"A Few Months to Live "describes what dying is like from the perspectives of nine terminally ill individuals and their caregivers. Documenting a unique study of end-of-life experiences that included detailed conversations in home care settings, the book focuses on how participants lived their daily lives, understood their illnesses, coped with symptoms-especially pain-and searched for meaning or spiritual growth in their final months of life. The accounts are presented largely in the participants' own words, illuminating both the medical and non-medical challenges that arose from the time each learned the "bad news" through their final days of life and memorial services.

Describing the nationwide crisis that surrounds end-of-life care, the authors contend that informal caregiving by relatives and close friends is an enormous and too-often invisible resource that deserves close and public attention. By incorporating not only the ill person's but also the family's perspective, they portray the nine participants in the contexts of their daily lives and relationships rather than simply as patients. Addressing such issues as palliative care, quality of life, financial hardship, grief and loss, and communications with medical personnel, the authors identify how families, professionals, and communities can respond to the challenges of terminal illness and the need to confront life's end.

This volume focuses on the use of dialogue journals in classrooms with students from diverse language and cultural backgrounds whose proficiency with spoken and written English is limited. The companion volume to Dialogue Journal Communication (Ablex, 1988), it carefully describes, from a teacher's experience, how dialogue journal writing can be effectively implemented in the multilingual classroom, with practical tips for starting and maintaining the practice, exploiting the benefits, and avoiding the pitfalls. It presents a model of researchers working in close collaboration with teachers and shows the development in the journals of individual students, with extended examples of student and teacher writing so that teachers can see research results that are not hopelessly extracted from the context in which they were produced. At the same time, it has a strong research orientation.

The thesis of this volume is that writing done by students who control their own topics, who have genuine purposes for writing, and have a real, known audience, is quite different and valuable in its own right. It forms a rich source of information about how young students think, manage their social interactions, and use language with competence to get things done. By selecting dialogue journal writing as a corpus for analysis, it is possible to observe children's communicative competence in using written language purposefully, apart from their ability to master a particular form of writing. The central argument is that dialogue journal communication represents a kind of personal literacy, prior to and more comprehensive than the particular literacies emphasized and assessed in schools. The contents include a practitioner's view of the practice itself and a summary of the research study methods developed to analyze interactive written conversations.