Recommends that writing teachers integrate word processing and revision strategies when teaching how to diagnose and correct structural writing problems. Presents exercises employing these methods in a first-year English composition course. Stresses the computer's ability to help students evaluate their writing, encouraging eventual independent…

Uses oral theory to examine the relationship between cognition and orality. Analyzes how the electronic media mimic the kind of interaction between speaker and audience characteristic of preliterate cultures. Argues that Ronald Reagan's effectiveness on television stems from his use of rhetorical structures characteristic of preliterate oral…

Presents a current events course designed to teach students in Israel both English language skills as well as the advanced reading and study skills they need to comprehend university level texts and journal articles. A current events approach to academic reading enlivens the foreign language classroom and motivates and broadens the horizons of…

Four activities for classroom French instruction are described: a board game for children's vocabulary development; a sentence and dialogue construction exercise using comic strips (existing or student-made); a discussion of the treatment of the notion of "event" in different journalistic contexts; and an exercise in debating skills and language.…

Presents a summary of the findings of an 18-month longitudinal study which examined how foreign language teachers' conceptions of their classroom practice developed as they participated in an inservice teacher education program. Discusses how shared professional discourse helped increase the complexity of their thinking. (SM)

Uses results from study of home child-caregivers' attitudes to examine how public/private discourses on mothering, professionalism, work, and caring contribute to providers' constructions of home child-carework. Focuses on providers' efforts to set boundaries between their business and the caring relationships developed with children and families,…

Using a small corpus of classroom discourse from graduate business administration seminars, some language features of student-led discussion are identified, then considered in relation to syllabus content. The fruitfulness of a discourse-based approach to both description of formal spoken-language genres and to classroom methodology is discussed.…

Examines two sets of classrooms in Mexican preschools over a period of a year to see why one set of classes improved significantly in independent problem solving when compared with children in matching classes. Differences in two sets of data were explored with a method for investigating classroom talk that combines qualitative interpretation with…

Focuses on the use of inexplicitness by native speakers (NSs) and nonnative speakers (NNSs) engaged in English conversations, for example impromptu, uninstitutionalized discourses. Shows that a characteristic of NNSs spoken language is the inappropriate level of inexplicitness used and the ways in which inexplicitness is manifested in the…

Describes a physics course designed to engage preservice elementary teachers in the practices and discourses of science through activities that would later be used with children. Presents an account of preservice teachers' progress in inventing and testing models, working with empirical data, critically evaluating and using authoritative sources,…

Reviews early research on innovative use of networked computers in language learning, focusing on a study of computer-mediated discussion that examined student/student and student/teacher interactions in a college French course. Due to rapid nature of computer-mediated exchanges, the "conversation" is a hybrid somewhere between writing and…

Examines differences in oral narrative discourse of adult second-language learners of English on narrative tasks simulating the ability to describe events in the Here-and-Now versus the There-and-Then. Results indicate that complex tasks elicit less fluent, but more accurate and complex narration than do simpler tasks. (90 references) (Author/CK)

This article presents the dialogue from a roundtable discussion on the principles of science education in today's school held by "Pedagogika" in March 2004. Participants were as follows: from the Russian Academy of Education: V.P. Borisenkov, doctor of pedagogical sciences, professor, vice president of the Russian Academy of Education,…

Current approaches to oral assessment of English in English secondary schools tend to concentrate more on "confidence" and "participation" than on the quality of children's thinking. This undermines the rich possibilities in classroom talk for cognitive development. Behavioural assessment approaches deny the essentially…

The use of Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC) has been hailed as a solution to the problem of access to native speakers for language learners. This project was devised to investigate whether regular and structured use of email, here via a bulletin board, might enhance learners' study of French, with regard to developing learner autonomy and…