Discusses the history and reasons for community-based mural art in North America. Describes the steps involved in a community-based mural project for students in which they work in groups to develop a mural theme and a sketch of the mural, paint the mural, document the process, and then present the mural to the class. (CMK)

A political science professor at James Madison University (VA) constructed a Web page to support an undergraduate course in government. This article defines Web-site goals and audience, reviews other sites, and discusses organization of Web links and technical choices for HTML editor, page layout and use of image, audio, and video files. Stresses…

Describes the use of PowerPoint software in a cooperative setting that allows inclusion students to create presentations as part of the learning process. Discusses equipment needed, audience, teacher and student preparation, and student evaluation, and includes examples of storyboards and worksheets. (Author/LRW)

Discusses how research on conventional discourse patterns in professional settings provides useful insights into the design of language for specific purposes/English for specific purposes courses (LSP/ESP). Suggests an LSP course should aim at developing students' genre awareness. The question of whether genre conventions should be explicitly…

A qualitative research methods course, offered for faculty at an Israeli school of education, was a significant "cultural event" promoting inclusion of qualitative methods in a strongly positivist setting. A profound change in faculty attitudes was eased by administrative support and by participants' ability to find entry points to ideas…

Shows how the instructional design process can assist in developing a Web-based distance teacher education course, based on the development of a Web-based course for teachers of language minority learners. Topics include audience needs analysis, establishing instructional goals, and formative evaluation and revision. (Author/LRW)

Supporting urban communities to make changes that contribute to sustainable living is a challenge that many environment and conservation organisations embrace. However, many community education and involvement initiatives to date have tended to appeal mostly to those with knowledge and enthusiasm for protection and conservation of the environment,…

This article focuses on an extended, interactive, collaborative project in a junior/senior-level business communication class. The main goal of the project is to address a difficult task central to many college-level writing courses: teaching students to consider and to write for specific audiences other than the teacher. A second goal is to focus…

This study examined native English speakers' reactions to nonnative primary stress in English discourse. I measured North American undergraduate students' processing, comprehension, and evaluations of three versions of an international teaching assistant's speech: with primary stress correctly placed, incorrectly placed, or missing entirely.…

The findings in the study suggest "reading-as-the-reader" can improve 5th- and 9th-grade writers' ability to compose descriptive writing consistent with their readers' informational needs. Participants included: 154 writers (78 fifth-graders and 76 ninth-graders) and 52 ninth-grade readers. The study adapted the referential communication design…

The United States blood plasma industry uses various rhetorics to access donors and markets its products while managing its stigma and potential legal liability. The industry includes both the public "nonprofit" sector and the private, for-profit blood collection and manufacturing businesses owned by pharmaceutical companies that rely on…

Writing 125 is a 13-week course that all first-year students at Wellesley College (Massachusetts) are required to take. One instructor teaches a section of it called "Law in Contemporary Society" which centers writing and reading activities around legal issues, namely "Roe v. Wade" and "Webster v. Cruzan." As an…

Papers by graduate students, and occasionally papers from their mentors which establish a context for the student papers, are organized into four sections. Section 1, "Observation," includes two papers, "Observation Children at a Puppet Theater Performance" (Grace Johnson), and "Manipulations: Clay Construction" (Kim Spradling). Section 2,…

A study analyzed the discourse in a variety of Hong Kong newspapers to assess how an individual takes on the role of reader in relation to the rather complex public discourse of a daily newspaper, particularly in a multicultural, politically charged context. Four categories of newspaper (Hong Kong English, Hong Kong Chinese, non-Hong Kong Chinese,…

This paper discusses several considerations and techniques in doing research which attempts to measure the effects of visual images on viewers. For example, to describe precisely the effects of some element of a visual image or series of images, researchers must be able to specify the institutional context in which the image is presented and…