Student teaching in New York City on September 11, 2001, forced the author to scrap her carefully planned lessons. Instead, she designed a unit to address the urgent needs of the ninth graders in her care. In this article, the author describes the poetry unit she designed to help students deal with the grieving process and allow them a way to talk…

In this article, the author relates her experiences teaching a history course titled "Introduction to the Modern World." She relates how some of her colleagues immediately began providing her with unsolicited warnings regarding the difficulty of engaging students in world history and the impossibility of covering "500 years of the whole world" in…

Assignments that combine case studies with applied research can work for presentations as well as for written reports. One such assignment that has proven to be successful both in the author's classes and later in the students' professional lives is based on (1) incorporating banking concepts and encouraging their use in presentations; (2)…

Research with ESL students studying at North American universities has indicated that Chinese students have difficulties in understanding academic lectures, taking notes, writing assignments, and giving presentations although they have obtained high TOEFL scores. The study investigates their English academic listening challenges as reported by…

Richard Gambino's "Blood of My Blood" was of help to a writing instructor coming to terms with the role that her Italian ethnicity played in her life and education. Gambino's understanding of the inner tensions experienced by an individual who must negotiate between two cultures has helped the instructor in teaching working-class and…

Demonstrating that reading can and should be part of every curricular area, this book provides a wide selection of activities developed for 39 books selected on the basis of their interest level and application to the needs of reluctant readers in grades 2 through 5. The first part of the book presents guidelines for motivating students and…

This paper argues for the inclusion of computer-based writing assignments in literature and writing courses, citing as objectives for students the fostering of collaboration; the cultivation of scholarly ideals; and the exploration of issues, ideas, and literature from varying perspectives. It explains how the instructor developed assignments…

The administrative communications course at Bloomsburg University has dual goals: to improve written and oral communication skills and to improve global business communication skills. Thus an opportunity exists to create projects that require graduate students to learn about other countries and other peoples. A project--writing a business plan for…

Writing and discussion are excellent ways for students to master content, develop analytical abilities, and become active and collaborative learners. The Writing Across the Curriculum movement offers a theoretical framework for the use of writing in instruction, maintaining that writing skills are primarily thinking skills, that writing is a…

This instructional resource presents ways in which teachers participating in a lesson bank exchange program for an ongoing research project have applied J. A. Banks' typology of ethnic identity development and related curriculum goals to literacy instruction. Banks' definitions of the stages of development and the curriculum goals for each stage…

Arguing that whenever new technology is adopted, instructors should always consider the purpose of promoting study. This Digest offers suggestions about using the computer as a study and learning aid. The Digest first discusses independent study, collaborative study, and interdisciplinary work with the help of the computer. The Digest then…

A study examined the effects of coauthoring, also referred to as collaborative writing, on student learning. Subjects were 24 students in a ninth-grade English class. Data were collected over the first 9-week quarter of the year. Eight collaborative writing triads were formed with a primary criteria in establishing heterogeneous groups in gender,…

These 1989-1996 issues of "Alabama English" contain articles that address current theory and practice in the teaching of reading, writing, and literature at any grade level. The first two issues focus specifically on the teaching of writing. The third issue is a special issue featuring Alabama authors, while the fourth issue presents…

It is difficult for a student to understand small group communication and the role communication plays in making an experience a positive or negative one until he or she is actually involved in small group experience. Such goes the argument for experiential learning in the classroom. By incorporating a service-learning component into the…

Just as the spoken word, virtual discourse in the listserv-assisted composition class unites the writer and the audience into a group. On-line writing takes the form of dialogue, and the reading of the on-line text does not shatter the audience but gathers them into collectivity. Since writing on the listserv is less rule-governed, students are…