This paper shares findings from a recent study that engaged a group of Kenyan teachers in a review and development of interpretive materials through a participatory action research framework. It focuses on critical contextual reviews of interpretive materials in non-formal organisations and development of similar materials in schools with teachers. Social interactions between teachers and non-formal educators enabled the sharing of ideas, skills and techniques on materials development processes. This provided a basis for developing interpretive materials to support environmental learning within school grounds. A teacher-centred approach to materials development as argued in this paper seeks to respect the needs of schools within their social and historical contexts. It further challenges the conventional top-down approaches in which non-formal educators are creators of materials and teachers are viewed as “technicians” who implement the materials in schools. The paper offers some tentative guidelines on the development of interpretive materials in schools.

Until recently, use has been made almost exclusively of text-based concordancers in the analysis of spoken corpora. This article discusses research being carried out on Padua University's Multimedia English Corpus (Padova MEC) using the multimodal concordancer MCA (Multimodal Corpus Authoring System, Baldry, 2005). This highly innovative concordancer enables the retrieval of parts of video and audio from a tagged corpus and access to examples of language in context, thereby providing non-verbal information about the environment, the participants and their moods, details that can be gleaned from a combination of word, sound, image and movement. This is of use to language learners of all levels because if “communication is to be successful, a relevant context has to be constructed by the discourse participants” (Braun, 2005: 52). In other words, transcripts alone are not sufficient if learners are to have anything like participant knowledge and comprehend spoken language. In the article it will be demonstrated how language functions expressed in the multimedia corpus of spoken English are retrieved using MCA. Online learning materials based on the multimodal concordances take into consideration not only language, but also the way in which it co-patterns with other semiotic resources, thereby raising the issue of the importance of learner awareness of the multimodal nature of communication.

This article discusses three main points. First, ultrahigh-temperature materials offer a large return to the propulsion community and to the economy, but replacing Ni-based alloys is a very difficult problem for both technical and financial reasons. Second, the oxidation resistance of selected Mo-Si-B alloys and the prospects for combining this with useful structural properties are remarkable, given the nature of conventional Mo alloys; however, there are nagging issues associated with their low-temperature (∼700°C) behavior. Third, further advances in the processing of such materials, together with assessments of their affordability and reliability, are vital for achieving a successful engineering technology.