This is a compilation of reports on international literacy research. The report includes 3 separate reports on France, United Kingdom and Brazil. In the first report, research correspondent Jacques Fijalkow presents research into variations of reading motivation related to students' socioeconomic status (SES), age, and gender. Three of these…

The authors advocate that a high-quality curriculum is an important first step toward good teaching and successful learning. Good curriculum comes from knowing what students can do, can almost do, and need to learn how to do as readers, writers, and language users. In this book, the authors combine their experience and learning in literacy…

This English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) curriculum was developed in 1994 at Garden City Community College in Kansas. The curriculum is designed to meet the needs of the Adult Learning Center students. Materials were developed for each level of college and adult education. The materials focus on six levels of ESL and include expected learner…

This project investigated the possible causes of and solutions to the reticence of many Japanese students attending General English courses at the University of Edinburgh Institute for Applied Language Studies (Scotland). It was suspected that students' reticence affected their rate of learning and personal improvement as well as the general…

This language arts unit of study for high ability learners in grades 5-6 highlights persuasion in oral and written form, focusing especially on oral communication. Emphasis is placed on providing evidence for opinions. Students must cite passages from literature to defend their points of view in discussion as well as in written arguments.…

For the K-3 teacher, this book presents hundreds of ready-to-use individual and group activities for developing reading, writing, listening, and speaking skills, all correlated with other curriculum areas and organized into nine monthly sections. The book includes teaching strategies, individual and group games, activity sheets, quizzes, writing…

Intended to provide practical information pertaining to methods and techniques for speech elicitation and production, the monograph offers specific methods and techniques to elicit spontaneous speech in bilingual students. Chapter 1, "Traditional Methodologies for Language Production and Recording," presents an overview of studies using…

More effective reading, writing, and communication courseware can be promoted through clearer guidelines in courseware development, stronger incentives for courseware developers, and greater motivation for teachers to seek out and use the courseware. In reading and writing, software guidelines must reflect traditional instructional objectives--or…

The product of a comprehensive project aimed at identifying reading, writing, and communication courseware needs, this report first discusses the benefits of computer assisted instruction and obstacles to its implementation in the communications area. It then describes procedures used to gather information and presents a detailed review of the…

Noting that humans are educated more by than about the mass media, this paper argues that modern society has produced an informal (mediated) ethics curriculum which may be more powerful than the formal (institutionally educational) curriculum developed by academics and administrators. It first examines the informal curriculum, listing statistics…

Grade inflation is a serious problem in multisectioned speech communication courses, and one of its principal causes is a desire for positive student evaluations and high enrollments on the part of professors and economically insecure departments (who need the funding generated by high enrollments). Positive student evaluations have been found to…

A study examined the impact of a simulated aging experience on nursing staff perceptions of job satisfaction and job performance. It was hypothesized that nurses and nurse aides who participated in the simulated aging experience would be more satisfied with their jobs and would receive fewer complaints from residents than those who did not…

In order to help teachers of business communication look for new and innovative ways to improve their teaching, this book offers a "how to" approach to various topics in business communication. The ideas expressed in this book are a collaboration of 32 members of The Association for Business Communication who served on the Teaching…

To examine the developmental process of communication competence and the resulting relationship between competence and college success, a longitudinal study of college students was undertaken. In this study, pertinent background factors and measures of communication skills were collected on the same population over the course of a student's…

To provide students with a rhetorical stance and motivation, a college freshman composition class adopted the ideas of the "radical" literacy educator, Paulo Freire, who believes that literacy should allow students and teachers to become truly conscious of the world. Class projects were initiated in which the students had as much…