The Teacher's Turn: Teachers’ Perceptions Of Observed Patterns Of Classroom Interaction

Insight in the way verbal teacher-student classroom interaction unfolds during the language lesson is of crucial importance for effective teaching. Although classroom observational research is indispensable, it is unable to uncover underlying intentions or motivations for the observed behavior. Teacher cognition research seeks to address the relation between teaching practice and what teachers think. This study reports on the perceptions of a group of English as a foreign language teachers (n = 57) who were asked to refect on results from a classroom observation study about EFL teacher-student interaction in a similar teaching context. A large majority (82%) of the respondents recognized the observed pattern of closed teacher questions and limited student responses. This majority indicated that student participation in their own lessons is similar to the observed lessons or lower. Respondents attributed the pattern of high teacher activity and low student activity to emotional factors rather than to students’ profciency levels, lesson content, lesson activities or motivational aspects. According to 51% of the respondents, making students feel more competent by focusing on formative evaluation might improve classroom interaction, whereas 18% of the respondents suggested that interaction could be improved by using different teaching materials

Culture and Ethnology by Robert Lowie, edited and with an introduction by Alex Golub

This number of the Savage Minds Occasional Paper Series presents an edited version of Robert Lowie’s Culture and Ethnology. Culture and Ethnology is worth reading today because it captures in a nutshell the fundamental arguments of Boasian anthropology and presents them in condensed form. It was originally a series of three lectures given at the American Museum of Natural History in 1917. A fourth and final chapter which focused on kinship was then added to these and the whole were published as a small book. In the book Lowie asks a simple question: how can we study culture, and what causes cultural phenomena? His answer is that culture is a ‘sui generis’ (Latin for ‘of its own kind’) force. Each chapter takes up a potential cause of culture -- first psychology, then race, and then environment -- and demonstrates that none of them can explain culture on its own. Culture, he argues, cannot be reduced to any of these things, even though it interacts with them. Neither, he argues, can culture be explained by any universal tendency for all societies to move through the same evolutionary stages

Social organization

ix, 465 p.; 22 cm