While freedom of speech is a defining characteristic of the United States, the First Amendment right is often regulated within certain environments. For years, schools have attempted to monitor and regulate student communication both within the educational environment and in student use of social media and other online communication tools.…

This article offers teachers 12 suggestions for dealing with cursing by students, such as teaching students the differences among assaultive cursing, racial insults and slurs, lewd and sexually assaultive insults and slurs, and profanity and epithets; differentially reinforcing less offensive profanity; trying self-mediated interventions; and…

Ways to deal with profanity and inappropriate language used by students are discussed, and methods are suggested to control this behavior. The focus is on middle schools. Students should learn to conform to conventional language usage, they should understand that language can be appropriate, inappropriate, or unacceptable depending on the context.…

Based on the realization that professors' cultural and personal backgrounds affect the way they transmit information and the way they interact with men and women students in their classes, this booklet is designed to help faculty members assess how they are presenting subject matter to their students. The first section of the booklet,…

Our everyday language is full of images drawn from animal life. Looking at such images can provide young people with insights into the creative use of language. (Author/RK)

The Curriculum And Research for Equity (C-A-R-E) program materials are inservice teacher training modules (workshops, curricula, references, and research data) designed to promote educational equity in elementary school classrooms. The training manual is intended to help elementary education professionals identify, assess, and rectify the problem…

An investigation of the process of language teaching as communication in a cross-cultural context shows that there is potential for misunderstanding. Examples of types of errors that are pragmatic rather than grammatical are discussed. A model is presented to help understand the pragmatic error. (DF)

During the brief time students come together for a group tour, museum educators have the opportunity to create a culture of thinking: a place where the group's collective as well as individual thinking is valued, made visible, and actively promoted as part of the ongoing experience of all group members. Creating such a culture is facilitated by…

This examination of the frequency of occurrence of multiple meaning expressions in the oral speech of teachers found that such expressions as indirect requests, idioms, similes, metaphors, and irony were used in about 36 percent of all utterances by two different teachers at each grade level from K-eight. Implications for language-impaired…

Intended to help classroom teachers, students, or researchers fathom or simply explore the impact of sex roles in human communication, these 47 annotated citations cover a variety of sources written in a range of disciplines. Sources, which are arranged alphabetically by author, include books and journals in communication, psychology, linguistics,…

Symbolic interactionism is a theoretical framework that derives from critical humanism through social psychology and is presented as an alternative to sociological and psychological views of social reality. This paper analyzes the general arguments of symbolic interactionism, its portrayal of people as responsible agents, and its interpretive…

Ways to eliminate sexism (discrimination based on sex) in Oregon State University classrooms are suggested, with attention to language, behavior, and expectations. Social outcomes of sexism are also identified. Unequal treatment singles out or ignores the individual. As a result, students may lose confidence, lower academic goals, or limit their…

A study examined the language use of two teachers, one a native, bilingual Cantonese-English speaker and the other a monolingual English-speaker, as they alternated teaching assignments between two first grade classes in a Chinese-English bilingual education program. Teacher-student interaction and the variation in teacher and student language use…

Discusses the following bicultural determinants in children's learning processes: family structure, value of education, self-concept, assimilative anxiety, social adjustment, and language (verbal and nonverbal). Presents basic guidelines for teachers who work with Oriental and other minority children. (Author/GC)

This book focuses on communication as the central feature in teaching and learning within second language classrooms. It examines the classroom as a unique communication context with highly regulated patterns of communicative behavior that are actively negotiated between teacher and students, and explores how and why these patterns of…