The reader may be familiar with the quip that books are not finished, they are abandoned. In the case of this book I can say that I know that it is not finished, if by finished is meant that I have covered all the major points in depth and did not neglect the viewpoints of others. That is by way of saying that it was not my intention to write a scholarly treatise, and for several reasons. For one thing, the literature on teachers as performing artists is sparse compared to that concerned with the selection and training of those in the conventional performing arts. The second reason, derived from the first, is that I decided that my focus in this book should be on clarifying several things: Why teaching should be taken seriously as a performing art; why teacher preparatory programs are part of the problem and not the solution; the resistance that should be expected to a truly radical reconceptualization of the selection and training of teachers; and why some of my concrete proposals will be viewed as impractical or require too long a term time-perspective for those (educators and the political community) posessed of the quick-fix mentality.
How can you find out what you need to know about the company, given the amount of time that you have available? What interview questions should you prepare for? What will you do if they throw a stress question your wayand how will you know the purpose underlying that kind of question? Most important of all, what should you do first?
We've written this book for busy people! We know that if you're a busy trainer, you probably won't have much time (or appetite) for the sort of book which offers profound and deep theories of how people learn at training sessions, or complex pedagogical models of how we should try to structure our training. In this book we've tried to offer down-to-earth, practical suggestions.
The Seminal Work on Using American Sign Language (ASL) with Hearing students.
This book supports the real reasons to sign with typically developing children. It makes them smarter, increases their language skills and enhances literacy. What else? Sign language is easy to learn and add to any classroom culture. The instructor does not need to be fluent to reap the many benefits! Every educational institution should incorporate sign language into their programming. This book gives the proof to getting it all started.
In this book, Charles Ruhl argues that words should be presumed initially to be monosemic: having a single, highly abstract meaning. Semantic research should first seek a unitary meaning, resorting to polysemy, homonymy or idiomaticity only when an extended attempt fails. Using a large database, Ruhl shows that some supposed "lexical" semantic meaning is actually pragmatic or extralinguistic. Included are extensive treatments of the verbs bear, hit, kick, and slap, the phrase take off, and the noun ice.
