The American Society for Quality (ASQ) has long promoted quality in elementary education through a program entitled Koalaty Kid. It was an outgrowth of activities at Frederick C. Carder Elementary School in Corning, New York, where Fred the Koala appeared throughtout the school on bulletin boards, at assemblies, in the cafeteria, and in the classrooms. […]

Active Involvement School administrators, teachers, sponsors, parents, and the students themselves work together on teams that are empowered to make decisions and implement change. This system does not mean that Koalaty Kid gives away the authority to run the schools. Rather, it means that everyone who is ultimately affected by a school has an opportunity to […]

Business plays an important role on fostering quality improvement efforts in higher education by transferring knowledge and expertise on quality processes and implementation practices. Many colleges and universites have also made substantial commitments to quality efforts. However, the precentages of higher educational institutions engaged in longterm efforts to measure and improve quality have been relatively […]

I am a firm believer that in order for learning technology to be successful, it should be integrated into the curriculum. According to a report published by the educational community Edutopia, this must happen ‘in ways that research shows deepen and enhance the learning process’, and ‘in particular, it must support four key components of […]

Assessment, evaluations and testing are commonly confused terms. For the purpose of this book, assessment refers to the testing of learner performance, and evaluation is used to mean any means of getting information about the course. The latter can refer to whether the material is appropriate to the level, how the learners are coping with […]

This chapter looks at how technology can be used to support project work, especially (but not only) for young learners and teenagers. Projects can help learners ‘develop confidence in using English in the real world, the world outside the classroom’ (Fried-Booth, 2002:5). Projects are also a means by which learners become active participants in an […]

Pronunciation is an area of language teaching that is often overlooked. Many teachers lack the training of confidence to teach it, or don’t appreciate the importance of this area and choose not to spend much time focusing on phonology. Although, as Pennington and Richards say, it is often viewed as having ‘limited importance’ in communicative […]

For many years, the computer had generally been more associated with applications in the area of writing language than spoken language (Pennington & Esling, 1996: 153), but with new developments in Web 2.0 and teachers’ and learners’ increased access to the Internet for language learning and teaching, this focus has been changing. Taking advantage of […]

Writing is probably the skill most affected by the rise of the Internet. Apart from anything else, the last decade has seen the emergence, or rise in prominence, of important new tools such as blogs and wikis, and social-networking platforms that have seen our learners becoming more used to writing. In many cases, you will […]

Reading is a complex and multifaceted skill, and notions of how best to teach reading have been in constant revision, especially with the rise of the Internet. The International Reading Association (2009) has said that ‘to be fully literate in today’s world necessitates proficiency in the new literacies of information and communication’. You can, therefore, […]