A key goal of university bilingual science courses is to enrich undergraduates' bilingual scientific literacy (BSL). However, very little is known about how to foster BSL. This study aimed to provide research evidence to explore the possibility that BSL can be promoted by using bilingual written argumentation when Socrative® is treated as an…

Courses: Public Speaking, Rhetorical Criticism, Persuasion, Political Communication, and Media Communication. Objectives: By the end of this activity, students should be able to: explain the key components of Lloyd Bitzer's rhetorical situation; assess and navigate various conditions affecting various speaking situations; conduct audience analysis…

"Targeting an Audience: A Discussion of Relevant Variables and a Test of Priming" is a teaching activity created to further students' knowledge of persuasive message reception and priming--a persuasion tactic often used in advertising by brands. Explanations of intended courses, learning objectives, and rationale are provided to help…

This experimental research described the effects of RAFT strategy on the writing performance of 10th graders Filipino ESL learners. Forty learners were identified as having nearly the same performance and grouped as experimental and control. The writing tasks used were taken from the actual module used by the Department of Education-Philippines in…

Courses: This activity is designed specifically for public-speaking courses, but it could be used in the general introductory communication course. It also holds potential for use in persuasion, argumentation, or strategic communication courses. Objectives: This activity helps students understand audience as a more complicated concept--one that…

We assessed the influence of genre-specific discourse knowledge and writing goals on the persuasive writing of 4th and 6th grade students with and without learning disabilities (LD). Students were first interviewed about their knowledge of persuasion and persuasive writing. They then wrote a persuasive essay about a controversial topic after…

Courses: Communication Theory, Nonverbal Communication, Public Speaking. Objective: At the end of this activity, students should be able to define key components of expectancy violations theory and apply the theory to analyze violations that occurred in Clint Eastwood's speech at the 2012 Republican National Convention.

On a February morning, Ms. Nelson (all names pseudonyms) was preparing her eleventh-grade class for a new unit with the goal of crafting arguments about the people and issues present in the classic novel "Things Fall Apart" by Chinua Achebe. As, teacher educators Eileen Shanahan and Min-Young Kim were observing in the classroom, it was…

Jim Carroll was concerned that A-level textbooks failed to provide his students with a model of the multi-voicedness that characterises written history. In order to show his students that historians constantly engage in argument as they write, Carroll turned to academic scholarship for models of multi-voiced history. Carroll explains here how he…

Courses: Public Speaking, Business and Professional Communication, Persuasion, or any other skill-based oral communication course. Objectives: Students will practice the development and demonstration of persuasive arguments in this single-class social judgment theory activity to improve their ability to change resistant audience attitudes.

An early foundation in writing offers students a valuable tool for learning, communication, and self-expression. Authored by a panel of experts, the "Teaching Elementary School Students to Be Effective Writers" practice guide presents four recommendations educators can use to help elementary students strengthen their writing skills. The…

Instructional tips help educators carry out recommendations contained in IES Educator's Practice Guides. The tips, based on a practice guide authored by Steve Graham, Alisha Bollinger, Carol Booth Olson, Catherine D'Aoust, Charles MacArthur, Deborah McCutchen, and Natalie Olinghouse, translate these recommendations into actionable approaches that…

Instructional tips help educators carry out recommendations contained in IES Educator's Practice Guides. This summary of evidence describes the research evidence that supports the use of the instructional tips in classrooms, and is based on a practice guide authored by Steve Graham, Alisha Bollinger, Carol Booth Olson, Catherine D'Aoust, Charles…

This study examines the composing process and authorial agency of a college ESL writer as she remediated an argumentative essay into a multimodal digital video. Employing principles of sociosemiotic ethnography, and drawing on the concepts of resemiotization and recontextualization, the study investigated multiple types of data, including an…

In "Cinema Paradiso" (Tomatore, 1988), Salvatore's love of movies came from spending his earlier, young life inside a cinema with the fatherly projectionist Alfredo, now blind and bitter. Alfredo is right. Life is much harder, yes, yet still very much "like in the movies" filled with frustrated actions, performed inside blind…