Students are rarely given the opportunity of being decisionmakers in class, and when they are, they may feel unsure of how to organize their own learning. However, over time they come to appreciate the benefits of a more active engagement in learning English. In this paper, I describe a procedure based on Exploratory Practice (EP) for guiding…

Drawn from a teacher-educator's experience in teaching a basic reading methods course and a Master's course for inservice teachers, this paper provides practical strategies for promoting active involvement, reflection, decision-making, and collaboration among preservice and inservice teachers. The paper first presents syllabi for the methods…

Various authorities outline the benefits of collaboration in the form of classroom writing groups in learning certain writing skills. Collaboration promotes interaction, dialogue and negotiation between reader and writer. Whether the collaboration resides in interior dialogue or communal discourse or both, collaborative discourse can enable the…

A family literacy program was designed to bridge home and school literacy contexts by involving parents and children in developmentally appropriate and culturally sensitive literacy activities. The program's purpose was to enhance children's achievement and interest in reading and writing. The family program was a mirror image of a…

This essay considers the many benefits of journal writing. It explains how one person learned, during a 26-mile commute, to talk into a tape recorder slowly, leaving sizable pauses between phrases to facilitate transcription later on; how journal writing is a way to catch moments in the day, to describe a scene or to make connections that one…

While learning to quilt, and subsequently seeing quilting everywhere, one teacher decided to make a quilt with the theme of herself as a teacher. Quilts are stories told in visual form, and connections exist between curriculum theory and quilting. During a Master's program, the teacher learned about various curriculum theorists and was amazed at…

Pupils need to experience a variety of reading activities in mathematics. For all pupils, the mathematics teacher should identify unknown words from their texts and print these words on the chalkboard clearly for learners to see. Phonics should not generally be emphasized in the mathematics curriculum, but brief "teachable moments" may…

Any number of successful teaching strategies use a mixture of methods rich in language use to enhance conceptual learning. Not all language-rich teaching leads to equivalent conceptual gain. A year-long study was conducted in three high school physics classes to provide empirical support for the existence of effects of varying level of…

A case study analyzed the dialogue in three student-professor dialogue journals written in conjunction with a content area reading course and its related field-based practicum. The three participating students one in English, one in social studies, and one in biology, were selected from a class of 14 students based on representation of predominant…

A study examines teacher's and children's interactions with the use of the writing journal in a pre-k classroom (ages 3 to 4). Eight pre-school children and three teachers in a university lab school were observed twice a week for 1-hour sessions over a 6-month period. The use of the writing journal was a part of the total learning environment…

A review of five professional journal articles offers ways of enhancing the teaching of history or political science by allowing students to reach out to primary sources. According to the review, the first article, "The Senior Citizens' Tea: A Connecting Point for Oral History in the Elementary School," by George Bidlake and others,…

The need to underline the relationship between spoken and written language in second language instruction is discussed, and the use of student dialogue journals to accomplish this is encouraged. The first section offers an overview of the whole language approach, which emphasizes integration of language skills. The second section examines briefly…

This study compared the level of reflection achieved by preservice versus inservice teachers. The study sample included 23 preservice teachers in a Master of Education program and 12 inservice teachers in a Master of Arts program. In the summer of 1996, the preservice teachers received a 3-hour training on reflective thinking and were involved in…

A researcher undertook a study of her own second language learning progress, focusing on development of pragmatic competence in Japanese and the relationship between language and social identity while living and working in Japan. The study addressed three areas: the formal instructional context of studying Japanese in Japan; the influence of the…

This paper discusses the content analysis of literacy narratives written in a college composition course in the Fall, 1996. The students developed their histories during the first weeks of class, using a journal format and sharing results with the class. They then wrote a polished and completed reading and writing autobiography. Using purposive…