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Story‐telling is recognised as important to child language development. However, children who use electronic communication aids have limited opportunities to develop their story‐telling compared to their natural speaking (NS) peers. The “Telling Stories”' project aims to explore narrative construction in teaching staff‐aided communicator dyads.

A pilot study was conducted to examine the feasibility of research methods. Video data were captured during a fictional story‐telling task. Two measures were investigated: communicative modality; and linguistic move type. Momentary time sampling (MTS) was applied to the video to determine range and proportions of communicative modalities in use. A coding framework was applied to determine the distribution of linguistic move‐types across the interlocutors.

The findings revealed multimodal contributions from both interlocutors. The linguistic move‐type coding indicates the NS assumed a more dominant, initiating role. MTS was shown to be an appropriate methodology for this research.

The pilot provides provisional data regarding narrative constructions of an aided speaker and tests the efficacy of the MTS methodology prior to the full study. Refinements to the protocol to be used in the main study are reported. The main study aims to provide detailed analysis of the narrative constructions of aided speakers, currently an area with little existing research.

The present study aims to examine the scope and contribution of behavioural investigative advice (BIA) reports from the National Crime Agency (NCA).

The 77 BIA reports reviewed were written between 2016 and 2021. They were evaluated using Toulmin’s (1958) strategy for structuring pertinent arguments, current compliance with professional standards, the grounds and backing provided for the claims made and the potential utility of the recommendations provided.

Consistent with previous research, most of the reports involved murder and sexual offences. The BIA reports met professional standards with extremely high frequency. The 77 reports contained a total of 1,308 claims of which 99% were based on stated grounds. A warrant and/or backing was provided for 73% of the claims. Most of the claims in the BIA reports involved a behavioural evaluation of the crime scene and offender characteristics. The potential utility of the reports was judged to be 95% for informative behavioural crime scene analysis and 40% for potential new lines of enquiry.

The reports should serve as a model for the work of behavioural investigative advisers internationally.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to systematically evaluate BIA reports commissioned by the NCA; it adds to previous similar studies by evaluating the largest number of BIA reports ever reviewed, and uniquely provides judgement of overall utility.

In the context of American institutions of higher education, the practical implementation of strategies associated with the development of L3+ or multilingual education often remain difficult to implement. Furthermore, students who reach the university level with pre-acquired bi/multilingual and bi/multicultural skills may perceive their competencies as trivialized and undervalued due to the lack of linguistically relevant opportunities available to them.

By contrast, the recent implementation of a multilingual course titled “Intercomprehension of the Romance languages: a pathway to Multilingualism,” at California State University, Long Beach (2014–2018) and St. Lawrence University (2018) offers bi/multilingual students the tools to develop skills geared toward language learning in a continuous effort to appraise, nurture, and upraise the ever-growing linguistic diversity present among students and faculty members in universities across the United States. This course and its iterations specifically benefit students’ pre-existing bi/multilingual competencies while offering them opportunities to reinforce and expand their multilingual repertoire. Students learn how to read in 5+ Romance languages, reinforce their knowledge of English, as well as of their Romance language, all while strengthening their metalinguistic awareness by learning how to navigate a larger repertoire of either foreign or unknown related languages.

In addition to discussing the pedagogical and theoretical framework of the course, the authors propose to explore how this innovative approach favors the development of multilingualism among students in North-American universities by examining course demographic data collected from several of these courses and key results relating certain aspects of students’ initial contact with new languages through intercomprehension.

Without exception, research on the contribution of the Prison Listener Scheme as a form of peer support for those who self-harm in custody has focussed on men in prison. Women’s experience of custody is shaped by their experiences of hegemonic masculinity that also mediate through women’s roles as mothers and caregivers. Women’s self-harm is similarly influenced by these gendered experiences. The purpose of this paper is to explore how the Listener Scheme as a form of peer-to-peer support for women contributes to women managing their self-harm in a female prison.

The paper used a case study design with a mixed-methods approach using a quantitative questionnaire with prison staff (n = 65) and women in custody who had self-harmed (n = 30). Qualitative methods included a focus group with Prison Listeners (n10) and semi-structured interviews with women who self-harm (n10) and prison staff (n10). Four days were also spent observing the prison environment.

Findings suggest that women seek support from other women as peer Listeners for three main reasons; their previous difficult experiences with men, a displacement of the mother role and their attachment needs in custody. Research suggests that women often have significant addictions and mental health concerns and are more likely than their male counterparts to engage in self-harm (Prison Reform Trust, 2017). In addition, women’s self-harm acts as a coping method for “intrapersonal issues” which documents self-harm as a result of frustration and lack of control in custody as opposed to “interpersonal issues” which documents self-harm as a result of relationship difficulties with partners (Walker et al., 2017). This paper suggests that peer support schemes internationally should be tailored to providing support for these types of gendered experience to support women who self-harm in custody. This has implications for the training and support of Listeners in women’s prisons.

This exploratory research was conducted in one female prison and while can be considered to test proof of concept is limited in its generalisability.

This paper suggests that Listeners providing peer-to-peer support for women in custody who self-harm may encounter triggers for this behaviour based on women’s experiences including; how women relate to men; women’s experience of the way custody displaces their role as mothers and women’s need for safe attachments in custody. These gendered experiences have implications for the training and development of peer support schemes in women’s prisons, such as the Listener scheme. Further research is needed to compare the gendered types of support Prison Listeners provide depending on whether they are in male or female prisons.

Wonders whether companies actually have employees best interests at heart across physical, mental and spiritual spheres. Posits that most organizations ignore their workforce – not even, in many cases, describing workers as assets! Describes many studies to back up this claim in theis work based on the 2002 Employment Research Unit Annual Conference, in Cardiff, Wales.