Teaching writing to middle school students: a national survey

A random sample of language arts, social studies, and science middle school teachers from the United States were surveyed about their preparation to teach writing, beliefs about responsibilities for teaching writing, use of evidence-based writing practices, assessment of writing, use of technology, and adaptations for struggling writers. The findings from this survey raised concerns about the quality of middle school writing instruction. Many teachers believed their preservice and inservice preparation to teach writing was inadequate. Middle school students spend little time writing or being taught how to write. While most teachers used a variety of evidenced-based writing practices and made adaptations for struggling writers, such methods were applied infrequently. Most teachers did not appear to use assessment data to shape how they taught writing, and computers played a relatively minor role in middle school writing instruction. Even though teachers generally agreed that writing was a collective responsibility, language arts teachers placed a greater emphasis on writing instruction than social studies and science teachers.     

Film History

John W. Landon BEYOND THE MIGHTY WURLITZER: THE HISTORY OF THE THEATRE PIPE ORGAN (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press,,1983—$29.95).

Susannah Harris Stone THE OAKLAND PARAMOUNT (Berkeley California: Lancaster-Miller Publishers, 1981—$11.95).

John Fell FILM BEFORE GRIFFTTH (Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 1984—$24.50/$10.95).

Herbert Marshall MASTERS OF THE SOVIET CINEMA: CRIPPLED CREATIVE BIOGRAPHIES (London: Routledge 8 Kegan Paul, 1983—$29.95).

John Kobal and V.A. Wilson FOYER PLEASURE: THE GOLDEN AGE OF CINEMA LOBBY CARDS (New York: Deliliah Books, 1983—$12.95).

Don Graham COWBOYS AND CADILLACS: HOW HOLLYWOOD LOOKS AT TEXAS (Texas Monthly Press, P.O. Box 1569, Austin, Texas 78767—$10.95).     

Barriers to resource sharing among higher education libraries a report to the Research Support Libraries Programme (RSLP)

This paper describes the user-focused approach to information skills at MMU Library. It covers the following cycle: identifying training needs at three levels (organisation, group and individual); developing a training strategy and materials; marketing information skills within MMU. Specifically, it describes how we went about discovering what our users wanted, creating and delivering what they needed, and how we ‘sold’ it back to them.     

Advancing communication as a science: Research opportunities from the federal sector

The centrality of communication in health promotion is described in Healthy People 2010: Objectives for Improving Health, which noted that "health communication can contribute to all aspects of disease prevention and health promotion." In this paper we build on this argument by suggesting that communication science can be advanced by pursuing a "big-science" strategy where important and challenging questions about the role of communication in modern life are studied through rigorous research designs and research findings are applied to addressing significant social issues and problems. A significant dimension of a "big-science" strategy is the pursuit of programs of research using longitudinal designs and large samples with adequate controls. Given that such large-scale studies necessarily involve funding, we review some major funding initiatives and programs in different agencies of the federal governmental.     

Collaboration Between the University of Michigan Taubman Health Sciences Library and the University of Michigan Medical School Office of Research

Librarians have traditionally facilitated research development resulting in grants through performing biomedical literature searches for researchers. The librarians at the Taubman Health Sciences Library of the University of Michigan have taken additional steps forward by instituting a proactive approach to assisting investigators. To accomplish this, the librarians have taken part in a collaborative effort with the University of Michigan Medical School Office of Research. Through this partnership, both units have created and adopted various techniques intended to facilitate the submission of grants, thus allowing researchers more time to conduct their primary activities.     

Ethnocinema and the impossibility of culture

The emerging methodology of ethnocinema fuses techniques from its ethnographic origins with its co-constitutive methods, and invites collaborators to creatively come together for mutual education and cultural transformation. Education as a site of the enactment and “politics of identity construction” continues to confront notions of authenticity/fallacy, hybridity/purity and a media-driven “fictive unity” in the ways we enact and teach culture (Souter, in Hall). Collaborative methods in educational practice, like ethnocinema, suggest that as notions of culture are changing so too must educational practices, both in classrooms and in research contexts. As global mobilities muddy the waters of articulable cultural values and identities, educational practices present an urgent imperative to engage in more dialogic teaching and learning – and more collaboratively generated research – to reduce alienation, generalisation and increase pedagogical border crossing. This article addresses the im/possibility and implications of moving beyond cultural identities in intercultural co-educational dialogue.     

New books

Spoken and Written English. By Henry Bradley. Oxford, at the Clarendon Press. 1919. Pp. 35.

Talking Business. By John Mantle Clapp, Lecturer on the Language of Business in New York University. The Ronald Press Company. New York, 1920. 526 pages.

The New World. College Readings in English. By Harold Bruce and Guy Montgomery. The Macmillan Company, New York, 1920. 464 pages.

Abraham Lincoln. A play. By John Drinkwater. New York: Houghton‐Mifflin Company. 1920. 112 pages.

Choosing a Play. Revised and enlarged. By Gertrude E. Johnson, Assistant Professor in the Department of Speech Education in the University of Wisconsin. New York: The Century Co. 1920.

The Greek Orators. By J. F. Dobson, M.A.. London: Methuen. New York: Dutton. 1919. Pp.314.