We will be returning in July with our combined summer issue.

Stay tuned!
 

The View From Here:
Lynne Fukuda

How Do Homework Guides Help Students Acquire Procedural Knowledge?

Nicholas D. Hartlep, M.S.Ed.
Doctoral Student
Urban Education (specializing in Multicultural Studies)
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
E-mail:  nhartlep@uwm.edu

The purpose of this action-research study was to unearth specifics regarding the effects of homework and students’ abilities to learn basic addition and subtraction facts. Homework has been researched in countless studies; nonetheless, current literature still leaves numerous unanswered questions regarding homework. The ongoing debate centers on homework’s benefits, especially in an era where teacher/student accountability and student academic success is so important with the landscape created by the enactment of No Child Left Behind (2002). There is mounting evidence that homework has great effects on student learning.

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Author as a Citizen of the Global Village:
An Interview with Sunny Singh

Nilanshu Kumar Agarwal, PhD
Chief Editor, Parnassus: An Innovative Journal of Literary Criticism
Senior Lecturer in English
Feroze Gandhi College     
Rae Bareli, India
E-mail: nilanshu1973@yahoo.com

In January 1999, Sunny Singh’s first play, Birthing Athena, was staged at the prestigious Sri Ram Centre, in Mandi House, New Delhi. The play was a critical and commercial success, with its story of emotionally fraught relationships in modern India—relationships between ambitious mothers and daughters, and between young professionals looking to reconcile ambitions that involve a global reality with relationships requiring some geographic stability. The play is split into three acts and has only three characters. In the 1999 production, the roles of Savita, Shankar and Ritu were essayed by Prabha Tonk, Sunit Tandon and and Seema Chari. Singh’s Single in the City, Nani’s Book of Suicides and With Krishna’s Eyes have been well-received by scholars.

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Localization Practices for Online Courses:
A Case Study for Contextual Considerations

Michael J. Frasciello
Doctoral Student
Composition and Cultural Rhetoric
Syracuse University
E-mail:  mfrascie@uc.syr.edu

 Current popular localization practices of online courses fail to consider appropriate contextual elements, such as culture and language variety. These practices are inadequate because they address only structural components of the document. This narrow scope is derived from a limited understanding (on the part of the course authors, instructional designers, and course translators) of how the target audience will interpret the course text. Localized online courses that consider only structural criteria fail to address the more critical criteria of effective communication and learning, such as the rhetorical perspectives and cultural complexities of the target reader/learner. Without a broader understanding of the reader/learner and deeper treatment of these contextual criteria, localized course content is treated as a distinct and separate component of the online course. This paper explores the case study of an online technical training course to illustrate the consequences of localization practices that fail to consider contextual structures at all phases of the online course production process.

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