Saturday, April 17, 2010

Nonverbal Communication Sources

NVC in Everyday Life, textbook by Remland

"No more Teachers' Dirty Looks: Effects of Teacher Nonverbal Behavior on Student Outcomes." Applications of Nonverbal Communication. By Ronald E. Riggio

NVC in the Classroom, Patrick W. Miller, PhD
This short pamphlet focuses on k-12 classroom environments. It has a good quiz and a good table of cross cultural comparisons in the back.

Body Language, Julius Fast, c1970
This is a best seller and one of the first popular classics in the field. Most of the information is outdated and there is no cross cultural evidence of note.


Telling Lies, Paul Ekman, 1985 (my version is a 2009)
Lie detection isn't a crucial part of NVC in education. However, this book is a wonderful example of systematic study of the art of lie catching, including common interpretive biases.

The Everything Body Language Book by Shelly Hagen, c2008
This, like the Complete Idiot's Guide to Body Language, is a introduction to the subject. It has a short overview of almost everything, and the material was fact checked by David Givens of the Nonverbal Dictionary Fame



Nonverbal Communication, by Albert Mehrabian, c1972

He is one of the forefathers of NVC research; he created the concept of immediacy, one of the most studied concepts in NVC. It is well researched in relation to education. His concepts of verbal immediacy in the book are startling and fascinating.

"Breaking the code of silence: a study of teachers' nonverbal decoding accuracy of foreign language anxiety", Language Teaching Research 11.2 (2007) pp209-221

"Nonverbal Communication and Writing Lab Tutorials" by Gina Claywell, paper presented at the 1992 CCCC convention. 8pg

"The Effects of Teacher Clarity and Nonverbal Immediacy on Student Learning, Recevier Apprehension and Affect. Communication Education, 52 (2), 135. Retrieved May 13,2008 from Academic Search Complete database.

"Writing Lab Tutors: Hidden Messages That Matter" by Grace Ritz Amigone, Writing Lab Journal. 24-29

Nonverbal Communication and the Study of Teaching, Anita E. Woolfolk and Charles M Galloway, Theory into Practice, Volume XXIV, Number 1, c 2001, 77-84

Nonverbal Communicaiton: Do You Really Say What You Mean? By Paul Preston, Ph.D., The University of Montevallo, Journal of Healthcare Management 50:2 March/april 2005. 83-86

Teaching Nonverbal Communication, by David C. Schwebel and Milton Schwebel, College Teaching, vol 50, no 3, (Summer, 2002) pp 88-91

Immediacy in the Classroom: Research and Practical implications, Kelly A Rocca, ppt presentation at the "Student Motivations and Attitudes: The Role of teh Affective Domain in Geoscience Learning" conference, Northfield, MN, Feb 12, 2007

The Complete Idiots Guide to Body Language, Peter A Anderson, Ph.D, c2004
This general public treatment of the subject is truly excellent. Anderson has written one of the best textbooks on the subject and this is a good start. There is a whole chapter on body language in education.

The Power of Body Language, Tonya Reiman, Pocket Books, c 2007.
Her information all checks out, but it comes from self-study, outside of a university environment. She is also a public/motivational speaker. Her youtube clips from the O'reilly Factor are fascinating.

Richmond, Virginia P., James C. McCroskey, and Mark L. Hickson. Nonverbal Behavior in Interpersonal Relations. Boston: Pearson Education, 2008. Print.
This is chapter 14, teacher and student nonverbal relationships. Quotes are available in the body language megaquote list.


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PDF Files

Applications of Nonverbal Communication, edited by Ronald E Riggio and Robert S Feldman, c2005, Lawrence Erlbaum and Associates. 327 pages

Beliefs about the Nonverbal Expression of Social Power, Dana R. Carney, Judith A. Hall, and Lavonia Smith LeBeau, Journal of Nonverbal Behavior, 105-123

Body Language in the Classroom, Patrick M Miller, Techniques, November/December 2005. www.acteonline.com

Unmasking the Face. Paul Ekman.
This book explains his theory of microexpressions and divides the face into three regions to aid in analysis.

Listening, Nonverbal Communication Training. Susan Timm. Northern Illinios University. Betty L Schroeder. International Journal of Listening. Vol 14. 2000. 109-128

Nonverbal Communication and the Study of Teaching. Anita E. Woolfolk and Charles M Galloway. Theory into Practice. volume xxiv number 1. C 2001

Nonverbal Communication Tests as Predictors of Success in Psychology and Counseling. By Samuel A Livingstone. c1980. 38pages
This study examined a number of different nonverbal tests and compared them to reports of success in psychology and counseling.

The role of gesture in bilingual education. Does Gesture Enhance Learning? Ruth Breckinridge Church, Saba Ayman-Nolley and Shahrzad Mahootian, Northeastern Illinois University, Bilingual Education and Bilingualism. 303-319.

ERIC Identifier: ED380847
Publication Date: 1995-00-00
Author: Sensenbaugh, Roger
Source: ERIC Clearinghouse on Reading English and Communication Bloomington IN.

How Effective Communication Can Enhance Teaching at the College Level. ERIC Digest.


What do learners make of teachers’ gestures
in the language classroom? DANIELA SIME. IRAL 44 (2006), 211–230 0019042X/2006/044-0211
DOI 10.1515/IRAL.2006.009

The Power of Nonverbal Communication. By Henry H. Calero. Silver Lake Publishing. c2005. 315pages.

A Method for Teaching About Verbal and Nonverbal Communication. Methods and Techniques. By Mark Costanzo and Dane Archer. Vol 18. No 4. Dec 1991.

Breaking the Code of Silence: A study of teachers nonverbal decoding accuracy of foreign language anxiety. Language Teaching Research. 11.2. (2007) pp209-221


Intercultural nonverbal communication: A bibliography. Kitao, Kenji; Kitac, S. Kathleen. Jul
87. published reference materials

Nonverbal Communication. Powerpoint. Binod Kumar Thakur and Kumar Nishant.

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HANDOUTS FOR USE IN CENTER OR PRESENTATIONS

Evaluating your nonverbal communication skills.

Source: The Language of Emotional Intelligence, by Jeanne Segal, Ph.D. 1 page handout







Nonverbal Communication in Teaching, Howard Smith, Review of Education research, Vol. 49, No. 4 (Autumn, 1979), pp. 631-672.
This is somewhat dated. There is a k-12 focus.

Smith, Sandi W. The Prototypical feature of the Outstanding Professor from the Female and Male Undergraduate Perspective: The Roles of Verbal and Nonverbal Communication. paper presented at the annual Meeting of the Western States Communication Association (San Jose, CA, Feb 23-27, 1994.)
The conclusions are fairly obvious. However, this is a good resource.




Thompson, Isabelle. Scaffolding in the Writing Center: A Microanalysis of an Experienced Tutor's Verbal and Nonverbal Tutoring Strategies. Written Communication 2009; 26; 417 originally published online Aug 13, 2009. Retrieved in 2010
This is an award winning study of a single tutoring session in great detail. She breaks down all activity into three categories (direct instruction, cognitive scaffolding, and motivational scaffolding). Illustrators are discussed, broken into Beattie's 4 categories, then narrowed to topic gestures and interactional gestures. The only real use of nvc information is with gestures.



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Unpublished dissertations/theses

Ragland, Nathan Basil. "Writing Center Tutorials and Gender Differences in Nonverbal Communication." Department of English. University of Louisville, Louisville KY, Dec 2005

Boudreaux, Marjory A. Toward Awareness: A Study of Nonverbal Behavior in the Writing Conference. Indiana University of Pennslyvania, May 1998


Thursday, April 8, 2010

The Language Instinct, Chapter 12

Imagine that you are watching a nature documentary. The video shows the usual gorgeous footage of animals in their natural habitats. But the voiceover reports some troubling facts. Dolphins do not execute their swimming strokes properly. White-crowned sparrows carelessly debase their calls. Chickadees' nest are incorrectly constructed, pandas hold bamboo in the wrong paw, the song of the humpback whale contains several well-known errors, and monkeys' cries have been in a state of chaos and degeneration for hundreds of years. Your reaction would probably be, What on earth could it mean for the song of the humpback whale to contain an "error"? Isn't the song of the humpback whale whatever the humpback whale decides to sing? Who is this announcer, anyway? -370

To a linguist or a psycholinguist, of course, language is like the song of the humpback whale. The way to determine whether a construction is "grammatical" is to find people who speak the language and ask them. -370

The legislators of "correct English," in fact, are an informal network of copy-editors, dictionary usage panelists, style manual and handbook writers, English teachers, essayists, columnists, and pundits. -372

. . . since prescriptive rules are so psychologically unnatural that only those with access to the right schooling can abide by them, they serve as shibboleths, differentiating the elite from the rabble. -374

One of the major discorveries of modern generative grammar is that the part of speech of a word--noun, verb, adjective--is not a label assigned by convenience but an actual mental catagory that can be verified by experimental assays, just as chemist can verify whether a gem is a diamond or zirconium. -394

Not every woman who has fallen is a fallen woman, and if someone stones you you are not necessarily stoned. -396

[A quote from Dwight Bollinger]
In language there are no licensed practitioners, but the woods are full of midwives, herbalists, colonic irrigationists, bonesetters, and general-purpose witch doctors, some abysmally ignorant, otehrs with a rich fund of practical knowledge--whom we shall lump together and call shamans. They require our attention not only because they fill a lack but because they are almost the only people who make the news when language begins to cause trouble and someone must answer the cry for help. Sometimes their advice is sound. Sometimes it is worthless, but still it is sought because no one knows where else to turn. We are living in an African village and Albert Schweitzer has not arrived yet. -399

Overcoming one's natural egocentrism and trying to anticipate the knowledge state of a generic reader at every stage of the exposition is one of the most important tasks of writing well. -401

Thursday, April 1, 2010

Teaching One-to-One: the Writing Conference

Teaching One-to-One: the Writing Conference

by Muriel Harris Harris, Muriel. Teaching One-to-one: the Writing Conference. Urbana, Ill.: National Council of Teachers of English, 1986. Print. Here are some basic points inside. In her book she prefers the term "teacher" or "instructor" rather than "tutor. Conferences can be incorporated in very different ways according to your structure. How can we teach a process? Talk about it Demonstrate it Participate in it. -Writers need to write, get immediate, helpful, supportive feedback, then write again. -Adopting the role of a collaborator, an interested but sometimes confused reader -pg 49, she covers proper seating, paper placement -Open Questions vs Rhetorical Closed Probe and Prompt Leading (questions where the teacher knows the answer) -Theorists like JoAnn Johnson feels an imperative structure is better than an open-ended questioning one. (As in, "Do X" and the tutor watches and responds to the results.) -"Education, Johnson comments, is the only field where a question is considered a stimulant for higher levels of thinking." -p64 -p.73 Pointing out the potential hazards of differences in nonverbal communication! EYE CONTACT, USE OF SPACE, CHAIR PLACEMENT, PAPER PLACEMENT -She mentions John Hinds idea of Reader vs Writer Responsibility in Meaning Making. how much mental work do we expect the reader to do? She advocates "perception checking" of students' intended meanings (that they are expressing through writing or talk). "In contrast, the nondirective approach [in counseling] rests on the assumption that most people can help themselves if they are freed from emotional obstacles such as fear of criticism and fear of failure." -70

Friday, March 19, 2010

Grammar, Grammars, and the Teaching of Grammar

Grammar, Grammars, and the Teaching of Grammar

anthologized in Cross Talk in Comp Theory, ed by Victor Villanueva ISBN: 0-8141-0976-4 by Patrick Hartwell For me the grammar issue was settled at least twenty years ago with the conclusion offered by Richard Braddock, Richard Lloyd-Jones, and Lowell Schoer in 1963: In view of the widespread agreement of research studies based upon many types of students and teachers, the conclusion can be stated in strong and unqualified terms: the teacher of formal grammar has a negligible or, because it usually displaces some instruction and practice in composition, even a harmful effect on improvement in writing. -205 [He wants to ask 4 questions: 1. Why is the grammar issue so important? 2. How can we intelligibly define the word grammar? 3. What do findings in cognate disciplines suggest about formal grammar instruction? 4. What is our theory of language and what does it predict about the value of grammar teaching?] [He distinguishes 5 versions of grammar. #1. Native speech patterns. #2 Scientific description of native patterns #3 Linguistic etiquette #4 Grammar as taught in school #5 Stylistic advice] ... or James Briton's analogy, offered informally after a conference presentation, that grammar study would be like forcing starving people to master the use of a knife and fork before allowing them to eat. -216 

 I consider a hypothetical argument, that if Grammar 2 knowledge affected Grammar 1 performance, then linguists would be our best writers. (I can certify that they are, on the whole, not.) Such a position, after all, is only in accord with other domains of science. . . -216 

 Arthur S. Reber, in a classic 1967 experiment, demonstrated that mere exposure to grammatical sentences produced tacit learning: subjects who copied several grammatical sentences performed far above chance in judging the grammaticality of other strings. -218 

 Most students, reading their writing aloud, will correct in essences all errors of spelling, grammar, and, by intonation, punctuation, but usually without noticing that what they read departs from what they wrote(22). And Richard H. Haswell ("Minimal Marking," CE, 45 [1983], 600-604) notes that his students correct 61.1% of their errors when they are identified with a simple mark in the margin rather than by error type. -223 22---- See Bartholomae, "The Study of Error"; Patrick Hartwell, "The Writing Center and the Paradoxes of Written Down Speech," in Writing Centers: Theory and Administration, ed Gary Olson (Urbana, Ill.: NCTE 1984) pp 48-61; and Sondra Perl, "A Look At Basic Writers in the Process of Composing," in Basic Writing: A Collection of Essays for Teachers, Researchers, and Administrators (Urbana, Ill.: NCTE, 1980), pp13-32 

 Developing writers show the same patterning of errors, regardless of dialect. (29) Studies of reading and of writing suggest that surface features of spoken dialect are simply irrelevant to mastering pring literacy. Print is a complex cultural code--or better yet, a system of codes-- and my bet is that, regardless of instruction, one masters those codfes from the top down, from pragmatic questions of voice, tone, audience, register, and rhetorical strategy, not from the bottom up, from grammar to usage to fixed forms of organization. -224 

 Writers need to develop skills at two levels. One, broadly rhetorical, involves communication in meaningful contexts (the strategies, registers, and procedures of discourse across a range of modes, audiences, contexts, and purposes). The other, broadly metalinguistic rather than linguistic, involves active manipulation of language with conscious attention to surface form. -225

Tuesday, March 16, 2010

Inventing the University

INVENTING THE UNIVERSITY

by David Bartholomae, anthologized in Cross Talk in Comp, Victor Villanueva Every time a student sits down to write for us, he has to invent the university for the occasion---invent the university, that is, or a branch of it, like history or anthropology or economics or English. The student has to learn to speak our language, to speak as we do, to try on the particular ways of knowing, selecting, evaluating, reporting, concluding, and arguing that define the discourse of our community. -623 

... he has to invent the university by assembling and mimicking its language while finding some compromise between idiosyncrasy, a personal history, on the one hand, and the requirements of convention, the history of the discipline, on the other hand. -624 This is, however, one of the most important characteristic slips of basic writers. (I use the term "basic writers" to refer to university students traditionally placed in remedial composition courses.) It is very have for them to take on the role--the voice, the persona-- of an authority whose authority is rooted in scholarship, analysis, or research. -625 

 Linda Flower has argued that the difficulty inexperienced writers have with writing can be understood as a difficulty in negotiating the transition between "writer based" and "reader-based" prose. -627 [Bartholamae thinks this advice is unhelpful, considering how little they really know about the reader and his/her discourse conventions]. Our students, I've said, have to appropriate (or be appropriated by) a specialized discourse, and they have to do this as though they were easily or comfortably one with their audience. -628 

 What these assignments fail to address is the central problem of academic writing, where a student must assume the right of speaking to someone who knows more about baseball or "To His Coy Mistriss" than the student does, a reader for whom the general commonplaces and the readily available utterances about a subject are inadequate. -629 

 [B argues for the importance of "academic writing" as writing for a discourse community, not an expressivist interpretation.] [Here he is reacting to a Cognitive Process theory , an expressivist type that places meaning in the writer, expressed by language.] The act of writing, here, has a personal, cognitive history but not a history as a text, as a text that is made possible by prior texts. When located in the perspective afforded by prior texts, writing is seen to exist separate from the writer and his intentions, it is seen i nth e context of other articles in Seventeen, of all articles written for or about women, of all articles written about English teaching, and so on. Reading research has made it possible to say that these prior texts, or a reader's experience with these prior texts, have bearing on how the text is read. -630 And since students assume privilege by locating themselves within the discourse of

Monday, March 1, 2010

Key Authors To Know in Writing Theory

Key Authors To Know in Writing Theory

Expressivism Peter Elbow Donald Murray Social Constructionism Kenneth Bruffee Marilyn M Cooper James Berlin Patricia Bizzell Cultural Studies pedagogies [Are heavily influenced by] Paolo Frere Ira Shor Mikhail Bakhtin I.A. Richards Linda Flower, Writer Based vs Reader Based Prose

The St Martin's Sourcebook for Writing Tutors

Tutoring is interpersonal. Tutors must draw upon extensive interpersonal skills to work effectively with students who bring a range of educational and cultural backgrounds and a variety of learning styles to their tutoring sessions. Tutors need effective interpersonal skills because the purpose of tutoring is to meet the needs of individual writers. -p.1

Expressivist tutors often employ "the Socratic dialogue," asking heuristic, or exploratory questions as a way of getting the student to discover and think about ideas and how they can best be communicated. -3

The writing center practice advocated by social constructionists involves extensive use of peer group critiquing to reflect the workings of discourse communities and to downplay the role of the tutor as an authority figure or the single source of knowledge. -4

In this view [cultural studes pedagogies], the goal of writing tutorials should not be the simple improvement of student writing. Instead, the goal is to give student writers a heightened awareness of the social injustice perpetrated by the dominant culture's racist and classist agenda and to empower these writers to resist this agenda. In short, the goal of such tutoring is to make better citizens of both tutors and student writers. -4

In a similar vein, proponents of postmodern, postcolonial, and post-process theories of composition call for approaches to tutoring that emphasize plural perspectives, identities, and processes. -5