The aim of this paper is to shed light on the nature of the topics of the reading passages in ELT coursebooks. To find out the content of the topics, a total number of 15 ELT coursebooks are studied by using both quantitative and qualitative measures. The discrepancies found are discussed and recommendations are made to underline the importance of…

Among Swales' (1996) list of occluded academic genres, retention-promotion-tenure (RPT) evaluations have been little studied. These evaluative reports, however, can inform EAP researchers, teachers, and students about ways that writers both follow and transgress discourse conventions to fulfill various purposes through an institutional text.…

Interviews with key scientists involved in research on severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), together with analysis of media reports and documentaries produced during and after the SARS epidemic, revealed many interesting aspects of nature of science (NOS) and authentic scientific inquiry. This novel insight into practice in the rapidly…

Over half of all racial/ethnic minority students matriculating at 4-year colleges fail to graduate within 6 years. One explanation for those low graduation rates is minority students' inability to find membership in the cultures and subcultures of their respective campuses. This study was focused on understanding the role of ethnic student…

Computer technology has the potential to provide rich resources for language teaching and learning. However, it continues to be underutilized, even though its availability, familiarity, and sophistication are steadily increasing. This case study explored the way in which three language instructors' beliefs about language teaching and learning…

Teachers are often unaware that bilingual students often switch between their languages when doing mathematics. Little research has been undertaken into this phenomenon. Results are reported here from a study of language switching by sixteen Year 4/5 Iranian bilingual students as they solved mathematical problems in an interview situation. Reasons…

Pets can be loyal, loving, and entertaining members of a family. Their deaths are generally experienced as painful losses by the people who love them, even though the grief experience is often culturally disenfranchised. In this manuscript, we discuss the role that pets can play in a person's life; the effects that pet loss can have on the people…

An Indonesian fable is the theme of this three-part lesson for young learners. Students practice with the past-tense verbs used in the fable. By listening, reading and ordering the sentences, and copying a paragraph of the story, students become very familiar with the fable. The lessons finish with homework to write a play based on the fable.…

A major focus of research on language acquisition in infancy involves experimental studies of the infant's ability to discriminate various kinds of speech or speech-like stimuli. This research has demonstrated that infants are sensitive to many fine-grained differences in the acoustic properties of speech utterance. Furthermore, these empirical…

We examined the effects of joint attention for object learning in 5- and 7-month-old infants. Infants interacted with an adult social partner who taught them about a novel toy in two conditions. In the "Joint Attention" condition, the adult spoke about the toy while alternating gaze between the infant and the toy, while in the…

The growing Hispanic population has come into increasing contact with the larger population of non-Hispanic Whites. It is important to understand the effects of this contact on prejudice. The effects of six kinds of contact were examined for their effects on prejudice between Hispanics (n = 156) and non-Hispanic Whites (n = 1,479) who were…

The purpose of this study is to explore the relationship between children's use of reading strategies and language cues while reading and their comprehension after reading two texts: "Cherries and Cherry Pits" (Williams, 1986) and "There's Something in My Attic" (Mayer, 1988). The data were drawn from a larger study of the…

In this article, we present a usability experiment in which participants were asked to make intensive use of information on an intranet in order to execute job-related tasks. Participants had to work with one of two versions of an intranet: one with an organization-based hyperlink structure, and one with a task-based hyperlink structure.…

This study investigated age differences in the way in which attentional resources are allocated to expository text and whether these differences are moderated by content preexposure. The organization of the preexposure materials was manipulated to test the hypothesis that a change in organization across two presentations would evoke more…

Dating violence is a serious problem among adolescents and young adults. Understanding teens' reactions to dating violence offers the potential to understand the factors that lead to perpetration of violent behavior and to elucidate prevention strategies. Knowledge concerning youth attitudes about dating violence is limited, and has largely come…