Dialog leads to collective meaning-making and shared understanding by building a sense of connection and belonging. Skillful discussion displays rigorous critical thinking, mutual respect, weighing of options, and decision making that serves the group's visions, values, and goals. When school faculties develop these skills, they transform their…

Educators must make communications a priority if they are to gain public support. Press releases are no substitute for public engagement, which should support district efforts to improve student achievement. School leaders should listen to parents, focus on internal audiences, use effective messages and messengers, and develop strategic…

Although good will can never replace a good education, certain supporting practices may either advance or hinder the educational mission. They are the ABCs of good customer service: attitude, behavior, and communication. First impressions are vital and often indelible. The good news is that these practices do not require much time or money. (MLH)

Examines the influence of interclause connectives on inference generation. Finds that readers incorporate causal knowledge-based inferences in the discourse representations for sentences containing a causal connective, and that connectives elicit inferences that are based on the connective's meaning. (SR)

Examines the relationship between lexical and grammatical knowledge to reading and listening comprehension. University students learning Spanish participated in the study. All participants performed the tests of lexical knowledge and grammatical knowledge respectively. Results suggest both similarities and differences between reading and listening…

Poor listening can have dramatic consequences; relatively minor mistakes can lead to misunderstandings and hurt feelings. In stressful situations, board members should use extra thinking time, focus on the person speaking, look interested, ask questions, paraphrase, empathize, and pause before reacting to angry outbursts. (MLH)

Presents an interview with Glenna Sloan, winner of the 2001 Arbuthnot Award. Discusses what triggered the writing of her "watershed" book "The Child as Critic"; experiences that helped her become a good listener; her experiences as a teacher; and what she sees as the future of children's literature. (RS)

Discusses how mentoring is being increasingly used by companies as a means of fostering employee learning and development. Presents the results of a qualitative study that investigated the characteristics that the ideal mentor should possess, and ways that both mentors and proteges can make mentoring relationships most effective. (Author/GCP)

Concentrates on the role verbal language plays in relation to music listening, or "knowing within" music. Discusses three different forms of knowledge (episteme, phronesis, and aisthesis) that are inherent in language and the musical listening experience. Expounds that knowledge by aisthesis depends on one's ability to perceive the…

Discusses the benefits of storytelling by teachers or librarians to elementary and middle school students. Topics include listening; sharing versus performing; finding stories, other than folk tales; guidelines for telling stories; and resources, including print sources and Web sites. (LRW)

Examines the oral responses of a class of urban kindergartners as stories were read aloud to them by their teacher, with the purpose of describing these responses as evidence of literary understanding. Finds that the children did not understand the stories as rigid and unbending structures, but as the raw materials for molding a variety of…

This study investigated whether discourse context affected the intelligibility of synthesized sentences for young adult and older adult listeners. Findings indicated a significant facilitating effect of context wherein previous words and sentences are related to later sentences for both listener groups. Results have direct implications for…

Following pretraining with everyday objects, 1- to 4-year-old children received listener training with three pairs of arbitrary stimuli of differing shapes. For each pair, 9 children were trained to select one stimulus in response to the spoken word /zog/ and the other to the spoken word /vek/. Next, in the look-at-sample category match-to-sample…

This study examined whether attention processing training-II [Sohlberg, M. M., Johnson, L., Paule, L., Raskin, S. A., & Mateer, C. A. (2001). "Attention Process Training-II: A program to address attentional deficits for persons with mild cognitive dysfunction" (2nd ed.). Wake Forest, NC: Lash & Associates.; APT-II], when applied in the context of…

The authors evaluated the roles of auditory-verbal short-term memory, visual short-term memory, and group membership in predicting language comprehension, as measured by an experimental sentence comprehension task (SCT) and the Test for Auditory Comprehension of Language--Third Edition (TACL-3; E. Carrow-Woolfolk, 1999) in 38 participants: 19 with…