This project combines interdisciplinary conversations within the field of communication to examine environmental meaning systems and communication practices in the context of forest environmental education. Due to concerns over children's environmental alienation, there has been a continued push toward place-based environmental education. One such…

Variations in group co-construction of knowledge and the extent to which participants engaged in negotiating meaning were directly related to instruction. The authors examined social interaction resulting from controlled variation in instruction using a counter-balanced design in two professional development courses for teachers. Both courses were…

This paper uses Conversation Analysis to investigate the ways in which participants in an online asynchronous postgraduate reading group managed and negotiated their contributions within the discussion. Using the conversation analytic concerns with sequential organisation, adjacency pairs and topicality, this article shows the analytic insights…

There has been an increasing interest in the use of computer-mediated communication (CMC) in problem-based learning. One line of research has been to introduce synchronous, or simultaneous, communication attempting to create text-based digital real-time interaction. Compared with face-to-face (F2F) communication, CMC may be a poorer medium…

Discusses assignments in discourse analysis and students' recurring methodological errors. (PD)

Examines fundamental rhetorical constructs that students and business professionals should consider when analyzing textual and financial information contained in corporations' annual reports. Discusses how students in business communication classes evaluate the rhetorical effectiveness of specific annual reports, as well as the ethics associated…

These five papers reflect a single project--discourse analysis in the curriculum. The first paper, "The Small Group Course as a Setting for Naturalistic Research" (Charles Petrie and Charles Laufersweiler), describes the teaching process of integrating both a graduate and an undergraduate class from which the other four papers describe resulting…

Suitable methods can be developed and instructional devices can be designed for the teaching of argumentation analysis to students of varying interests, ages, and capacities. Until 1950, the study of argumentation in the Netherlands was either purely practical or a continuation of the classic logic and rhetoric traditions. A number of new research…

Explores the nature of explanations used by 20 middle school science teachers utilizing the constant comparative analysis method in analyzing transcripts of classroom discourse. Discusses a subsuming categorical framework for the 10 types of explanations generated, along with examples of each type, namely: analogical, anthropomorphic, functional,…

Kenneth Burke's concepts of identification, the five terms of dramatism, and strategic uses of ambiguity can be successfully taught to undergraduates if appropriate and familiar examples are used. Print and electronic advertising offer the instructor an up-to-date, familiar, and abundant source of classroom examples. Market segmentation models…

This study examined how modes of organizing conversation determine the type of knowledge conveyed to preschool and kindergarten children. Approximately 150 audiotaped conversations from 23 classes of students of different age levels from 2 to 6 years were analyzed. Children's spontaneous speaking turns or answers to teachers' questions were…

The purpose of this article is to demonstrate how the method of meaning implication discourse analysis can be applied in the context of online collaborative reflective practice of student teachers. The method was developed to identify knowledge building in networked contexts. It derives from the model of meaning implication developed by Piaget,…

Observations of 90 lessons reveal the limitations of the whole-class discussion, the dominant teaching method in elementary and secondary schools. In addition to producing a low percentage of student involvement, rarely more than 50%, teachers' questions and answer techniques do not usually stimulate critical thinking. Besides most often asking…

Investigators wrote proposals for research on the nature and learning of communicative processes in the elementary classroom. Three questions were addressed: (1) What is the nature of communication in the classroom? (2) How do students acquire the rules of classroom discourse? (3) What is the effect of inadequate learning of classroom discourse…

This paper presents and analyzes two examples of classroom discourse which belong to the genre of "talk about texts." Both are extracts from discussions between a small group of primary school students and their teacher (in England) on the topic of short texts of narrative fiction which they have just read together during the…