Describes one teacher's systematic inquiry into the effectiveness of strategies to increase students' vocabularies. A research-type approach indicated that use of clarity statements and interchanges that encouraged connections to the students' own lives seemed more effective in helping students incorporate their understanding of concepts with…

The authors review some of the constructs provided by recent classroom language studies. By employing constructs from these studies to describe part of a classroom lesson, the authors illustrate one way to explore how classrooms work. They then list some cautions and recommendations about the use of classroom research for making policy decisions.…

Research about classroom communication, classroom management, training, and staff development form the basis around which teachers can improve their practice. Staff development programs must be dynamic to support and stimulate this process. (CB)

Discusses the interrelationship of the language arts, and how both oral and written language help the learning process. Describes a classroom in which students' activities center around talking, and how the teacher participated as a researcher in ethnographic studies out of which came the motivation for this instructional approach. (HTH)

School research should be more social in nature, i.e., contextualized, interactive/dynamic, and sensitive to participant conceptions. To explore the possibilities and limitations of the social study of social studies, a conception of social research is delineated, using recent social studies classroom research as illustration. Research utilization…

Within the field of linguistics there are several very different approaches to discourse analysis. Sociolinguists look at the structure of social interaction as manifested in conversation. Psycholinguists are concerned with aspects related to language comprehension. Philosophical and formal linguists are interested in the semantic relationships…

Schools have been accused of being insensitive to students' cultural backgrounds, and thus of failing to serve some populations because instruction and curricula are designed for middle class children. But teachers should be cautious about applying the findings of ethnographic studies which address this problem. Although ethnographic studies…

Research suggests that teachers would like to relinquish some control of classroom activity to students, and many have accomplished this difficult task with notable success. This collection of essays, with contributions from both classroom teachers and university professors, recounts some of these successes and aims to be a resource for teachers…

Translates research findings regarding gender inequities in education into pragmatic strategies for change. Describes strategies for change which administrators, academic support services, and faculty may use to pursue the goal of enhancing gender sensitivity in communication education. (KEH)

The goal of this panel was to develop the means to improve the reliability, validity, and utility of analyses of human interaction in learning settings. Research on interaction itself, as well as its association with the variables of student learning, student characteristics, setting characteristics, and teacher education were all concerns of this…

One educator's experience suggests that having graduate teaching assistants use classroom assessment techniques (CATs) in structured assignments is a good way to develop teaching assistants' ability to look beyond their classroom survival concerns in that it provides a safe way for them to engage students in dialogs about learning. Examples of…

Although there is much scientific research available to guide educational decision making, decision making based on prevailing conventional wisdom continues. Five areas are conspicuous for relying on this type of decision making. First, grade retention has been shown in over 600 studies to be detrimental to the child, yet the conviction persists…

The structure and quality of classroom interaction and the ways in which children learn how to interact appropriately was the initial focus of the research and field work described in this paper. The site was a kindergarten/first grade class in a suburban Boston Title I elementary school with many students from second and third generation…

The report resulting from a colloquium of scholars on teacher development and promising educational practice for ethnolinguistically diverse populations is summarized. The group met to discuss the urgent need for teacher preparation to meet the needs of increasingly multilingual school populations. Two major conclusions were reached: that…

The first major purpose of this paper is to show the ways in which teachers can benefit from research and the application of research findings to classroom interactions with children. The second major purpose is to examine research findings on the quality and characteristics of teachers' interactions with children by looking at findings on…