While we often assume media are highly effective tools for learning, research shows an unpredictable relationship between text and audience response, with variable interpretation being the norm. This can be especially problematic in anthropology, whose central goal is to understand different cultures; some studies suggest that films may reinforce…

This article reports an empirical study of classroom observation of two general English lessons that examined the effects of teachers' referential questions on learners' responses in two ESL classrooms. The study found that in both classes, the teachers asked many more referential questions than display questions, contrary to earlier findings.…

While there has been a great deal of debate about enlarging the canon, less attention has been paid to how students respond to "new" literary figures such as Margery Kempe and Julian of Norwich, or to how instructors should incorporate them into an already cramped literature survey course. Instructors must consider some questions that…

Rural school students need ample opportunities to engage in creative writing, particularly the writing of poetry. A student teacher and a cooperating teacher in a rural fifth-grade classroom (with 12 students) guided the students in the writing of limericks by starting out with couplets, then triplets, and then limericks. The teacher had clearly…

Satire is a genre long extant if not especially beloved in human history. Practitioners of the art claim the intent to persuade and educate through their works. Many quantitative studies have tested the persuasive effects of satire. In research on persuasion, A.D. Annis (1939) compared the effects of editorials and editorial cartoons and concluded…

A 25-year-old male instructor of Korean, Japanese, Hawaiian, American, and Australian background teaching predominantly 20-year-old, white students at a midwestern university developed an activity to introduce interpersonal communication to the students on the first day of class. Objectives were to develop in learners: (1) an awareness of…

It is a misguided and wasteful effort to try to separate out the teaching of language arts from the teaching of social studies and to wage war over which subject is most deserving of children's time. Instead, there is real power to be gained from teaching from a combined language arts-social studies perspective that shares similar goals and values…

Responding to complaints by New York City area employers about the lack of communication skills of City University of New York (CUNY) graduates, Baruch College (a CUNY college with a specialization in business) initiated a new program of communication-intensive courses to address the problem. One such course involved intercultural communication.…

Kenneth Burke's Dramatism, as a "meta-perspective," encourages a liberating awareness of the shortcomings of all rhetorics by upholding a "comic frame" that exhorts commitment without dogmatism, tolerance without uncritical relativism. Teachers of rhetoric can use a liberating comic frame that acknowledges the recalcitrance of…

A survey of English majors at the University of Southern Maine concerning the subject of curricular reform allowed a professor involved in the planning of the project to compile several "dos" and "don'ts" in an appendix titled "A Few Basic Principles of Questionnaire Design." These guidelines, however, require some…

A doctoral student's interest in self-culture connections led her to observe an English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) writing class focused on autobiography and read all the students' papers. Autobiographical writing not only gives ESL students a chance to write about what matters to them, but the teacher can capitalize on students' cultural…

States that college chemistry teachers can best assess a curriculum by observing how much reinforcement it provides to the students. Also urges that curricula should offer opportunities to instruct the concrete operational student in formal operational thought. (MLH)

Article described a program that successfully allowed for students' individual differences while stimulating them to learn mathematics. (RK)

Academic performance in three fields of study, engineering, physical sciences and languages, has been analysed by comparing the characteristics of successful students with those of the less successful and those who failed to graduate. (Editor)

Discussed the development of mass media programs and considered the relative success of those programs currently being used. (RK)