An inside look at one revealing battle over multicultural education.

Compelling American Conversations: Questions and Quotations for Intermediate American English Language Learners from Chimayo Press helps American immigrants and international students develop their fluency skills and academic vocabulary through conversation exercises. Each chapter includes two sets of conversation questions, vocabulary review, short writing exercises, paraphrasing exercises with proverbs, a discussion activity around pithy quotations, and an online "Search and Share" activity. Focusing on both daily experiences and American culture through proverbs, quotations, and speaking exercises, the materials help intermediate English language learners explore their lives, learn common American sayings and expressions, and develop vital discussion skills. The 15 topical chapters include: Opening Moves; Going Beyond Hello; Making and Breaking Habits; Studying English; Being Yourself; Choosing and Keeping Friends; Playing and Watching Sports; Talking About American Television; Celebrating American Holidays; Being Stylish; Handling Stress; Practicing Job Interviews; Valuing Money and Finding Bargains; Exploring American Cities and Seeing Our World With Photographs. The "Resources and Notes" appendix includes the academic word list, supplemental worksheets, bibliographical references, author biographies and indices to proverbs and quotations. Designed primarily for community college ESL and adult education students, this flexible ESL textbook can be used by high school English language learners (ELL) and intensive English programs. Compelling American Conversations, is the third title in the Compelling Conversations series, most known for the original fluency-focused advanced ESL textbook, Compelling Conversations: Questions and Quotations on Timeless Topics (2006).

Based on a series of public lecturers sponsored by the Smithsonian Associates and the National Communication Association, this book provides insight into concerns that conversation is changing in negative ways in the United States, both on an interpersonal level and on a national level.

Cultures in Conversation introduces readers to the ethnographic study of intercultural and social interactions through the analysis of conversations in which various cultural orientations are operating. Author Donal Carbaugh presents his original research on conversation practices in England, Finland, Russia, Blackfeet County, and the United States, demonstrating how each is distinctive in its communication codes--particularly in its use of symbolic meanings, forms of interaction, norms, and motivational themes. Examining conversation in this way demonstrates how cultural lives are active in conversations and shows how conversation is a principal medium for the coding of selves, social relationships, and societies. Representing 20 years of research, this volume offers unique insights into the ways social interactions not only gain shape from, but also are formative of cultures. It makes a significant contribution to communication scholarship, and will be illuminating reading in courses focusing on cultural communication, language and social interaction, intercultural pragmatics, and linguistics.

The mass media and religious groups in America regularly argue about news bias, sex and violence on television, movie censorship, advertiser boycotts, broadcast and film content rating systems, government regulation of the media, the role of mass evangelism in a democracy, and many other issues. In the United States the major disputes between religion and the media usually have involved Christian churches or parachurch ministries, on the one hand, and the so-called secular media, on the other. Often the Christian Right locks horns with supposedly liberal Eastern media elite and Hollywood entertainment companies. When a major Protestant denomination calls for an economic boycott of Disney, the resulting news reports suggest business as usual in the tensions between faith groups and media empires. Schultze demonstrates how religion and the media in America have borrowed each other’s rhetoric. In the process, they have also helped to keep each other honest, pointing out respective foibles and pretensions. Christian media have offered the public as well as religious tribes some of the best media criticism— better than most of the media criticism produced by mainstream media themselves. Meanwhile, mainstream media have rightly taken particular churches to task for misdeeds as well as offered some surprisingly good depictions of religious life. The tension between Christian groups and the media in America ultimately is a good thing that can serve the interest of democratic life. As Alexis de Tocqueville discovered in the 1830s, American Christianity can foster the “habits of the heart” that ward off the antisocial acids of radical individualism. And, as John Dewey argued a century later, the media offer some of our best hopes for maintaining a public life in the face of the religious tribalism that can erode democracy from within. Mainstream media and Christianity will always be at odds in a democracy. That is exactly the way it should be for the good of each one.