This book looks at an issue which is at the heart of every classroom, the role that talk plays in children's learning. Drawing on a substantial research base, the book provides useful suggestions to facilitate successful talk between teachers and children to improve learning and raise standards. Through analysing the talk that goes on in primary…

For teachers, demonstrating that the classroom is a safe environment for all students, and that respect is expected at all times, is vital. For these two things to occur, open lines of communication between the teacher and students are key. While preparing lesson plans as a first year graduate teaching assistant in composition, an instructor…

This topical bibliography and commentary discusses how the principles in first language acquisition can be applied to second language learning and summarizes a variety of techniques employed by teachers towards that end. It discusses first language acquisition, narrative strategies, conversational strategies, and creating contextual experiences.…

One intention that an instructor had for her new course called "Writing and Healing: Women's Journal Writing" was to make apparent the power of self-written text to transform the writer. She asked her students--women studying women writing their lives and women writing their own lives--to write three pages a day and to focus on change.…

A review of the educational research on humor use will answer many questions about how it works in the classroom. Humor can be classified in three ways, each with its own primary function: superiority theory--sociological function; relief theory--psychological function; and incongruity theory--intellectual function. Classes filled with relevant…

This document contains the reports of the travel grant awardees who participated in the eighth International Congress on Mathematics Education (ICME-8) in Sevilla, Spain, July 14-21, 1996. The support of these awardees marks the importance placed on mathematics education in the United States and participation in the international congresses. This…

This handbook introduces teachers and students to the "design conversation," a classroom discussion technique with some variations that involve writing or group work. The design conversation helps students understand topics in the subject matters more deeply and explore them analytically and imaginatively. It is a critical and creative…

This research tries to determine effective intercultural classroom communication in the American higher education setting. Theories on classroom communication and intercultural communication (Uncertainty Reduction and Communication Accommodation) are used to build the framework. Subjects were four professors from three different academic…

Recently, Martin, Myers, and Mottet (1999) introduced a measure of motives students use when communicating with their instructors. The purpose of this study was to examine further students' motives for communicating with their instructors by considering both students' sociocommunicative orientation and instructors' socio-communicative style. Also…

This report summarizes the procedures and results from a 3-year research project that investigated the reciprocal sequence of interaction behaviors between teachers and students around disruptive behaviors in general education classrooms. The study was conducted in six elementary and two middle schools serving relatively large numbers of students…

One especially productive avenue of research is the close analysis of classroom talk. In the micro-ethnographic approach used in this study, conversation is not simply a metaphor, but becomes the unit of analysis. For the study, one key element to the functioning of thinking communities is the way they are co-constructed by participants. While all…

Regularly videotaping students' conversations for them to analyze gives them more holistic data from which they can learn and improve. This learner self-evaluated video shows teachers an innovative use of technology that enhances classroom interaction, increases students' ability to observe and control their learning, and provides teachers with…

One writing instructor and her colleagues use the concept of teachers modeling responses for students as a cornerstone of the "mutually responsible" classroom. They spend a week preparing their classes to "do" peer response in much the same way that Mary K. Healy describes in her essay "Using Student Writing Response…

This paper focuses on the filtration process of culture during communication in education with reference to visual elements. An introduction provides a review of some communication models--graphic representations of theories that attempt to predict and explain the process of communication. These simple models are discussed: Aristotle's model of…