Research has established important links between student sense of belonging in the classroom and levels of academic engagement, motivation, and persistence (e.g., Jang et al., 2016; Reeve, 2012) yet more work is needed to identify specific teacher communication tactics and strategies that can foster sense of belonging and increased engagement.…

Communication strategies define audience-specific behavioral goals, identify priority cognitive and affective communication objectives necessary to achieving those goals, and propose specific communication tactics meant to increase the likelihood of achieving those objectives. Unfortunately, it appears that few scientific organizations have…

Purpose: Breakout rooms are commonly used by lecturers as a means to achieve collaborative learning in online lessons. Although breakout rooms can be effective at encouraging student engagement, interaction and learning, many students dislike being forced to interact with peers, and for some students, it can lead to feelings of anxiety and stress.…

By deepening students' discussion skills, schools can play a key role in bridging communication divides in our society. As the nation has become increasingly politically polarized, how can educators teach constructive dialogue in the classroom? The authors--education experts and researchers--offer seven strategies for helping students engage in…

The focus of this article is on deafblind people who are or have been involved with deaf signing communities and, when vision changes, transition to tactile reception of sign language. This brings about a disconnection with the signing community, exploration of (other) possibilities, and seeking or creating deaf blind spaces. In the United States,…

Variation in how frequently caregivers engage with their children is associated with variation in children's later language outcomes. One explanation for this link is that caregivers use both verbal behaviors, such as labels, and non-verbal behaviors, such as gestures, to help children establish reference to objects or events in the world.…

Drawing on Freire's Engaged Pedagogy as a theoretical framework, I investigated the manifestation of dialogical relationships between faculty and students in fully asynchronous online courses. Employing a post-intentional phenomenological methodology, I examined how students and faculty held varying expectations for relationships in asynchronous…

This paper advocates for using critical intercultural and participatory pedagogy as the basis for an introductory communication course. Communication programs are often concerned with the basics -- teaching students to communicate effectively through writing and speaking. Yet the methods for teaching these two classic competencies diverge widely,…

In Western societies, school pedagogies tend to be biased in favour of talk and emphasise the links between talking, thinking and learning. Thus talk is often privileged over silence as the basis for learning activities in classrooms, sustained by theories of learning which afford priority to talk. Such cultural bias towards talk means that by…

Background: Children with Down syndrome have speech and language difficulties that are disproportionate to their overall intellectual ability and relative strengths in the use of gesture. Shared book reading between parents and their children provides an effective context in which language development can be facilitated. However, children with…

Purpose: The use of three-dimensional virtual worlds (3DVWs) is increasingly becoming a common practice in language education to provide digital learning environments for second-language (L2) communicative classes. This study aimed to identify the key factors underlying communication in 3DVWs that can improve the communication skills of L2…

Background: Parkinson's disease (PD) can affect social interaction and communication as well as motor and cognitive processes. Speech is affected in PD, as is the control of voluntary eye movements which are thought to play an important role in 'turn taking' in conversation. Aims: This study aimed to measure eye movements during spoken…

Institutions are increasingly supplementing their traditional class formats with hybrid approaches that mix in-person, remote synchronous, and remote asynchronous delivery methods. Even when the student population expects and appreciates more flexibility in scheduling, students still struggle with technology-enhanced instruction when course design…

Despite decades of research and thousands of peer-reviewed articles on nonverbal communication written by a worldwide community of academics, a number of people in position of power, including security, justice and legal practitioners have embraced "body language" pseudoscience. This autoethnography aims to offer an otherwise…

Extensive research has been conducted to investigate the role of emojis in interpretation, impression, perceptions, personality and relationship building. However, in the higher education sector, few studies have examined how emojis influence the learning motivation and performance of students. Using the theories of source credibility and stimulus…