Explicit Direct Instruction Quotes

That shifting, layered sensibility is also, in part, the world into which the King James Bible was born. The king’s instructions were perfectly explicit: they were to use ‘circumlocution’, in other words language in which meaning was to be ‘sett forth gorgeously’. There was no terror of richness in this. Richness, as King David had known when he decorated the temple for God, was one of the attributes of God. Majesty, honour and power were gorgeous in themselves and the Jacobean sense of the beautiful loved both pearls and diamonds, both openness and ceremony. Miles Smith referred in his Preface to ‘the Sun of righteousness, the Son of God’, and it was the beams of that sun which the King James Translators would bring to the people. But the sense of clarity and directness was sewn and fused to those other Jacobean virtues: a pattern of order and authority; the majestic substance, the ‘meat’ of the word of God; the great ceremonial atmosphere of its long, carefully organised, musical rhythms, a ceremony of the word; an atmosphere both godly and kingly; both rich and pure, both multiplicitous and plain. This Bible, in other words, would absorb the full aesthetics of the age. You only have to read the Translators at full flood, feeling behind them the sense of unstoppable divine authority, to hear the immense, gilded majesty of the translation. In describing God’s assembling of the armies of a vengeful justice, they reached their apogee:

1. Divine Writing: The Bible, down to the details of its words, consists of and is identical with God’s very own words written inerrantly in human language. 2. Total Representation: The Bible represents the totality of God’s communication to and will for humanity, both in containing all that God has to say to humans and in being the exclusive mode of God’s true communication.[11] 3. Complete Coverage: The divine will about all of the issues relevant to Christian belief and life are contained in the Bible.[12] 4. Democratic Perspicuity: Any reasonably intelligent person can read the Bible in his or her own language and correctly understand the plain meaning of the text.[13] 5. Commonsense Hermeneutics: The best way to understand biblical texts is by reading them in their explicit, plain, most obvious, literal sense, as the author intended them at face value, which may or may not involve taking into account their literary, cultural, and historical contexts. 6. Solo Scriptura:[14] The significance of any given biblical text can be understood without reliance on creeds, confessions, historical church traditions, or other forms of larger theological hermeneutical frameworks, such that theological formulations can be built up directly out of the Bible from scratch. 7. Internal Harmony: All related passages of the Bible on any given subject fit together almost like puzzle pieces into single, unified, internally consistent bodies of instruction about right and wrong beliefs and behaviors. 8. Universal Applicability: What the biblical authors taught God’s people at any point in history remains universally valid for all Christians at every other time, unless explicitly revoked by subsequent scriptural teaching. 9. Inductive Method: All matters of Christian belief and practice can be learned by sitting down with the Bible and piecing together through careful study the clear “biblical” truths that it teaches. The prior nine assumptions and beliefs generate a tenth viewpoint that—although often not stated in explications of biblicist principles and beliefs by its advocates—also commonly characterizes the general biblicist outlook, particularly as it is received and practiced in popular circles: 10. Handbook Model: The Bible teaches doctrine and morals with every affirmation that it makes, so that together those affirmations comprise something like a handbook or textbook for Christian belief and living, a compendium of divine and therefore inerrant teachings on a full array of subjects—including science, economics, health, politics, and romance.[15]

A low-context culture is a place where little is left to assumption so things are spelled out explicitly. In contrast, high-context cultures are places where people have significant history together and so a great deal of understanding can be assumed. Things operate in high-context cultures as if everyone there is an insider and knows how to behave. Written instructions and explicit directions are minimal because most people know what to do and how to think. Our families are probably the most tangible examples we have of high-context environments. After years of being together, we know what the unspoken rules are of what to eat, how to celebrate holidays, and how to communicate with each other. Many of our workplaces are the same. We know when to submit check requests, how to publicize an event, and how to dress on “casual” Fridays. New employees joining these kinds of organizations can really feel lost without adequate orientation. And many religious services are also very high context. People routinely stand, bow, or recite creeds that appear very foreign and confusing to someone just joining a religious community for the first time. Discerning whether a culture provides direct and explicit communication versus one that assumes a high degree of shared understanding is a strategic point of knowledge. And leaders need to bear in mind the areas of their own organizational and national culture that are high context and how that affects outsiders when they enter. Table

Advancing no particular theory of their own, some insist that explicit teaching of grammar, vocabulary, semantics, pragmatics, and even pronunciation is necessary because students in immersion classrooms sometimes have trouble with these features of the second language. Direct instruction, they say, is the only remedy. Such claims rely heavily on short-term studies in which older students—rarely K–12 English learners—are taught a linguistic form, such as word order, verb conjugation, relative clauses, and so forth, then tested on their conscious knowledge of the form soon after.

Tips from Psychology 1. Make sustainable behavior the social default When asked directly, people vehemently deny that their actions might be influenced by trendiness or popular opinion. However, we are biologically programmed to care what other people think of us and to try to make our behavior fit in. This is a product of our evolution: early humans who were ostracized from their group faced almost certain death out on their own. Because of this biological programming, all people internalize and act on messages from other people, both explicit and implicit messages, about the kinds of behaviors expected and accepted by society. At the same time, people significantly underestimate the extent to which these social messages influence them. A recent study of household energy use confirms this: when asked outright, participants told experimenters that “what neighbors are doing” was the least likely factor to influence their behavior. However, the results showed that out of four different types of informational messages (environmental impact, money savings, how-to instructions, and how much neighbors are cutting back), the message about neighbors’ behavior was the only message that resulted in participants measurably reducing their own electricity use (Schultz, et al, 2007).

These findings and those from other research led Lyster and Mori to propose the counterbalance hypothesis. According to this hypothesis, feedback is more likely to be noticed if learners are oriented in a direction that is opposite to what they have become accustomed to in their instructional environment. One example of this would be that learners who receive L2 instruction that is focused on meaning/content need feedback that directs their attention to form more explicitly.

A topic sentence, which states the paragraph’s main idea or gist. Although topic sentences often appear at the start, to let readers know the main idea up front, they may also appear in the middle of the paragraph or at the end. Furthermore, some paragraphs do not include a topic sentence at all. In these paragraphs, the main idea is implied, rather than being stated directly. The reader must infer it from the supporting sentences.

A substantial body of research over decades demonstrates that directly teaching handwriting in the primary grades enhances legibility and fluency

Exemplary texts can illustrate a number of features, including text structure; use of graphs, charts, and pictures; effective word choice; and varied sentence structure. Teachers should either read exemplary texts out loud or direct students to read and reread selected exemplary texts, paying close attention to the author’s word choice, overall structure, or other style elements. Teachers should explain and students should discuss how each text demonstrates characteristics of effective writing in that particular genre. Students will then be prepared to emulate characteristics of exemplary texts at the word, sentence and/or text level, or they can use the text as a springboard for writing.

Two-Column Notes or Topic Web?  Depending on how much scaffolding and support students need, two-column notes alone may be sufficient to plan before writing. They can use the items in the left column to structure the writing piece and begin writing a draft directly from the notes. However, some students benefit from also developing a topic web because it provides a better “big picture” for the structure of a writing piece. They use the topic web to guide the organization of the writing pieces, and details from the two-column notes to develop the information into sentences and paragraphs.