A communication project in a technical writing course demonstrated the importance of communication skills in a profession as it developed the students' own speech and writing skills. After listing what they believed were the major problems in business communication, students compared their responses with instances submitted by local business…

While gathering the 1980 census, the U.S. Census Bureau tried several methods of improving its training of census interviewers. This paper covers three general areas of that experiment. First, it reviews bureau efforts to improve verbatim training and presents selected results from an alternative training experiment conducted in the 1980 census.…

One promising alternative to the traditional workshop format of inservice teacher education is to bring researchers and teachers more closely together, in classrooms, where the two groups can work as a team addressing those needs the teachers have defined. A teacher and a researcher collaborated in a 3-month effort to improve the way the teacher…

A contrastive study of Japanese and American English sought to explore how speakers agree and disagree in the two languages. Japanese-speaking college students and American English-speaking teachers of English as a foreign language were informally questioned about food preferences, with their comments surreptitiously recorded for analysis. Results…

Second language educators need to examine in greater depth the learning processes of young children in order to provide them with the kind of teaching they need in order to really learn. This means searching other fields to learn as much as possible about: questioning strategies and the development of critical thinking skills; hemispheric…

Using a case study approach, this study focuses on a physical science teacher's method of pacing instruction and the use of target students. This report includes an examination of: (1) the teacher's perceptions of the target students in the science class; (2) possible reasons for certain students being target students; and (3) types of questions…

Developed at Tarrant County Junior College (TCJC) Northeast Campus (Texas), this paper presents and discusses materials and activities for teaching foreign language conversation classes. Introductory comments describe TCJC's Department of Foreign Languages, new curricular emphases on the development of oral skills, the nature of the college's…

The technique individuals use to narrow the possible responses in "solicits" (demands, requests, or questions requiring a response) in and outside the classroom often helps to avoid miscommunication and can be a useful tool for classroom teachers. A narrowing exercise was completed by 35 classes of native English and English as a second language…

A study examined the types of questions teachers asked and the types of responses they elicited from prestory and poststory portions of reading comprehension lessons. The Question Response Interaction instrument was used to gather data from teachers and their inner city third, fourth, and sixth grade students in both high and low reading groups.…

This module, one in a series of performance-based teacher education learning packages, focuses on a specific skill that vocational educators need to be successful in the area of instructional execution. The purpose of the module is to give the teacher understanding of the characteristics of and techniques involved in effective oral questioning and…

This report describes the interactive structure and questioning patterns used by 20 preservice teachers using Smith's AUTHOR system to create interactive videodisc modules on earth science topics. Results indicate three forms of questioning were used, although multiple-choice questions were used two-thirds of the time. Interaction was defined in…

This paper describes four problems that may confront researchers interested in capturing and describing participant perspectives when the participants of interest are young children in early childhood education settings. Problems were identified with interview data collected in three studies conducted in separate preschool and kindergarten…

A study was conducted to determine the patterns of questioning behaviors exhibited by four preservice and four inservice teachers in an inner-city elementary school. Specifically, the study examined the types of questions teachers asked, the types of responses given by students, the wait-time between questions that teachers provided for high- and…

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 21 titles deal with a variety of topics, including the following: (1) creativity as a mediating variable in inferential reading comprehension; (2) teacher questioning and student response interaction during portions of reading…

The creative process of teaching is discussed. Teachers are artists because they employ creativity when they formulate, select, and organize their ideas into a medium which is called a lesson. This medium, in turn, is the means which provides a learning experience for others. There are eight articles. In the first article, "What is a Lesson?"…