Janaina Weissheimer

Naps in school can enhance the duration of declarative memories learned by adolescents

Sleep helps the consolidation of declarative memories in the laboratory, but the pro-mnemonic effect of daytime naps in schools is yet to be fully characterized. While a few studies indicate that sleep can indeed benefit school learning, it remains unclear how best to use it. Here we set out to evaluate the influence of daytime naps on the duration of declarative memories learned in school by students of 10–15 years old. A total of 584 students from 6th grade were investigated. Students within a regular classroom were exposed to a 15-min lecture on new declarative contents, absent from the standard curriculum for this age group. The students were then randomly sorted into nap and non-nap groups. Students in the nap group were conducted to a quiet room with mats, received sleep masks and were invited to sleep. At the same time, students in the non-nap group attended regular school classes given by their usual teacher (Experiment I), or English classes given by another experimenter (Experiment II). These 2 versions of the study differed in a number of ways. In Experiment I (n = 371), students were pre-tested on lecture-related contents before the lecture, were invited to nap for up to 2 h, and after 1, 2, or 5 days received surprise tests with similar content but different wording and question order. In Experiment II (n = 213), students were invited to nap for up to 50 min (duration of a regular class); surprise tests were applied immediately after the lecture, and repeated after 5, 30, or 110 days. Experiment I showed a significant ~10% gain in test scores for both nap and non-nap groups 1 day after learning, in comparison with pre-test scores. This gain was sustained in the nap group after 2 and 5 days, but in the non-nap group it decayed completely after 5 days. In Experiment II, the nap group showed significantly higher scores than the non-nap group at all times tested, thus precluding specific conclusions. The results suggest that sleep can be used to enhance the duration of memory contents learned in school.

WORKING MEMORY CAPACITY AND LEXICAL DENSITY IN L2 SPEECH PRODUCTION

Este estudo investiga a relacao entre a capacidade de memo-ria de trabalho e a densidade lexical (DL) no desempenho oral e no de-senvolvimento da habilidade de producao oral em L2. Os 45 participan-tes deste estudo foram submetidos a duas coletas de dados, cada umaconsistindo de um teste de amplitude de memoria de trabalho duranteo desempenho oral, adaptado de Daneman (1991), e de uma tarefa deproducao oral em L2, com um intervalo de doze semanas entre elas.A DL foi determinada pela proporcao de itens lexicais repetidos e naorepetidos na fala dos participantes. Os resultados mostram que a am-plitude da memoria de trabalho esta negativamente relacionada a DLoral em L2, ou seja, os participantes com maior amplitude usaram maisitens lexicais repetidos. Quanto ao desenvolvimento da habilidade oral,apenas os participantes com menor amplitude de memoria de trabalhodemonstraram um aumento signi& cativo na medida de DL ao longo dasduas fases de coleta de dados.

A Translational Framework of Educational Neuroscience in Learning Disorders

Neuroimaging has undergone enormous progress during the last two and a half decades. The combination of neuroscientific methods and educational practice has become a focus of interdisciplinary research in order to answer more applied questions. In this realm, conditions that hamper learning success and have deleterious effects in the population – such as learning disorders (LD) – could especially profit from neuroimaging findings. At the moment, however, there is an ongoing debate about how far neuroscientific research can go to inform the practical work in educational settings. Here, we put forward a theoretical translational framework as a method of conducting neuroimaging and bridging it to education, with a main focus on dyscalculia and dyslexia. Our work seeks to represent a theoretical but mainly empirical guide on the benefits of neuroimaging, which can help people working with different aspects of LD, who need to act collaboratively to reach the full potential of neuroimaging. We provide possible ideas regarding how neuroimaging can inform LD at different levels within our multidirectional framework, i.e., mechanisms, diagnosis/prognosis, training/intervention, and community/education. In addition, we discuss methodological, conceptual, and structural limitations that need to be addressed by future research.

Working memory capacity across L2 speech proficiency levels

This study investigates whether working memory capacity (WMC) varies across languages and in the course of L2 speech proficiency levels. Following suggestions in Finardi and Weissheimer (2009) and Prebianca (2010), who found that WMC varied as a function of L2 speech proficiency, the present study assessed three proficiency levels (elementary, intermediate and advanced) and two languages (L1-Portuguese and L2-English). Two WM tests were used, one in the L1 and another in the L2, both in the speaking mode. Sixty adult learners of English as a foreign language participated in the study: 19 elementary, 19 intermediate and 22 advanced learners. Results of Kruskal-Wallis and Mann-Whitney tests corroborate Finardi and Weissheimer (2009) and Prebianca (2010) suggesting that WMC measured with a speaking span test in L2 seems to conflate the relationship between speech proficiency levels and WMC.

O ENSINO BILÍNGUE EM NATAL/RN: UM MAPEAMENTO PRELIMINAR DO CONTEXTO

This paper aims at presenting a preliminary account of the bilingual education in Natal/RN based on the notions of bilingual (GROSJEAN, 1982; WEI, 2000) and bilingual education (HAMERS; BLANC, 2000; FISHMAN; LOVAS, 1970; DALE; TANNER, 2012). The data were collected through questionnaires and interviews in four private bilingual schools in Natal/RN. Results indicate that most of the schools include two languages concomitantly in their bilingual curriculum with differences as regards the hour load to work with each of the languages