Vital to successful learning and teaching and a necessary pre-stage to lesson planning is constructing a long-term and a mid-term plan. In order to ensure successful progression in pupils’ language learning, careful thought is necessary in terms of deciding what pupils need to learn and in which order. Chapter 5 looks at the fundamentals of syllabus and unit planning, taking account of providing meaningful progression through the foreign language, related directly to appropriate pedagogy, and walks student teachers through the stages needed to create successful unit plans, and mid-term and long-term schemes of works for teaching modern languages.

Our goal in writing this book was to address a notable gap in the availability of essential resources dedicated to this critical content area. Despite its foundational importance, no existing text offers a focused, in-depth exploration of language and literacy knowledge tailored for pre-service and in-service teachers working in Foundation to Year 10. The 2008 Bradley Review highlighted a deficiency in teachers’ language and literacy awareness and proficiency, a concern that was addressed by the introduction of the Literacy and Numeracy Test for Initial Teacher Education Students (LANTITE) in 2016. Consequently, initial teacher education programs have initiated courses and support services in English language and literacy to bolster teachers’ personal knowledge and skills, enabling them to pass the LANTITE’s literacy component.

Chapter 12 evaluates the challenges of SDG 15: Life on Land, which aims to protect and restore terrestrial ecosystems, sustainably manage forests, combat desertification, halt and reverse land degradation, and stop biodiversity loss. The proximate and underlying drivers of deforestation and biodiversity loss that have led to the drastic decline of plant and animal species, threatening “biological annihilation,” are explained. Ending nature’s underpricing can be achieved by eliminating harmful subsidies, charging for environmentally damaging products, and enforcing regulations that can help protect forests and biodiversity. Increased investments in the conservation and restoration of forest ecosystems can be achieved through market-based tools such as biodiversity offsets, ecosystem service payments, debt-for-nature swaps, green bonds, and sustainable supply chains. Rethinking the international framework for an agreement on global forest and biodiversity conservation and restoration strategies may involve fostering the involvement and investment of the private sector, which has substantial revenue to gain from forest ecosystems and biodiversity conservation.

Describe key elements of adolescent identity development; evaluate the genetic, social, and cultural influences on identity; understand creativity and cultural change as parts of adolescent development.

Describe the development of imagination, creativity, and flexible thinking; understand how children express their creativity in their drawings, their imaginary worlds, and in what they are willing to believe; provide examples of how children’s imagination is grounded in their everyday experience.

Are civil conflicts driven by resource crises? Research suggests that the root of conflict, in part, is explained when analyzing how economic deprivation drives groups into turmoil. Resource ownership, especially when unevenly distributed, often leads to violence. Research remains divided, however, on which resources drive violence, and the precise mechanisms that are involved. While many scholars argue that inequality drives violence, there exist many other factors that can help to explain civil wars. Evidence in this chapter suggests that while oil dependence may trigger conflicts, the duration of conflict is heavily influenced by factors beyond resources alone. Contrarily, agricultural commodities lack significant ties to civil war onset or duration, challenging our understanding of deprivation on a country-specific basis. Conflict is inextricably tied to maintaining political order, which for resource-rich countries hinges on interacting factors that governance structures facilitate. Further analysis on these topics – like the greed, state capacity, and grievance frameworks – offers strong insights into why violence emerges, giving multiple avenues and case studies as evidence for explaining civil wars overall.

This chapter explores the value of the arts in the lives of very young children in early childhood education settings. It is hard to imagine a more joyful or rich opportunity for connection, expression and learning in early childhood than the arts. Humanity has always created art in a range of forms for a range of purposes and the youngest children are innately attracted to engage in music, dance, drama, and visual arts experiences.

Chapter 8 evaluates the challenge of SDG 2: Zero Hunger, which aims to meet the food needs of an increasing global population while safeguarding the food needs of the poor and promoting sustainable agricultural land use. The interaction between rural poverty, natural resource degradation, and food insecurity in developing countries is a vicious cycle. Increasing agricultural production to meet the rising global food demand is constrained by the limited availability of fertile agricultural land suitable for expansion. It requires significant increases in production per unit of agricultural land already in use rather than expanding the land under agricultural production. However, the high costs associated with agricultural intensification make increasing sustainable agricultural production a real challenge. Removing or re-orientating environmentally harmful subsidies in agriculture and identifying new and innovative policies to boost sustainable agricultural intensification is required, especially in developing countries with fragile and limited fertile agricultural land.

Chapter 7 explains the range of policy tools decision-makers can use to correct incentives for an oversupply of environmental “bads” and an undersupply of environmental “goods” in markets. There are two critical steps to address the underlying causes of environmental mismanagement. Step 1 involves removing existing policy distortions. Step 2 explains how policy options can be used to correct market failures and compares and contrasts these options. Market-based instruments provide incentives for producers and consumers to reduce or eliminate negative environmental externalities through markets, prices, and other economic means, e.g., Coase Bargaining solutions, cap and trade, taxes, and subsidies. Regulatory-based (command and control) instruments rely on setting a standard, such as emissions or technology adopted, backed by penalties to modify economic behavior. In the absence of government intervention to correct market failures, private sector measures, such as liability, information disclosure, and voluntary agreements, have a role in correcting environmental problems.

Identify different perspectives on child development; describe important features about how children grow, adapt, and change; illustrate what is unique about human childhood.

When reflecting on this book’s insights, a key question is highlighted: What is the prospect for effectively preventing and resolving armed intrastate conflicts globally? The threat of such conflict erupting remains a constant risk for policy-makers and researchers to investigate, and to prepare for constructive intervention. As discussed throughout this text, the challenges inherent to establishing effective peacekeeping policies and resolving intrastate conflict remain. Furthermore, this chapter addresses how areas of non-violent conflict, but high tension, threaten to escalate in the future. Is it possible to successfully intervene and to deescalate future intrastate violence? From the timing of intervention to international cooperation, the debates and critical lessons that we conclude with here will encourage thought-provoking discussions on formulating effective policies to prevent and end intrastate violence.

In this chapter, we exclusively consider vector spaces over the field of reals unless otherwise stated. First, we present a general discussion on bilinear and quadratic forms and their matrix representations. We also show how a symmetric bilinear form may be uniquely represented by a self-adjoint mapping. Then we establish the main spectrum theorem for self-adjoint mappings based on a proof of the existence of an eigenvalue using Calculus. Next we focus on characterizing the positive definiteness of self-adjoint mappings. After these we study the commutativity of self-adjoint mappings. As applications, we show the effectiveness of using self-adjoint mappings in computing the norm of a mapping between different spaces and in the formalism of least squares approximations.

Language use involves the activation of phonological, morphological, grammatical and lexical systems for meaning-making with other people in specific contexts. Therefore, we not only need to acquire and develop these linguistic systems for language use, but we also need to develop an awareness and understanding of these linguistic systems as meaning-making resources for appropriate use in a given context. For this reason, it is necessary to focus on the social use of language as a key aspect of language development.