When people read temporarily ambiguous sentences, there is often an increased prevalence of regressive eye-movements launched from the word that resolves the ambiguity. Traditionally, such regressions have been interpreted at least in part as reflecting readers' efforts to re-read and reconfigure earlier material, as exemplified by the Selective…

Individuals with autism exhibit significant impairments in prosody production, yet there is a paucity of research on prosody comprehension in this population. The current study adapted a psycholinguistic paradigm to examine whether individuals with autism are able to use prosody to resolve syntactically ambiguous sentences. Participants were 21…

The author, a programme leader for a Post Graduate Certificate in Learning and Teaching in Higher Education (PGCLTHE), hears a complaint from her colleagues that undergraduate students require "spoon-feeding". Accepting structuralism's argument that language does things, not just describe them, the author examines "spoon-feeding" in more depth.…

This study investigates the manner in which syntax, prosody, and context interact when second- and fourth-semester college-level English-French learners process relative clause (RC) attachment to either the first noun phrase (NP1) or the second noun phrase (NP2) in complex nominal expressions such as "le secretaire du psychologue qui se promene"…

In this essay, Jeff Duncan-Andrade explores the concept of hope, which was central to the Obama campaign, as essential for nurturing urban youth. He first identifies three forms of "false hope"--hokey hope, mythical hope, and hope deferred--pervasive in and peddled by many urban schools. Discussion of these false hopes then gives way to…

This article describes a metaphorical imaging activity used in World Educational Links (WEL), a graduate teacher certification program, to help future social justice educators explore their relationship with society and their sense of interconnectedness and empowerment to effect change. The author investigates possibilities inherent in the…

Seventy-seven new academics--59 at a large, public university in the UK and 18 at a medium-sized, private comprehensive university in the USA--were asked to read an extract of an article on the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) and mark the text according to categories of difficulty or dislike. Analysis of the data revealed six main…

In conventional drama, circularity is a positive thing, a return to the beginning, a symbol of the cyclical, generative nature of life. Part of John Guare's intent in his post-Absurdist play, "The House of Blue Leaves," is to help establish a new theatrical aesthetic by violating theatrical convention. For Guare, circularity is not a…

A tongue-in-check response claimed to be from the prime minister of England to Thomas Jefferson regarding the "Declaration of Independence." Claims that the declaration fails to meet recently adopted specifications for proposals to the Crown and lacks a line-item budget, citations from recent literature, and measurable goals. (MLF)

Using Sfard's distinction between acquisition and participation metaphors as an organizing principle, the twelve school-based projects within the TLRP programme were overwhelmingly judged by the Learning Outcomes Thematic Group as belonging to the acquisition metaphor. In essence, this article advances the initial analyses in two directions: (1)…

As public policies increasingly hold schools responsible for preventing school failure, experiences of other organizations that must operate with high reliability may be helpful. This article builds on previous studies of high reliability organizations to inquire how their strategies might inform efforts to improve reliability in loosely coupled…

Grounded in a communication in the disciplines (CID) theoretical framework, this study was the first phase of a multiphased project exploring oral genres in the academic discipline of design. The purpose of this study was to provide a baseline understanding of how faculty perceive and assign meaning to the oral genres that students performed in…

Drawing upon five years of experience with an interdisciplinary initiative, colleagues in biology, literary studies, and physics offer a framework by which to understand the nature and value of interdisciplinary work. Effective interdisciplinary exchange depends on a dynamic and mutual interplay that challenges normally unexamined disciplinary…

The instructional metaphor is an important bridge to understanding, particularly when students are undertaking tasks that are conceptually difficult and outside their previous experience. It is suggested that the limitations of the implicit metaphor of the procedural control languages are the main cause of the problems experienced with delivering…

Teachers often use analogies and are unaware of it--they are using them automatically. Whenever they begin an explanation with "It's just like...," "It's similar to...," or "Think of it this way...," they are using an analogy to explain a concept to their students. An "analogy" is a similarity between concepts. Analogies can help students build…