A suicide intervention training program is described which was developed as a three and one half hour presentation to small groups of paraprofessionals or professionals who might serve as telephone hot-line staff members. Theoretical assumptions upon which the program is based are listed in the areas of communication-skills training models, crisis…

Careful audience analysis should be a major focus of the rhetorical side of technical writing courses for university undergraduates. Student writers need to be taught to appreciate their readers' problems, interests, and motives. Most often, audience analysis is accomplished imaginatively--authors create mental images of their readers. Students…

Mother Goose is well suited to use in the elementary ESL classroom for several reasons. The stories appeal to children's imagination, adhering to the principle that a good story should have surprise value, interesting characters, meaningful conflict, action, and realism. The natural rhythms help develop English intonation, and the stories…

This paper discusses the meaning and formation of children's play in order to (1) deepen understanding and respect for what play is, (2) demonstrate how young children cannot thrive or survive without play, and (3) give a common framework for interpreting and deriving meaning from the play behavior that occurs in the daily lives of young children.…

The full power of drama as both a teaching and learning medium can be realized only when the inner world of meaning is harnessed to the outer world of expressive action. The teacher has available a number of techniques that can involve the students in the vital interaction of both frames. To involve the students in the expressive frame, the…

A case study design that included classroom observation, repeated self-assessments, and formal interviews was used in a training workshop for 11 preservice teachers. The intent was to train them to use dramatic activities with secondary school students in their own classrooms. The training incorporated elements of theory, demonstration, peer…

Transfer of knowledge and skills from the classroom to real life settings is an essential goal of any educational program. A study of microcounseling skills possessed by graduate students examined their interactions with classmates in a role playing situation. All students participated in skills training, responded to videotaped client vignettes,…

This introduction to, and comment upon, a symposium on communicative competence argues that the appropriate unit of analysis in language development is communicative competence and proposes that the development of communicative competence can be studied usefully through observing children's communication during role play. Communicative competence…

Research findings indicate that role play can contribute to children's language growth through furthering: (a) growth in imaging, (b) increased recall, (c) discriminative listening, (d) development of novel forms of communication, (e) learning of socially appropriate communication, and (f) motoric actions. Teachers can facilitate role-playing by…

This guide presents a program for group counseling with foster parents who have had preservice training and an orientation to agency procedures. The program consists of six group sessions, each with its own objectives, thematic content, and methods. Counseling methods include group discussion, guided fantasy, and role playing. Thematically, the…

The two studies reported here investigate the impact of prosocial TV programs and rehearsal techniques on children's learning or acquisition of program content and on performance of behavioral adoption. Subjects for the studies were 73 kindergarten boys and girls who were predominantly middle and lower class. The children saw four 'Mr. Rogers'…

The study included the design and analysis of a teacher education simulation games to teach a typology of small group member roles and compare its cognitive effect with a lecture containing the same information. To analyze each teacher education student's performance in the simulation game, lecture and subsequent tests, both cognitive and…

Naturalistic observation of the spontaneous role-taking behavior of 16 four-year-old children (8 boys, 8 girls) in a free play situation with a same-sex peer was used to investigate the sex role perceptions and preferences of young children. Videotape recordings of the unelicited male, female, parental, and conjugal role portrayals were examined…

A group of seven Japanese-language Oral Proficiency Interview (OPI) testers licensed by the American Council on the Teaching of foreign Languages (ACTFL) conducted research related to ACTFL-OPI criteria. They first examined 24 audiotaped interview tests to see what kind of consistency there would be when individual testers applied general criteria…

This brief paper is an anecdotal commentary on a class exercise developed for an advanced European History course covering the period 1815 to the present. It describes a role-play, case-study exercise designed to reinforce previously covered material. Students are directed to attend a mock peace conference to consider if any one country was…