In order to fill in the research gap related to the theory and practice of critical literacy in Taiwan, this article describes an English Conversation activity offered during the 2005 spring semester at a university in southern Taiwan. The article uses a critical instructional model to analyze students' team dialogues as responses to a…

In this article, the authors present parent-educator conversations, which were selected to illustrate common communication patterns and provide links to some of the Division for Early Childhood of the Council for Exceptional Children's recommended practices for communicating and collaborating with parents. Using conversation analysis, researchers…

Teachers and students can use color to identify different types of writing. This article describes using color to highlight annotations, identity, topic sentences, thoughts and emotions, logical arguments, advertising and selling, showing and telling, and looking and seeing. Includes sample assignments for identifying emotional content, topic…

Ethical issues make writing assignments more than academic exercises, especially when the ethical issues involve the writing itself. Such issues arise in every aim and mode of discourse and in every stage of the writing process, from choosing a topic to editing the final draft. Informative discourse must be factual and comprehensive, and have…

This article elaborates a model for understanding pedagogy in online educational forums. The model identifies four key components. Intellectual engagement describes the foreground cognitive processes of collaborative learning. Communication processes operating in the background accumulate an ever richer store of shared understandings that enable…

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…