Media messages are increasingly packaged in ways that blur distinctions between genres. The U.S. Army National Guard's recent campaign incorporating rock stars and popular music to appeal to potential recruits exemplifies this trend, as commercials and music videos become one and the same. Given this increasing trend, critical media literacy…

Communication between home and school is good for kids. Keeping families up-to-date about upcoming events is important, but it's not enough to fully engage parents as partners. When schools and families really work together, that sets the stage for all kinds of benefits. The National Coalition for Parent Involvement in Education reports that…

Stuttering is a communication disorder which can include repetitions, prolongations, or having gaps in speech (blocks, with no sound). Stuttering is also known as stammering, although the correct term is actually dysphemia. In this article, the author shares her stuttering experience so that others will realize what it is like to live with a…

Collaboration is essential to manage complex real world problems. We used phenomenologic methods to elaborate a description of collaboration between two departments at an academic medical center who considered their relationship to represent a model of effective collaboration. Key collaborative structures included a shared vision and commitment by…

This study sought to explore differences in strategy use across three oral communication tasks. Twenty-two intermediate level university students carried out three tasks in pairs at three different time periods. After each task, which varied in terms of cognitive, interactional and learner factors (Robinson, "International Review of Applied…

A progressive attempt to replace traditional public administration values and concepts by others that are closer to private management can be observed in the replacement of the service user concept by that of consumer or client. This redefinition's more implicit or explicit intent is to increase consumers'/clients' status, their capacity to choose…

Nearly all states have standards for student learning and they have assessment programs to measure students' proficiency on those standards. But schools within each state nonetheless are left to develop their own standards-based student report cards as the primary means of communicating information about students' performance. To address the…

In this essay, the author provides an in-depth description of the course "Communication and Activism" and its rationale. She then offers some evaluative reflections, and concludes with a discussion of tensions experienced and lessons learned. She closes with a recommendation for activist educators to be mindful of these tensions and their ethical…

Whereas the speech act of refusal is universal across language, the politeness value and the types of linguistic forms used to perform it vary across language and culture. The majority of the comparative pragmatic research findings were derived from one single source of data (i.e., either production data or perception data). Few attempts have been…

Extending Lee's (Pragmatics 15: 395-422, 2005) work, the researcher further investigates the requestive behaviour of a group of Cantonese learners of English (CLEs) in Hong Kong in terms of their strategy and linguistic preference. The data were collected from a discourse completion test (DCT). Their requestive behaviour is studied in three…

Introduction: This paper reports on a study undertaken for the UK Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC), which explored the economic implications of alternative scholarly publishing models. Rather than simply summarising the study's findings, this paper focuses on the approach and presents a step-by-step account of the research process,…

In this webinar, Dr. Joyce Epstein, Director of the Center on School, Family, and Community Partnerships and the National Network of Partnership Schools, discussed what the research says about effective family engagement. The webinar and PowerPoint presentation are also available. A brief list of resources is included.

Many writing teachers provide feedback to their students through writing conferences; however, the existing literature indicates teachers may unintentionally harm their weaker students by using this strategy. To better understand the effect of the writing conference on developmental writing students, the researcher created a mixed design ANCOVA to…

The purpose of this mixed-design study was to examine the impact of three types of professional development activities aimed at improving conversations in four targeted preschool classrooms. A review of the literature was used to identify the professional development approaches and the importance of improving teacher-child conversations as a…

Every school leader will benefit from this must-have book by award-winning educator Pete Hall. In it he shares his wisdom, insights, and lessons lived and learned with educators at all stages of their careers. His lively, readable style makes it easy to follow his practical tips and strategies for taking action, goal-setting, motivating others,…