The majority of writing tasks assigned to second language (L2) learners tend to target an abstract audience and the writing generated is not meant for real or meaningful purposes. The emergence of Web 2.0 concepts has created a potential educational environment where students have access to a widely distributed, authentic audience with a simple…

This paper argues that making computer games as part of a classroom project can develop a range of new media storytelling, visual design and audience awareness skills. This claim is supported by data from the evaluation of a six week game making project in a state funded primary school in which 11-12 year old learners made their own computer games…

Despite the need to provide differentiated instruction to diverse learners in contemporary CTE programs across institutes of higher education, little research has explored the actual classroom instructional strategies employed in postsecondary settings. To that end, this study found 387 CTE faculty most frequently use interactive lecture,…

Student engagement at first-year level is critical for student achievement, retention and success. One way of increasing student engagement is to use a classroom response system (CRS), the use of which has been associated with positive educational outcomes by fostering student engagement and by allowing immediate feedback to both students and…

Health fairs, a component of health education programming for many years, generally offer an unstructured opportunity for participants to gather health information. This manuscript describes an alternative approach to a "traditional" health fair, which involves working with previously assessed and specifically targeted groups of people who move as…

Teachers act out a play every day that includes soliloquies, dialogue, questions, cues, and demonstrations to evoke a response from their audiences. Learning requires that the students--or audience--see a new concept in a motivating and dynamic environment, a setting that provokes inquiry and an understanding of how new knowledge applies to real…

This article analyses Mind the Gap's Boo, a re-imagining of Harper Lee's "To Kill a Mockingbird", which features a cast of learning disabled actors. It is concerned with the public reception of the work, particularly the "effect" of an all-disabled cast. What are the consequences, both ethical and aesthetic, for these actors to tell this story on…

All employers occasionally must deliver bad news to their employees, but few bad news situations can compete with the delicate task of announcing layoffs. In an electronic age, when layoff notices delivered via email are quickly leaked to outsiders, CEOs must take into account not only the employees who will be affected by the layoffs but also the…

This article presents the results of a study that investigated readers' perceptions of tone formality in online text passages. The study found that readers perceived text passages to be less formal when they contained personal pronouns, active voice verbs, informal punctuation, or verb contractions. The study reveals that professional…

A primary responsibility for directors of college and university counseling centers is to explain to various audiences the multiple ways such units are of value to their institutions. This article reviews the history of how counseling center directors have been encouraged to develop and describe the work of their centers. Often overlooked are the…

Rhetorical agency is the capacity for words and actions to be intelligible and forceful, and to create effects through their formal and stylistic conventions. The polemical discourses of Larry Kramer, a controversial AIDS activist, demonstrate a concurrence of features that define the polemic as a rhetorical form and therefore enable agency:…

Educators continue to strive for advanced teaching methods to bridge the gap between native and non-native English speaking students. Lessons on written forms of communication continue to be a challenge recognized by educators who wish to improve student comprehension and overall ability to write clearly and expressively. "Methodologies for…

Didactical advantages of audience response systems (ARS) have been discussed extensively ever since they have been used in classes. However, conventional ARS bear some drawbacks, such as requiring specific hardware, generating costs (text messaging based and web service fees) and creating a dependency on external hosts. In this paper we present a…

The interactive response system (IRS) has been widely used to promote student learning since 2003. It is an electronic system connected to handset devices allowing students to transmit their responses by pressing the desired buttons and meanwhile allowing the teacher to monitor and track individual students' answers anonymously and statistically.…

This volume includes 3 papers based on presentations at a workshop on communicating assessment information to particular audiences, held at Educational Testing Service (ETS) on November 4th, 2010, to explore some issues that influence score reports and new advances that contribute to the effectiveness of these reports. Jessica Hullman, Rebecca…