The intention of this article is to illuminate the developmental coping experiences of children of domestic violence abuse whether observed and/or experienced, and the impact upon school discourse at the elementary school level. It is aimed at providing school professionals with insights into their roles and responsibilities in the area of…

Many instructors are planning to teach their writing classes in the networked computer classroom. Through the use of electronic mail, course listservs, and chat programs, the instructor is offered the opportunity to facilitate a more egalitarian classroom discourse that creates a strong sense of community, not only between students, but also…

A study explored how teenage audiences interpreted brochures intended to discourage them from taking drugs, and more broadly, how readers respond to the visual and verbal messages presented through brochures that aim to inform and persuade. Over 100 brochures and handouts from national and local drug prevention agencies were collected. A subset of…

Whole language, a theory of language instruction that was developed primarily in terms of helping children learn to read, has now been extended to middle- and secondary-school levels. Andragogy, the learning of adults, is a specific theory of adult education, conceived in contradistinction to pedagogy, the teaching of children. When these two…

A study focused attention on the academic personas acquired by two AAVE-oriented (African American Vernacular English) beginning writers as reflected by their speech in informal settings and the style they employed in academic tasks. The study explores the degree to which literacy experiences (home and school) affect students' lives. It was guided…

Sample excerpts from e-mail discussion used in place of the traditional journal in freshman composition illustrate the fascinating issues raised in this new forum. E-mail allows confrontational statements that would not have been made face-to-face and puts in written form a dialogue for analysis by the entire class. A study concentrated on three…

"Questioning the Author" is a particular style of classroom discussion that tries to get young students (fourth and fifth graders) to actively grapple with the ideas they read about in class. It may be distinguished from other reading strategies by the following approaches: (1) it addresses a text as the product of a fallible author; (2)…

Teachers of advanced technical and professional writing need to provide credible ways in which their students can extend the cultural critique the teachers try to engage them in into the world outside the classroom. The nature of resistance in nonacademic discourse can be explored to help both the teachers and students think through the imposing…

This paper states that college radio invokes two ends of a language spectrum -- the clean language authorized for on-air use and the dirty language prohibited from such use, and that the interaction between the two produces "expositional obscenity," a catalytic form of discourse that invites the audience to render a judgment about…

The library can assist in grounding college student writing in reading and inquiry rather than in the mere retrieval of information Fundamental rhetorical goals can best by met by getting students into the library to ask questions, analyze sources, and evaluate claims so they can react to and incorporate the work of other writers into their own…

Rhetorical ethos, or the character of the rhetor as she presents herself in discourse, is vital to the success of any student attempting to enter the universe of academic discourse. According to Aristotle, ethos is demonstrated by showing good sense, good character, and good will. However, in the modern university, with the diversity of…

This guide provides moderators with a sense of what deliberation means, their roles, the dialogue format, and principles and skills they need to keep in mind as they interact with the participants. The purpose of a deliberative dialogue is to bring community members together to discuss a relevant and important issue. The question addressed in this…

Families and communities have enormous resources of knowledge around them that they use in their daily lives. Teachers may overlook or devalue these "funds of knowledge." Students, however, can benefit when teachers draw on community knowledge. Educationists advocate for the integration of subjects so that school curriculum is more…

An ethnographic study examined slang as spoken on campuses of two universities in the United States, one on the West Coast and one in the Midwest. Subjects were students from Intercultural Communication classes, who served as participant/observers and data gatherers. Subjects were instructed to collect slang terms that they heard on campus and,…

Despite substantial research on children's literacy performance outside school, relatively few studies have examined the classroom context of writing development, and even fewer have considered the relationship between general classroom discourse and writing. This paper presents an ecological framework for studying the relation between classroom…