Elaborates on the argument that listening is a neglected observational skill and provides suggestions for skill development. (PEB)

This is an imaginary first-person account of a 15-year-old Portuguese student who has spent a year and a half in an American high school. While conceding that the language barrier did prove difficult for him at first, the student says that language was not the overwhelming problem he expected it to be. He proceeds to explain six features of life…

Describes classroom language as used in teaching an FL, recognizing it as belonging to an artificial rather than a real-life situation; this fact must be kept in mind and "the game played" in the classroom. Examples are given. (IFS/WGA)

These two related papers provide information on teacher attitudes toward black dialect use in the classroom and the measurement of such attitudes. The first paper reports on data from 176 administrators, counselors, teachers, and student teachers, revealing significant relationships between a teacher's definition of black dialect, attitudes toward…

The comments focus on two topical themes and two aspects of research in the papers in this volume of the "Language and Ethnography" series dealing with ethnography and education. The first part deals with continuity and discontinuity in children's home and school lives. Borrowing from the field of second language learning, the point is made that…

Educators have relied on the work of Jean Piaget for many years in an effort to understand the intellectual capabilities of children and adolescents. Piaget, however, did not consider instruction and school experiences to be factors that influenced children's conceptual development. The Soviet psychologist, Lev Vygotsky, proposed the opposite:…

This series, designed for use in inservice teacher workshops, addresses the question, "How do children and teachers use language to get things done?" The transcribed classroom discourse presented and discussed in each volume illustrates functional language in a real context based on the videotaping of undoctored classroom events from…

An analysis is presented of students' attitudes in a leadership training program and the relationships between those attitudes. Student attitudes toward the program facilitator as a person affected their attitudes toward that person as a teacher and role model, also affecting the student's sense of belonging in the group. Student's acceptance of…

This paper stresses the idea that teacher communication in the classroom affects the self-concept of students. It begins by reviewing the process of communication and the effect of self-concept on that process by providing and discussing an intrapersonal communication process model. It then provides instructor guidelines for self-concept…

Dynamics of discussion in the classroom are analyzed based on data from 64 classrooms in Georgia, Alabama, and Florida. Among the discourse problems considered are the separation of answers from questions, the relationship between the presupposition of an utterance and the speaker/hearer assumptions, and the relationship between utterance form and…

The material in this handbook was developed with the idea of stimulating (presumably adult) students to ask questions in a spontaneous manner. Through these questions, the students elicit the newspaper story from the teacher, who arouses their interest by divulging one leading fact. Fifteen exemplary newspaper stories are summarized to initiate…

BASED IN PART ON A SKINNERIAN LEARNING ORIENTATION, 4 DIMENSIONS OF THE TEACHER'S BEHAVIOR ARE HYPOTHESIZED AS IMPORTANT IN MEDIATING CLASSROOM LEARNING--(1) INFORMATION GIVING (IG), (2) RESPONSE ELICITATION (RE), (3) FEEDBACK (F), AND (4) TEACHER CONTROL (TC). FROM 34 TO 42 5-MINUTE OBSERVATIONS WERE OBTAINED FOR EACH OF THE 4 TEACHERS IN A…

This review of the literature related to research on oral communication in the classroom pursues two issues: the types of oral contributions students make and whether those types are related to school achievement. In considering research on oral communication in classrooms, the paper looks at information that considers whether the communication…

To determine whether increased teacher use of student ideas would produce increased verbal initiation, an experiment was conducted with 16 second grade teachers and their classes. First, a series of observations were made under normal class conditions to determine the usual percentages of teacher use of student ideas and student initiation. Then,…