Research on the effects of questioning in the classroom has explored the placement, timing, type, and social impact of questions. Principles of good questioning include the following: (1) well-stated questions should be concise, clear, and complete; (2) questions should be topical in nature, requiring a complex answer; (3) yes or no questions…

A study was conducted to determine (1) whether teachers see a need for or value interaction in the classroom, (2) what methods they use to encourage interaction, (3) how much interaction actually occurs in high school English classrooms, and (4) what factors or methods encourage or discourage interaction. The study involved five high school…

A study of code-switching in the classroom language use of a group of Ohio third graders used as data over 17 hours of conversation taped in September through December during structured small-group lessons, informal conversations, whole-class lessons, and peer teaching of English to monolingual and Spanish-dominant children. The group included…

This study was designed to find how teachers differed in their tacit assumptions about classroom communication. (Author)

Research has shown that nonverbal variables have a strong influence on classroom communication. This paper examines the way in which communication in the classroom is affected by the variables of distance, physical environment, facial expression, vocal cues, posture and gestures, touch, use of time, physical attractiveness, and dress. Each…

This is an examination of beginning teachers' acquisition of the structures of classroom discourse. Teachers were compared at the beginning and at the end of their first teaching year using a discourse analysis system. Thirty-three hours of audiotapes from 11 teachers were transcribed an coded. Teacher initiations during informing, eliciting, and…

The purpose of this paper is twofold: first, to provide a rationale for the design and use of a nonverbal coder-training system, and second, to present comprehensive coder-training packages theoretically based in the areas of (1) learning theory, (2) nonverbal research, and (3) instructional technology. Specifically, this training program is…

Argues that the area in which the artistic development of young children can be helped immediately, without awaiting teacher retraining in the various arts, is story telling: if children are continually asked to tell stories, and if delight is shown in their stories, then the stories improve; eventually children want to write them down. (Author/JM)

This report presents the results of classroom interaction research to determine if elementary and secondary school teachers in a North Carolina school district treated males and females differently, and to find out if an intervention strategy would foster more equitable treatment. An experimental group of teachers participated in workshops that…

This series, designed for use in inservice teacher workshops, addresses the question, "How do children and teachers use language to get things done?" The transcribed classroom discourse presented and discussed in each volume illustrates functional language in a real context based on the videotaping of undoctored classroom events from…

The following papers and reports on discourse analysis are included here: (1) "Discourse Analysis, What's That?" by Hatch and Long; (2) "Contextual Analysis of English: Applications to TESL" by Celce-Murcia; (3) "Discourse and Second Language Acquisition of Yes/No Questions" by Vander Brook, Schlue, and Campbell; (4)…