Background: Most university faculty members are expected to teach. Many would benefit from instruction designed to improve lecturing. Aims: To explore the impact of a program in which video-recorded lectures were critiqued by peers. Method: Sixteen lecturers participated in this qualitative study. Four agreed to have an undergraduate lecture video-recorded for peer review. Twelve participated in review sessions wherein the lecturer and three peers viewed and critiqued the recorded lecture. All discussions were recorded and transcribed for thematic analysis. Subsequently, semi-structured interviews were conducted with each lecturer and all 12 peer reviewers. Three pairs of research team members independently conducted thematic analyses of the discussion transcripts and the interviews; then all members met to develop consensus on major emergent themes. Results: Six themes were identified: (1) the benefits of peer review; (2) the components of successful peer review; (3) the value of reflection on teaching experiences; (4) the inherent stress in peer evaluations; (5) the elements of successful lecturing; (6) lecturing as performance. Conclusions: The benefits of peer assessment of lecturing (PAL) were enthusiastically endorsed by all 16 participants. The PAL program is now supported by the McGill Faculty Development Committee and plans to implement regular PAL sessions in place.

Based on our experience, the third edition needs to be used as a reference document in all stages of evaluations of medical education programmes.

How can e-mail be integrated into a college preparatory ESL curriculum? Classroom e-mail exchanges between the University College of the Cariboo in Kamloops, BC and the University of Wisconsin, the University of Northeastern fllinois, and Carleton University demonstrate that e-mail can be effective in teaching intercultural awareness, creating a more positive affective climate by providing greater privacy and intimacy, and in making the EAP curriculum more relevant to the needs and aspirations of young people looking ahead to the 21st century.

How effective are graphics as lecture comprehension supportsfor low-proficiency ESL listeners? In an experiment conducted with 103 college-level Asian students, agroup that heard an audiotape while looking at a page with an organizational graphic performed better on a comprehension test than a control group (no words or graphics provided), whereas the participants in two vocabulary conditions (one with vocabulary from the lecture listed in alphabetical order and the other with vocabulary listed in the order in which the words occurred in the text of the mini-lectures) performed no better than the control group. The findings indicate that the graphics enhanced listening comprehension. Suggestions for using graphics to teach academic listening skills are provided.Lecture listening skills are generally recognized as important for student success in academic environments (Dunkel, 1991;Mendelsohn, 1994;Powers, 1986). Yet the mental effort required can leave second-language learners overloaded, frustrated, and demoralized (Eastman, 1991;Snow, 1993;Ur, 1984). According to Geddes and White (1978), students often try to focus equally on all parts of a discourse. Unable to attend to everything with equal intensity, they may give up even when they could have grasped the gist of the message. College-bound students expect materials to be relevant to their academic goals and to be pitched at an appropriate level of cognitive maturity.In their study of Taiwanese college students, Chiang and Dunkel (1992) pointed out that there is no research on the needs of students at lower levels of listening proficiency with respect to the comprehension of lecture discourse. They acknowledged that lectures are extremely difficult for these students and recommended they be given short lectures on familiar topics and written versions of lectures in the prelistening stage.As an increasing number of Asian students enter college and university programs in North America, there is a growing need to modify content instruction to accommodate the needs of these learners (Brinton, Snow, & Wesche, 1989;Christianson, 1995). In this article I attempt to explore how graphics can facilitate the second-language lecture comprehension process.The importance of comprehensible input as a necessary (although insufficient) factor in L2 language learning is well documented in the SLA literature. Krashen (1982) argued that the most effective way to teach a second language is to give learners large amounts of comprehensible input in an environment of low anxiety. Krashen's views on comprehensible input have TESL CANADA JOURNAULA REVUE TESL DU CANADA VOL. 14, NO.1, WINTER 1996 45"sparked interest in comprehension-based methodologies and materials" and have led "an increasing number of scholars and practitioners to believe that comprehension processes and strategies need to be taught actively in second language classrooms" (Omaggio-Hadley, 1993, p. 163).Because meaning is inferred from and understood in context (Brown, 1987;Garrod, 1986), it is not surprising that con...

In post-secondary education, there is a widely-held belief in a "gold standard" for evaluative studies of curricular innovations. In this context, "appropriate" assessment is understood to refer to experimental designs and statistically significant differences in group outcomes. Yet in our evaluative study of a medical undergraduate program, we did not find these concepts to be particularly applicable. Based on our experience, we now feel that it is appropriate to assemble an eclectic mix of scientific findings, show how they have been used for program improvement, and articulate the program's theoretical rationale and social significance. In the absence of statistically significant differences, this comprehensive argument can be used to justify the deployment of curricular innovations. The same may be true of other educational programs that target hard-to-measure changes in affective domains.

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Messick (1988) maintained that technology-based delivery methods would transform both our conceptions of teaching and learning, and also our methods for evaluating student learning. Designed 100 years ago (Crocker & Algina, 1986), classical approaches to assessing test quality are unsuited to the contemporary context of technology-based learning (Messick, 1988). We will discuss evolving conceptions of validity and show how Messick’s (1989) framework is an improvement over traditional conceptions. We will then apply Messick’s framework to the evaluation data from the globally delivered, hybrid “A Course in Writing Effectively for UNHCR.” Our results will show how Messick’s framework provides a comprehensive assessment, based on evidence, values, and consequences of the merit and worth of contemporary assessment tasks.

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