The present study aimed to longitudinally investigate basic literacy skills and verbal memory at the end of the first term among Japanese second-graders and difficulty in reading kanji at the end of the third term. The participants were 1720 Japanese second-graders tested on their kanji reading skills; children with scores less than the 2.5th percentile were considered to have ‘severe difficulties.’ Under the risk conditions in which children showed combined occurrences of risk scores in the tests of abilities to write words with special morae, a word search and a test of digit span at the end of the first term, the odds ratios of children with severe difficulty in kanji reading ranged from 8.55 to 70.99. Since these odds ratios were much larger than the odds ratios for the single prevalence of each risk factor, multiple prevalence of the risk factors at the end of the first term seems likely to effectively predict the occurrence of severe difficulty with kanji reading in the third term.

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Takahashi and Ito (2012) suggested that difficulty in clause-level processing does not affect the frequency of stuttering in school-aged children who stutter. This suggests that they do not experience difficulty with processing of syntactic structures. If this is the case, they may not experience difficulty with processing of phrases, which are smaller syntactic units than clauses, and phrase-level processing will not be more difficult than word-level processing. It is predicted that the frequency of stuttering of noun phrases will not be significantly higher than that of compound nouns. Results show that the frequency of stuttering of noun phrases was not significantly higher than that of compound nouns. There were no significant difference in the loci of stuttering between noun phrases and compound nouns. The results suggest that phrase-level processing is not more difficult than word-level processing, and that school-aged children who stutter do not experience difficulty with processing syntactic structures.

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The purpose of this study is to identify the roles played by NGOs in promoting inclusive education under the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA) scheme in a state of Tamil Nadu, India. Both governmental and NGO documents were analyzed. In addition, two NGOs were visited and staffs were interviewed. The tasks performed by the NGOs in promoting inclusive education under the SSA in Tamil Nadu state were two-fold: management of educational settings and employment of personnel. It was found that the two types of NGOs (metropolitan and rural) were different in their service capabilities. Issues related to service provisions through NGOs were also discussed from two perspectives. After the termination in 2011 of the commission to NGOs for management of the project, professional contributions as well as monitoring of government activities by NGOs may be required in the future. This study suggests that under the SSA scheme, NGOs played pioneering roles in paving the way for and providing a transitional period toward inclusive education until state governments took over these responsibilities in the state.

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