This study examined teaching assistant's immediacy in lecture/laboratory and self-contained classes. Two hundred fifty-six students responded to instruments measuring teachers' immediacy behavior frequency, perceptions of instruction quality, and cognitive learning. No significant difference was identified when comparing lecture/laboratory and…

Kenneth Burke is typically regarded as the single most significant figure in 20th-century rhetorical studies. Undergraduate textbooks in rhetorical criticism, rhetorical theory, and communication theory typically include coverage of Burke's theory of dramatism. In this article, the author describes a classroom activity dubbed "Burke Bingo" that…

Personal narratives can be useful epistemological tools or qualitative study methods that promote alternative ways of knowing in the classroom. Promoting interactive and meaningful classroom experiences involves motivating students in creative and innovative ways. In this essay, the authors discuss the use of personal narration as a pedagogical…

This article discusses the use of role-play as an effective strategy for enhancing the quality of multicultural curricula in the English as a second language (ESL) classroom. The author critiques the use of the simplistic additive approach to multicultural instruction and furthers the work of those theorists who advocate the use of the more…

As the United States strives to achieve energy independence, students need to be literate about energy and environmental issues. In this article, the authors present a lesson about the nation's electricity resources that is part 1 of a free, comprehensive unit on coal and energy that is available online (http://tinyurl.com/coalenergyunit). The…

This article discusses a unit of work, developed by this author, that encouraged students to "express themselves" by using language to make a difference (i.e., to protest an issue of particular concern.) While the culminating task for this unit was a spoken task requiring students to reflect upon what they had done and how successful…

The author was keen to look at advertising with her online classes, both in Business Enterprise (looking at how businesses operate, target marketing, language used in business etc) and in Creative Writing as she felt that this was a topic which worked in both areas and was an important one due to the huge impact and the big intrusion that…

Although many of us would like to get beyond lecturing, we often lack concrete strategies for doing so, particularly in our larger classes. This paper suggests one such strategy for creating a discussion-based course. The success of such a course is predicated on students reading and thinking about the course material (receiving "first exposure")…

The identification and integration of reusable and customizable CSCL (Computer Supported Collaborative Learning) may benefit from the capture of best practices in collaborative learning structuring. The authors have proposed CLFPs (Collaborative Learning Flow Patterns) as a way of collecting these best practices. To facilitate the process of CLFPs…