This article describes how the author has successfully combined polling with more traditional instructional strategies to enhance student presentation skills in an advanced course teaching technical German. By helping students select and prepare topics, anticipate questions and engage the audience, instructors can eliminate some of the root causes…

This article offers a way of using the theory of audience design--how speakers position different audience groups as main addressees, overhearers, or bystanders--for written discourse. It focuses on main addressees, that is, those audience members who are expected to participate in and respond to a speaker's utterances. The text samples are…

As Facebook becomes increasingly more popular as a communication tool for businesses and organizations, it is important that our students learn to transfer personal Facebook skills to professional settings. This article focuses on the lessons learned by two students who used Facebook as part of a social media internship, as well as what the author…

Every year, marketers spend millions of dollars trying to vie for the attention of that oh-so-lucrative demographic--the 18- to 24-year-old. For those people serving academic environments, this just happens to be the demographic of their entire clientele. So the challenge becomes how to grasp a slice of these attention spans distracted by…

While a good class with a guest speaker requires plenty of advance preparation, the real clincher is for the teacher to create a tight fit between the course objectives and the speaker's purpose in being there. The speaker has to play an essential role in fulfilling the learning objectives of the course; if that doesn't happen, the students will…

This article is written for scholars, researchers, and academic leaders who have a passion to share their knowledge outside the classroom, laboratory, or institution. They want to make a difference and believe that the information they possess and ideas they have to offer have a public importance. Based on his book "Pitch Perfect:…

The way teachers shape and handle their own feelings and those of their learners is central to the success of learning. Now in its second edition, "Teaching with Emotional Intelligence" shows how to manage this influential yet neglected area of learning and teaching. This practical book looks at how lecturers and teachers can develop and use their…

So you want to use humor in your classroom but think it will be inappropriate? After all, you might be thinking, you teach a very serious subject and do not want to turn your classroom into a three-ring circus. But even when teaching technical courses as systems analysis and computer programming, you can still use humor effectively in the…

Communicating Ocean Sciences to Informal Audiences (COSIA) is a college course that creates and develops partnerships between science educators in informal science education institutions, such as museums, science centers and aquariums, and ocean scientists in colleges and universities. For the course, a scientist and educator team-teach…

Protocol analyses in research on writing reveal that throughout the composing process talented writers direct a tremendous amount of mental effort toward integrating and pursuing complex goals such as developing and following overriding themes, elaborating main points, clarifying content for a particular audience, and integrating genre features.…

The purpose of this article is to provide suggestions for using public speaking tasks in English language teaching (ELT) and to highlight some of their many advantages. For the purpose of this article, the author will focus on two types of these tasks: student presentations and debates. Student presentations may consist of either individual or…

No matter the medium--magazines, newspapers, or TV--institutional leaders need to hit the right tone and convey specific talking points to their audience. A media-savvy leader doesn't just provide accurate information; he or she can help change the tenor of a discussion and build support for crucial institutional initiatives. No university is an…

This paper explains how first-year composition students wrote business sales letters about short fiction and then revised those letters into full-fledged literary essays that analyzed the stories. By completing these two writings back-to-back (that is, experiencing the metagenres between business writing and literary analysis), students not only…

With her recent book, "Paint the Wind" (2007), hitting the shelves this fall, author Pam Munoz Ryan delivers a welcome addition to the 25 plus books she has written for young people, including her award-winning novels "Esperanza Rising" (2000) and "Riding Freedom" (1998) and picture books "Amelia and Eleanor Go for a Ride" (1999) and "When Marian…

English 302: Writing about the Arts is a practicum course offered at the University of Windsor for upper-level English undergraduate students. The course asks students to write about a variety of art forms and requires engagement with multiple genres of writing as a way for students to effectively order their experiences, reconstruct meaning in…