Reading aloud: A way for parents to support their children's growth in literacy

Parents can form a vital link to literacy and later school success by encouraging literacy and language modeling in their daily communication with children. This article describes a study in Head Start classrooms in Florida and North Carolina where teachers used a book lending system and high quality books which they shared with children and families. Strategies for teachers to assist parents in providing support for emergent literacy are given. Ways to help families see the importance of their practices and encourage the use of these ideas as part of their daily routines are shared.     

Spelling and grammar checkers: are they intrusive?

Spelling and grammar checkers help to make surface errors more apparent; do they influence the way in which people revise the content of their writing? We investigated whether the presence of checkers distracts students from making content revisions. Twenty‐five freshmen, 20 English majors and 20 graduate students revised two essays on a computer, one with the spelling and grammar checkers, and the other with a dictionary. These essays were unfamiliar to the students and rigged with content and surface errors. The checkers helped the participants to revise text for surface features but did not affect the students’ other revisions. Our findings suggest that checkers are helpful yet do not inhibit students’ ability to make content revisions.     

Preparing student teachers for alternative assessment in science

This material is based upon work supported in part by a grant from the National Science Foundation California State University Student Teaching Development Project (DOE-9250027) and the W. M. Keck Foundation. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the funding ordanizations.     

Organizational and Intercultural Communication: An Annotated Bibliography

Professional technical communication often takes place within a larger organizational structure, a structure defined and constrained by both external (national or disciplinary) and internal (organizational) cultures. Thus, theories that help technical communicators analyze and understand organizations can be of especial importance. This bibliography overviews theories of organization from the viewpoint of culture, using five themes of organizational research as a framework. Based on this framework, each section introduces specific theories of international, intercultural, or organizational communication, building upon them through a series of related articles, and showing how they can be applied in the field of technical communication.     

An investigation of proportional time spent in various communication activities by college students

This article examines ethics of consultants from the perspective of counter‐rational organizational theory. First, a set of four ethical questions, derived from Kohlberg, are presented. Second, a real consulting scenario is described, and the author's intervention is outlined. Finally, the implications of the case to consulting practice are discussed.     

PubMed Instruction for Medical Students: Searching for a Better Way

In 2007, Duke University Medical Center Library instituted an interactive, online PubMed tutorial and quiz for medical students to replace an in-person lecture. This article describes the events leading to this educational paradigm shift and how the tutorial was implemented. Important concerns in the switch to an online approach to PubMed training were student satisfaction and the extent to which searching skills would improve. To determine the effectiveness of the online model, two years of student quizzes and evaluations were examined. Results indicate that students benefit from and appreciate the interactive tutorial.     

Contribution of discourse and morphosyntax skills to reading comprehension in Chinese dyslexic and typically developing children

This study aimed at identifying important skills for reading comprehension in Chinese dyslexic children and their typically developing counterparts matched on age (CA controls) or reading level (RL controls). The children were assessed on Chinese reading comprehension, cognitive, and reading-related skills. Results showed that the dyslexic children performed significantly less well than the CA controls but similarly to RL controls in most measures. Results of multiple regression analyses showed that word-level reading-related skills like oral vocabulary and word semantics were found to be strong predictors of reading comprehension among typically developing junior graders and dyslexic readers of senior grades, whereas morphosyntax, a text-level skill, was most predictive for typically developing senior graders. It was concluded that discourse and morphosyntax skills are particularly important for reading comprehension in the non-inflectional and topic-prominent Chinese system.