Even though science teachers and other stakeholders all want students to be instructed in the most effective way possible, discussions about what that way might be are seldom productive. What the author has found in these conversations is that, despite a number of shared goals for student learning that participants bring to the table and despite…

For the past few years the authors have worked in urban public elementary schools to implement literacy instruction that emphasizes higher-level reading, writing, and thinking, while also maintaining instructional focus on the skills of decoding, word recognition, and fluency. Their efforts have involved implementing an initiative called In2Books.…

In this article, two teacher educators examine two curriculum moments they have experienced, one with children and the other with pre-service teachers. They find possibilities for shifts in their understandings and insights into their own identity making and that of students. Drawing upon Connelly and Clandinin's (1992) notion of teachers as…

The research described in this paper is part of a wider exploration of organisational learning and some of the social-psychological mechanisms which underlie the individual-organisation learning relationship. Adopting a grounded theory approach, qualitative data were obtained during email interviews with 15 foundation degree students concerning…

This study reports the perceptions of students and lecturers on the effectiveness of the foreign language instruction in relation to students' academic needs in an English-medium university in Turkey. The theoretical framework of the study draws upon a discourse community (DC) perspective, which considers writing as a socio-cultural practice and…

Six criteria for the existence of a discourse community are given, and the genre of the reprint request (RR) is discussed in terms of the discourse communities using it. (Author/LMO)

The current literacy crisis, which has spawned numerous studies and generated vigorous debate, is less about decreasing literacy and ability among the North American and worldwide population than it is about who controls literacy, how literacy is used, and who can use literacy. Most who claim there is a literacy crisis are reacting to the…

Employs Jurgen Habermas' communicative action theory and concept of a lifeworld, alongside composition theory's use of community, to examine the effectiveness of guilt as a rhetorical strategy in two national environmental publications. Suggests that environmental groups should not rely on guilt as a rhetorical strategy because, outside their…

Argues that rhetorical theory needs to keep alive competing concepts of discourse communities, so that alternatives exist in the description and analysis of discourse practices. Proposes distinguishing between two kinds of discourse communities--the local and the global--so that rhetorical analysis can achieve the necessary critical edge,…

Suggests that educators help students see their literacies as grounded in situation and community. Argues that high schools should provide a multitude of situational contexts for literacy-learning experiences beyond the general academic community. Draws on genre theory to offer five general suggestions for improving the teaching and learning of…

Dannels (2001) has advocated Communication in the Disciplines (CID) as a model for Communication Across the Curriculum (CXC) teaching and scholarship. Turning attention toward CID work requires an alternative way of thinking and planning, and invites an expanded, discipline-specific agenda for CXC scholarship. The purpose of this study was to…

This review discusses the concept of the two-year college as a separate discourse community within the larger discourse community of higher education. The article offers a complete definition and description of discourse communities and discusses a new understanding of scholarship in terms of the scholarship of teaching. The review argues that…

Research articles (RAs) have been recognized as a distinct genre in the English-using discourse community because of their unique writing conventions. Despite the great number of studies on the analysis of the textual or phrasal aspects of abstracts of RAs, few have been transformed into actual teaching materials for EFL graduate students. The…

This autobiographical case study of two scientists involved in earlier studies documents a profile of each scientist. These profiles were used to develop semi-structured interview protocols and email surveys for each scientist. The central issues of these data collections were whether these modern, evaluativist scientists believe that the…

Increasing the number of Aboriginal students graduating from university is a goal of many Canadian universities. Realizing this goal may present challenges to the orientation and methodology of university curricula that have been developed without consideration of the traditional epistemologies of Aboriginal peoples. In this article, three…