Providing high-quality student services to students enrolled in distance education programs is a critical link to the academic success of this growing student population. (Contains 7 figures.)

In this study, the oral conversations of primary students were examined in an effort to understand how student participation and role in discourse community affects their learning. Discourse analysis provided both an analytical framework for analysing student and teacher talk and a definition of discourse communities. The concept of discourse…

This article reports on doctoral research which explored the meaning and role of information literacy among a specific group of workers--firefighters. An alternative concept of information literacy and a broader definition of information literate people are introduced. The article suggests that librarians are currently bound by an educational…

The use of English as an international language of science (EILS) is by now well documented; depending on one's orientation, English may be seen as a neutral "lingua franca" or it may be seen more insidiously as a dominating and overpowering force. This paper explores these co-existing roles of EILS through various perspectives. It begins by…

Advocates of computer-mediated instruction have pointed to the potential of online teaching for facilitating students' active learning behavior. Small-group online discussion can have a role in meaningful student interaction. Yet, what is less known are the conditions under which students actually engage in interaction in online discussion groups…

This article examines the experiences of advanced students and of graduates in a nontraditional MA in professional writing program to discover how faculty may assure student success in professional writing occupations. The study investigates the knowledge domains and habits of mind that foster student success in writing. The research is the…

Considerable research has now been undertaken into the development of different approaches to exploiting language corpora for pedagogic purposes in the context of ESP. The question of how language corpora might be utilized by students beyond the immediate language-teaching context is, however, one as yet seldom addressed in the literature. This…

Building on the framework of Peters and Armstrong's (1998) three Types of Teaching/Learning, this article explores the use of dialogue to foster a collaborative and democratic learning experience. There are three conditions under which dialogue can be facilitated as a part of the collaborative learning experience: (a) intent, (b) a dialogical…

This paper develops a rhetorically centered model of community literacy in the theoretical and practical context of local publics--those spaces where ordinary people develop public voices to engage in intercultural inquiry and deliberation. Drawing on fifteen years of action research in the Community Literacy Center and beyond, the authors…

The study explores students' use of language in the process of making sense of genetics concepts. It aims to analyze primary and secondary discourses, and examine the relationship between social practices and discourses. Sixth-grade students were interviewed before and during four weeks instruction on genetics. General trends were detected…

Computer mediated conferencing (CMC) has been widely viewed as a valuable forum for providing opportunities for interaction among learners in a distance education setting. Interaction in distance contexts; however, is not well understood, and it has been argued that social markers are cued in online communications and that gender influences…

Richard Gambino's "Blood of My Blood" was of help to a writing instructor coming to terms with the role that her Italian ethnicity played in her life and education. Gambino's understanding of the inner tensions experienced by an individual who must negotiate between two cultures has helped the instructor in teaching working-class and…

A study examined from a feminist poststructuralist perspective the discourses available in a classroom using a critical pedagogy, based on a belief that teaches need to make it possible for their students to question the social world constructed in texts. The teacher of an Australian junior primary classroom (with students age five to eight) took…

The intercollegiate forensics community appears less receptive to women than it is to men. Women report a variety of positive and negative gender-based experiences in intercollegiate forensics. Positive experiences tend to include women into the intercollegiate forensics community or to allow women to include others in the community. Negative…

Generally speaking English department faculty respond very differently when reading freshman writing than when reading most other kinds of writing. Mina Shaughnessy has pointed out that "ordinary readers" try to understand what they are reading, but the writing teacher, "like a lawyer examining a client's document for all possible ambiguities and…