Teachers yearn for better writing skills from students. One way to achieve that goal is through a writing center, whether for basic writers or for the Harvard-bound student. But just because there is a writing center does not mean teachers are necessarily pleased with it. Center directors need time to talk to teachers about the center, make them…

Teamwork skills such as conflict resolution and communication strategies are challenging to teach. The use of stories may help develop these complex skills. Although engagement is generally seen as a key component of learning environments, what constitutes engagement has not been fully explored. The purpose of this study was to examine how…

Effective communication between homes and schools can be essential in helping students experience success in the classroom. Unfortunately, the topic of establishing mechanisms for meaningful parent-teacher communication is often slighted during the preparation of teachers. New teachers entering classrooms need the opportunity to interact and…

A review of research on sex role differentiation in classroom interaction reveals that women are marginalized from education by its content and by the classroom interactional processes. Sex-role stereotyping exists in curriculum materials at all educational levels, with textbooks more likely to portray boys in active roles and girls in passive…

Communication is essential in each and every sphere of life, and is considered the fundamental social process because human beings interact with each other through communication in social settings. Classrooms have their own social settings in which teachers and students interact. During interaction, the main purpose of the teacher is to…

Online collaborative learning has typically been studied within the context of learning communities. Little is known about the potential influence of students' personalities on online communication, group interaction, and task engagement among members of a learning community. This study used a mixed-method, triangulation design, involving the…

Cued Speech (CS) is a tool used to make spoken languages visible. While it uses the hands to communicate information visually, it is not a form of sign language. Signed languages are languages in their own right and use the hands, body, and face to present complete concepts rather than words. They have their own grammar systems and vocabularies.…

The aim of this study was to examine the effects of sound-field amplification intervention on the acquisition of specific educational goals for children in mainstream cross-cultural classrooms. Twelve classes of Year 2 children participated in the project. For classes 1 to 8, the listening environments were alternated between amplified and…

The Veterans Health Administration (VA) provides a case study for linking performance measurement, information technology, and aligned research efforts to facilitate quality improvement in a large, complex health system. Dialogue between clinical researchers and VA leaders occurs through structured activities (e.g., the Quality Enhancement…

The public has developed a powerful voice over the past two decades, calling for involvement in school decision making and creating the conditions for schools to pay attention to engaging the public in more meaningful ways. Lessons for all schools can be learned from charter school efforts to engage their public effectively. This article presents…

This article is the second part of a report on research that examined immersion language teachers' strategies to modify their speech in order to maintain use of the target language. As described in the first part in "Babel," Volume 40, Number 2 (Veque, 2005), this classroom-based research, undertaken at Methodist Ladies College (MLC) in…

This study examines interventions designed to improve communication between individuals who take care of children with ADHD. A teacher rating of 6,171 elementary school children identifies 1,573 children with ADHD or with high risk for ADHD. Parent interviews and information from teachers are collected on 243 children who are randomized into…

Interactive discourse structuring is used to guide listeners through on-going speech and has been shown to have a positive effect on lecture comprehension, particularly in L2 settings. As mobility increases in the academic world, there are more opportunities for lecture events characterized not only by linguistic/cultural diversity, but also by…

This article describes a teacher-as-researcher project conducted by Karen Shelton (second author), a hard-working middle school teacher. This project focused on using written conversation as an instructional strategy to integrate reading, writing, and social studies. The authors begin with a classroom vignette to describe how William Bintz (first…

Language loss is a concern for the Cherokee Nation in northeastern Oklahoma. As part of language revitalisation efforts, in 2001 Cherokee Nation opened the Cherokee Immersion Preschool in which teachers use only Cherokee throughout the day with their monolingual English-speaking students. Based on a study of the Immersion Preschool that spanned…