This guide describes activities used by language teachers in developing students' oral communication skills. Activities are presented for instruction in English as a Second Language as well as other second languages. Ideas are organized in 4 parts, with 14 subsections: fluency (conversation, fluency and interaction, group work, dialogues and role…

This practicum was designed to increase the quality of service in five day care centers in a metropolitan Florida county, as evidenced by increases in the Early Childhood Environmental Rating Scale (ECERS) scores of early childhood teacher participants. A 10-week teacher education program for 5 early childhood teachers was developed around Marilyn…

This practicum was designed to address the problem of middle school students reacting to and handling conflict situations with violent behavior in an urban environment. These responses affected the well-being and safety of all middle school students at the school. The major goal was for middle school students to increase their awareness of…

This instructional guide for Sesotho (spoken in several areas of Africa by about 6 million people) is designed for the training of Peace Corps volunteers in Africa. The first two chapters outline Sesotho phonology (phonetics, articulation, and speech sounds and patterns not present in English) and tone and length, grammatical structure (class and…

Six conference papers are presented in this volume. They include: "Living Civilization: a Theoretical Model for Using Task-Based Activities To Combine the Teaching of Language and Culture" (Sharon Gwinn Scinicariello); "Foreign Language Reading versus Understanding: Using Think-Aloud Protocols To Identify L2 Reading Problems"…

A study analyzed electronic-mail requests from college students (n=34 native speakers of English/NSs, 65 non-native speakers/NNSs) to faculty, randomly gathered over the period of a year. The requests were analyzed for the affective response they produced both on the faculty recipient and on a non-recipient faculty member, and for linguistic forms…

This paper examines problems faced by visually-impaired secondary pupils in gaining access to information in print. The ever-increasing volume of information available inundates the sighted and is largely inaccessible in print format to the visually impaired. Important issues of availability for the visually impaired include whether information is…

Discourse strategies used by status-unequal interlocutors expressing disagreement are discussed. The paper focuses on the influence of role relationships on semantic formulas. A comparative study of discourse strategies used by native speakers of Turkish and North American English in the same speech event is also reported. Data were gathered from…

Based on the recognition that nearly all children will experience the direct or indirect effects of divorce through their relatives or friends, and that many children do not openly share their feelings, this book is a guide to help adults assist children from preschool to grade 3 in understanding and dealing with the emotions arising from the…

This guide offers strategies for working with students with autism in the areas of academic instruction, organization and time management, and social skills. The importance of considering the autistic student's use of language and thinking style is stressed. Chapter 1, "Who Are Higher Functioning Young Adults with Autism?" (Ann Fullerton),…

A discussion of the role of developmental psycholinguistics in second language instruction begins by examining the nature of communicative intentions, their classification, and their role in the language classroom, drawing parallels between first language acquisition and second language learning. Stages in the progression from single words to…

This book presents an interdisciplinary chronological perspective on the history of children considered exceptional and how services to them have evolved over time. It begins by placing the origins of special education in historical context from Aristotle through the Enlightenment and beyond. Subsequent chapters consider individual conditions…

A Pima County (Arizona) adult workplace education program in English as a Second Language (ESL) is outlined. Salient elements in program design, student recruitment and program marketing, student assessment, instructional methods, and program evaluation are noted, and the topical content of the ESL curriculum is charted. Tasks/competencies and…

The culmination of work by the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development's (ASCD) Urban Middle Grades Network, a special Advisory Panel on Improving Student Achievement, and the Improving Student Achievement Research Panel, this book proposes a repertoire of tools for educators meeting the needs of an increasingly diverse student…

A study investigated how repetition was used in the telling of personal narratives to create emotional involvement on the part of listeners, to evaluate stories, to prevent listeners from asking questions and from losing the story's focus, and to justify narrating that particular story in a cross-cultural setting. It was assumed that narrators…