This paper describes an agenda for expanding interest and motivation among sixth-grade foreign language students in a middle-class suburban community located in northeastern Illinois. The problem was originally noted by the teaching staff/researchers who found students unable to focus and maintain attention during class. Administration of surveys…

Data from the National Center for Education Statistics' 1993-94 annual Schools and Staffing Survey concerning the training of teachers of limited-English-proficient (LEP) students are summarized. LEP training was defined to include both pre-service and in-service training. In 1993-94, United States public schools enrolled over 2.1 million LEP…

The Montgomery County (Maryland) public school system has started using assessments other than multiple-choice tests because it is felt that this will provide school staff with better information about the success of the instructional program. One of the ways assessments can provide better information is by having teachers score student papers.…

This curriculum unit consists of a series of lesson plans focused on Japan for preschool students ages 3 to 5 years. The unit has five themes: (1) geography; (2) language; (3) people and clothing; (4) customs; and (5) food. Each theme has from four to eight activity lessons which address different developmental domains, including language, social…

A 59-item annotated bibliography on language arts instruction for the gifted organizes research into three main categories: (1) instruction of gifted students in tracked classrooms; (2) instruction of gifted students in mainstreamed or heterogeneous classrooms; and (3) instruction of gifted and nongifted toward the goal of developing higher level…

This book is designed to be a source of ideas and motivation to encourage curiosity in children, provide opportunities to develop scientific processing skills, find out about cultures around the world, and explore science concepts. This resource incorporates multicultural literature and approaches into the teaching of science concepts in the…

This resource book contains a whole-language, extended thematic unit about the ways in which all people are the same. The book includes the following sections: (1) "Everybody Eats Food"; (2) "Everybody Wears Clothes"; (3) "Everybody Needs a Place to Live"; (4) "Everybody Communicates"; (5) "Everybody Uses Transportation"; (6) "Everybody Goes to…

These lessons on Mexico have been taught in an integrated fashion within a sixth grade language arts and social studies classroom. Lessons are intended to be easy to pick up and use by any teacher. The material includes: (1) Rationale; (2) "Lesson 1 - I'll Bet You Can Map the Western Hemisphere in a Minute!"; (3) "Lesson 2 -…

This document, which was developed to meet the needs of trainers and workers in Australia's automotive industry for learning activities designed to boost auto workers' numeracy skills, contains a total of 33 learning activities organized into 8 sections. The topics covered in the individual sections are as follows: calculators (key words and…

Sentence combining--a technique of putting strings of sentence kernels together in a variety of ways so that completed sentences possess greater syntactic maturity--is a method offering much promise in the teaching of writing and composition. The purpose of this document is to provide a literature review of this procedure. After defining the term…

A study investigated whether male and female tutors, as institutional representatives, use the same pragmatic features in their language. Ten graduate-student writing tutors, five male and five female, were recorded in sessions with both male and female students at a university writing center. Transcripts were analyzed for turn transition type…

Focusing on problems in the teaching/learning process related to the classroom atmosphere, this book demonstrates problems related to gender bias in the classroom, discusses the implications of these and other problems, and offers suggestions for improving the teaching/learning environment. The first section describes the importance of classroom…

An 18-month qualitative study examined the process of designing, developing and evaluating a video-case laserdisc-based instructional support program for the professional development of English/language arts teachers and focusing on the application and practice of the reading/writing workshop approach. The first step was the creation of a…

This paper examines 22 empirical computer-assisted language learning (CALL) studies published between 1989 and 1994, and 13 reviews and syntheses published between 1987 and 1992, pertaining to CALL in higher education in the United States. A "three streams" framework helps to place CALL in a larger context and illustrate its several…

This paper offers an interpretive microanalysis of university students' work session with "Philippe," a multi-media instructional program for foreign language learning. The main objective of Philippe is to provide French-as-a-Foreign-Language learners with what is widely assumed to be what they need most: contacts with native speakers of the…