Carolyn Anderson is a speech and language therapist who is currently working as a senior lecturer at the University of Strathclyde. In this article she provides an early account of her ongoing research into communication between teachers and pupils with severe and complex learning disabilities. Video recordings were made of teacher-pupil…

An inservice teacher education minicourse using programed materials is described. The course is intended to develop skills in studying verbal teaching-learning interactions for the purpose of increasing student participation, initiative, and motivation, and uses the Flanders Interaction Analysis Categories (FIAC) to analyze teaching. Information…

Student motivation is a cause of great concern for educators at all levels, but perhaps never more so than during the middle school years. Teachers' observations about declines in student interest and confidence in academic tasks are borne out by a number of large-scale empirical studies. In this article, the author examines how teachers create…

Investigates, within the context of the question-answer framework of a foreign language oral proficiency test, the interactive nature of spoken discourse between Canadian students and assessors when there is trouble in talk as perceived by the assessors, with a focus on how they accommodate to the students. The study has implications for rater…

Investigates Chinese students' interaction styles and reactions to peer response groups in English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) composition classes. Interviews with Chinese-speaking and Spanish-speaking students were audiotaped and examined by researchers. Analysis of these tapes indicated that the Chinese students' main objective of group harmony…