Bringing together an international team of scholars, this pioneering book presents the first truly systematic, cross-linguistic study of variation in literacy development. It draws on a wide range of cross-cultural research to shed light on the key factors that predict global variation in children's acquisition of reading and writing skills, covering regions as diverse as North and South America, Asia, Australia, Europe and Africa. The first part of the volume deals with comprehensive reviews related to the variation of literacy in different regions of the globe as a function of socio-political, sociocultural, and language and writing system factors. The second part of the volume deals with comprehensive reviews related to the variation of literacy in different world regions. Offering a pioneering new framework for global literacy development, this groundbreaking volume will remain a landmark in the fields of literacy development and literacy teaching and learning for years to come.

More often than not, developers will stop a large project in the middle of the build stage to rethink and recode the software design so it's cleaner and more efficient. Known as "refactoring," this process eats up valuable time and money. To help offset refactoring, this book presents a new process called "prefactoring," the premise of which states that you're better off considering the best possible design patterns before you even begin your project. Prefactoring, in essence, is the art of applying the insights gleaned from previous experience (whether yours or someone else's) when developing software to new projects. Doing so will likely save you from making costly design changes midstream - and maybe even save your job! This practical, thought-provoking guide details prefactoring guidelines in design, code, and testing, each derived from the lessons of many developers over many years. With these guidelines, you're far more likely to create more readable and maintainable code before you reach the second-guessing stage. To help communicate the many facets of this process, "Prefactoring" follows the example of a fictitious client, Sam, as he seeks to create a software system from beginning to implementation. Among the topics covered are: General development issues; Implementation classes; Object-oriented design; Creating reports via separation of concerns; Associations and states; and, Creating and testing interfaces. If you understand object-oriented design, and you want to save time and money by considering more efficient designs before you begin your project, "Prefactoring" will show you the way. It won't guarantee that you'll never need to refactor your design or code again, but you're sure to cut down on the amount of refactoring you do.

This volume presents the first truly systematic, multi-disciplinary, and cross-linguistic study of the language and writing system factors affecting the emergence of dyslexia. Bringing together a team of scholars from a wide variety of disciplines, it takes a dual focus on the language-specific properties of dyslexia and on its core components across languages and orthographies, to challenge theories on the nature, identification and prevalence of dyslexia, and to reveal new insights. Part I highlights the nature, identification and prevalence of dyslexia across multiple languages including English, French, Dutch, Czech and Slovakian, Finnish, Arabic, Hebrew, Japanese and Chinese, while Part II takes a cross-linguistic stance on topics such as the nature of dyslexia, the universals that determine relevant precursor measures, competing hypotheses of brain-based deficits, modelling outcomes, etiologies, and intergenerational gene-environment interactions.