This portrait of a high school literature classroom is one of a series of several such portraits which depict diverse classroom settings of high school literature, and which result from the second year of a teacher-research project in the greater Albany, New York area. This article portrays teacher Tony Carrera and his sophomore honors English…

A study investigated factors affecting participation, engagement, and retention of non-native English-speaking students (NNSs) in community college mainstream classes. The student sample included three classes in developmental English at a small western Massachusetts community college. Data were drawn from taped classroom observations and student…

A program has been developed at Gallaudet College (District of Columbia) which provides a B.A. degree and regular teacher certification for hearing impaired or deaf students. The focus is exclusively on "regular" education, and its expressed intent is to prepare hearing impaired preservice teachers for full certification in regular…

The role of the personnel evaluation process in improving the performance of teachers as classroom communicators is explored by contrasting the personnel evaluation system of Alaska Pacific University (APU) with that of the Anchorage School District (Alaska). While the APU system offers little specification for formative evaluation activities, the…

A study examined the relationship between science learning and literacy development in two language minority classrooms: a self-contained, combined grade 7-8 class of Haitian students and a multilingual basic skills class within a large high school bilingual education program. In particular, the investigation analyzed the ways in which a model of…

This study focused on verbal and nonverbal immediacy behaviors of teachers, the relationship between immediacy variables and cognitive learning, as well as homophily, interpersonal solidarity, and student attentiveness at the senior-high school level. Subjects, 87 female and 73 male senior-high school students enrolled in interpersonal…

A dialogue journal is a written conversation in which a student and teacher communicate regularly over a period of a semester or a school year. The student may write as much as he chooses on any topic, and the teacher responds, introduces new topics, offers observations, clarifies, and asks and answers questions. Teachers use dialogue journals to…

Second language educators need to examine in greater depth the learning processes of young children in order to provide them with the kind of teaching they need in order to really learn. This means searching other fields to learn as much as possible about: questioning strategies and the development of critical thinking skills; hemispheric…

A study of repair in conversations between students of English as a second language (ESL) focused on: (1) strategies of negotiation for meaning used by students with a common language background (Spanish) when speaking English; and (2) the dynamics of repair during pair work, a frequently used technique for eliciting conversation. Verbal…

While the populations of students learning writing in English as a second language (ESL) are diverse and have widely varying needs, three general recommendations to nonspecialist teachers of ESL pupils are to: (1) organize courses according to thematic unity; (2) limit the number of formal, polished essays assigned; and (3) encourage students to…

The technique individuals use to narrow the possible responses in "solicits" (demands, requests, or questions requiring a response) in and outside the classroom often helps to avoid miscommunication and can be a useful tool for classroom teachers. A narrowing exercise was completed by 35 classes of native English and English as a second language…

Conveying an adequate conception of the nature of science to students is considered by many to be implicit in the broader context of what has come to be known as scientific literacy. It has also been demonstrated that possession of valid concepts of the nature of science do not necessarily result in better science teaching. This study examines the…

To investigate the rhetorical relations between oral and written texts in adolescents' academic discourse, a study examined oral and written language samples of three high school juniors in a San Francisco area middle class suburban community (two males and one female) participating in an English literature class. Discourse analytic techniques…

Focusing on the teacher in the problems basic writers experience, a study analyzed the written interaction between a teacher and basic writers, culled from a larger ethnographic study of one freshman composition class. The purpose was to characterize the mode of discourse within a communicative exchange called "theme-ing," which begins…

A study examined the types of questions teachers asked and the types of responses they elicited from prestory and poststory portions of reading comprehension lessons. The Question Response Interaction instrument was used to gather data from teachers and their inner city third, fourth, and sixth grade students in both high and low reading groups.…