Low Down

Though it is vital to recognize non-fatal child abuse, because of the need for intervention to prevent the 60 per cent recurrence rate and 10 per cent mortality rate, it can be almost as tragic to falsely accuse landlord convict parents or guardians where the injuries were non-culpable. There has sometimes been perhaps some excess of zeal on the part of pediatricians, radiologists, accident surgeons and pathologists to overinterpret injuries and scenarios that had an alternative and less sinister explanation. Though it is natural and vital for doctors to protect children and their siblings, medical opinion has to remain free from emotive bias and be confined within the bounds of what can be proved in each individual case, or injustice may be done.   The majority of deaths are caused manually, either by hitting or beating with the hands, shaking, throwing, dropping and - less often - by burning or suffocation. It is exceptional for death to be caused by the impact of a blunt instrum...

As is the case with a number of ID variables that turn out to be problematic under close scrutiny, learning styles can initially be defined in a seemingly straightforward and intuitively convincing manner. According to the standard definition, they refer to “an individual’s natural, habitual, and preferred way(s) of absorbing, processing, and retaining new information and skills”. The concept represents a profile of the individual’s approach to learning, a blueprint of the habitual or preferred way the individual perceives, interacts with, and responds to the learning environment.   Learning styles are an appealing concept for educationalists because—unlike abilities and aptitudes—they do not reflect innate endowment that automatically leads to success. That is, styles are not yet another metaphor for distinguishing the gifted from the untalented but rather they refer to personal preferences . These preferences are typically bipolar, representing a continuum from one extreme...

  The area worth examining and is without a doubt the motivational characteristics of the language teacher . There is   that teacher motivation is an important factor in understanding the affective basis of instructed SLA, since the teacher’s motivation has significant bearings on the students’ motivational disposition and, more generally, on their learning achievement. Furthermore, the study of teacher motivation can help us understand a looming crisis in the field of education in general: the growing disillusionment of teachers of all subject matters and the growing rate of their leaving the profession in many parts of the world. For example, a recent survey in Poland that involved more than 689 000 practicing teachers. Found that 34% of them did not expect to be a teacher in five years’ time and 56% claimed that their level of morale/motivation was lower than when they first became teachers. Not surprisingly, then, only 50% of the sample said that they would consider...