Shakespeare didn't write scripts so much as he wrote plays--live productions to be acted out in front of audiences through multimodal forms of expression. Yet some teachers' script-only approach to the Bard inadvertently isolates students from the many visual, auditory, and performative elements that make his plays so enduring. This article…

It is conventionally held that illiteracy is simply the absence of literacy, however the latter term happens to be defined. As such, illiteracy is nothing more than failure to achieve the literate foundation upon which success in the rhetorical curriculum depends. I challenge convention by arguing that literacy is fundamentally a rhetorical…

Marc Aronson, a lecturer in the School of Communication and Information at Rutgers University at New Brunswick and a historian who writes books for young adults, recently suggested that all Ph.D. candidates be required to take a course he calls "Communications." The goal would be to teach Ph.D.'s--both would-be academics and those who will pursue…

In order to reap the social gratifications of Online Social Networks (OSNs), users often disclose self-related information, making them potentially vulnerable to their online audiences. We give a brief overview of our theoretical ideas and empirical research about additional cognitive and metacognitive factors relevant for the perception of risk…

"I was planning on doing a lot of work today during your presentation, but I couldn't get anything done. I just had to pay attention!" The author received this unexpected feedback from a teacher at the end of a presentation he gave, and although he considered it a compliment, it made him reflect on the dire state of presentations in…

Comic books and graphic novels are a profitable market for publishers; 2012 sales of comics and graphic novels totaled $680 million in the United States and Canada. Graphic novels can even be found on the pages of The New York Times Best Seller list. The popularity of comic books and graphic novels cannot be denied, the sales of both movies and…

Teachers search for ways to make classroom writing relevant and "real world." This article makes a case for using radio as a framework for the teaching of writing. Using this framework enables students to write strong, specific, and effective pieces and draws the real world into the classroom with the use of smartphones and Web-based…

With increasing changes in our demographic populations and new immigrants settling in the US, there is an increasing need for visual communications that address the diversity of our populations. This paper draws from the results of the researcher's several past research and teaching projects that worked with different cultural populations. These…

Recently, there is an explosive growth of smartphone availability. In this work, we studied how mobile and Internet-based Student Response System improves the learning process. We used a free software application (Socrative©) to create a set of questions that can be deployed during the class. It was used in four different courses in three…

This study explored whether student journalists believed they shared news topic preferences with the public. Previous research suggests journalists are very different from the audiences they serve, which may influence their perceptions of audience story preferences because of the social identity theory and the social distance corollary. A national…

One of the problematic features of the "skills discourse" is the view that skills are decontextualized bits of knowledge and disposition. Instead, how skills such as communication are defined and used are shaped by cultural, political, and situational factors. In this article, we integrate theory from communication studies, critical…

Flipped classes are well-known for reversing the typical in-class lecture and out-of-class homework structure by instructing students to learn by themselves from on-line learning materials and inviting them to ask questions based on their individual difficulties in class. Many attempts at integrating this teaching method into English as a foreign…

Embedding active learning is a common mechanism for meeting science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education reform goals. Researchers have identified student benefits from such strategies, yet these benefits may not be universal for all students. We sought to identify how students at a nontraditional university perceive…

This study evaluated large-scale state writing assessments for the inclusion of motivational characteristics in the writing task and written prompt. We identified 6 motivational variables from the authentic activity literature: time allocation, audience specification, audience intimacy, definition of task, allowance for multiple perspectives, and…

This paper reports on some data on the effects of screen-based interactivity on children's engagement with storybook apps during family shared book reading that were gathered in a 2-year, small-scale ethnographic case study in Spain. Data analysis focuses on the complex interplay between the storybook app's interactive features and the children's…