, it's perhaps a mistake not to start with grounding first in this form.Alternatively, much more emphasis on Homer could equally help provide a base from which to expand.The most difficult authors in some ways are in the classical Attic (Demosthenes, Aristophanes, Plato).Again, it could have been a better strategy, even keeping the focus only on these, to concentrate on say, Plato.

To sum up, my suggestion would be to use this series with some caution: It's quite effective to acquire some of the basics, and reading all the text in the first volume is certainly a satisfying experience.But for a more thorough base in ancient Greek, it may be better to: (i) master the koine of the New Testament; (ii) focus on Homeric Greek with Pharr's text; (iii) and, acquire depth in the Attic dialect with either of different texts which rely on a single author (Hansen's course uses extracts from Plato; in the older tradition, Mather and Hewitt provide the whole of Xenophon's Anabasis in an excellent, annotated version). ... Read more

Product Description
The present volume provides a cross-linguistic perspective on the development of tense-aspect in L2 acquisition. Data-based studies included in this volume deal with the analysis of a wide range of target languages: Chinese, English, Italian, French, Japanese, and Spanish. Theoretical frameworks used to evaluate the nature of the empirical evidence range from generative grammar to functional-typological linguistics. Several studies focus on the development of past tense markers, but other issues such as the acquisition of a future marker are also addressed. An introductory chapter outlines some theoretical and methodological issues that serves as relevant preliminary reading for most of the chapters included in this volume. Additionally, a preliminary chapter offers a substantive review of first language acquisition of tenseaspect morphology. The analysis of the various languages included in this volume significantly advances our understanding of this phenomenon, and will serve as an important basis for future research. ... Read more

Product Description
This is an EXACT reproduction of a book published before 1923. This IS NOT an OCR'd book with strange characters, introduced typographical errors, and jumbled words.This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process. We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide. We appreciate your understanding of the imperfections in the preservation process, and hope you enjoy this valuable book. ... Read more

Product Description
Editor:
Heather Fehring

In the last 10 years, the world has witnessed a massive change to the nature of what it means to be literate. Educators of English must ask themselves challenging questions, such as how can we effectively assess students’ literacies, and how can we ensure that the assessment process empowers individuals? Although there are many stakeholders to consider as educators perform and report on literacy assessments—students, parents, colleagues, and government, to name a few—teachers must make informed, consistent judgments regarding students’ literacy achievement.

This volume presents articles published by the Australian Literacy Educators’ Association (ALEA) between 1992 and 2002. Editor Heather Fehring has chosen 19 articles that present diverse viewpoints related to literacy assessment and reporting practices. The articles, which encompass a range of grade levels from elementary school to high school, explore literacy assessment from a theoretical perspective, report on applicable research studies, discuss the implications of standards and benchmarking, and demonstrate practical classroom implementation of assessment and reporting techniques.

Literacy Assessment provides a rich resource of perspectives on the topic of literacy assessment, but more important, it stresses the importance of teacher judgment in relation to literacy assessment and reporting. This collection will give you the knowledge to make informed judgments about the literacy assessments and reporting practices in your own classroom. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Par ou, la bibliotheque?
Dans les bibliotheques on a toujours besoin de l'argent, des bibliothecaires, et des clients. Et les bibliothecaires, ce sont des pionniers..traditionnels! Savez-vous qu'a cause d'eux, et des citoyens genereux, toute chose electronique de la Bibliotheque du Congres est a la portee des internautes. Maintenant, sur des rayons des bibliotheques, a cote des livres, il y a des cassettes, des cd-roms, des videos, toute chose electronique. Maintenant, sur des tables, a cote des livres, il y a des ordinateurs. Mais plus ca change electroniquement, plus c'est la meme chose!

Hey, Where's My Library?
Selecting, processing and making available audio and video products, CD-ROM, and online reference are not traditional librarian jobs. But the digitized traditional library has different concerns. The virtual library still needs collection and public service librarians, catalogers, and information processing experts. It also needs the corporate sector, funding agencies, and information producers and providers: the Library of Congress digitized historical collections on limited Congressional funds and huge private fundraising. Librarians have a pioneering tradition: barcodes before grocery stores; book sorting and shelving robots in Europe; cooperative cataloging and indexing for decades; the ILL code in the 1930s; and self-checkout. So they can handle the traditional acquisition of property and the digital acquisition of rights while plugging away at storing, finding and getting out information. Peggy Johnson and Bonnie MacEwan see to it that libraries will be VIRTUALLY YOURS whether you are librarian, staff or user. The book joins up with Pat Ensor's THE CYBRARIAN'S MANUAL, Joan Giesecke's PRACTICAL STRATEGIES FOR LIBRARY MANAGERS, Robert S. Want's LIBRARY OF CONGRESS ONLINE, and Anne Woodsworth's PATTERNS AND OPTIONS FOR MANAGING INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY ON CAMPUS. ... Read more

Product Description
This is an EXACT reproduction of a book published before 1923. This IS NOT an OCR'd book with strange characters, introduced typographical errors, and jumbled words.This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process. We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide. We appreciate your understanding of the imperfections in the preservation process, and hope you enjoy this valuable book. ... Read more

Product Description
School resource centres are, or should be, an integral part of the educational process. The Library Association has argued both for better training of teachers in information skills and the appointment of professional librarians in schools. These guidelines revise and update those published in 1992 under the title "Learning Resources in Schools". They deal specifically with secondary school libraries, placing them in the context of current educational imperatives and thinking. The contribution of schools library services, both internal and external, towards educational effectiveness in secondary schools is especially emphasized. The first part of this document is an executive summary of policy for headteachers, governors, chief education officers and local education authority officials, government and other policy makers. The second part is a practical section for professional librarians, teacher librarians and others responsible for managing libraries and other forms of learning support in secondary schools. Amongst other key topics, the guidelines cover: level of provision; exploitation of resources; management; funding; ICT and information skills; evaluation; and inspection. ... Read more