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I agree with both Marcy and Cathy that the first step is to try to do something about ridiculous class size. But that is not really addressing Bob's question; rather, it's proceeding from an unexamined premise that lectures are to be avoided at all costs. He's asked us to examine that premise, not just replicate it, and I think it would do us all a lot of good to do so. Part of the depth of feeling against lecture may result from what we teach. If you are teaching writing, there really isn't much to lecture about, since writing is such a hand's on skill and is so contenxtualized--every different student writing every different project on every different day needs different advice. Some advice about writing is probably generalizable, but so little that it's not really worth it. So a lecture to 200 students about writing can't be much more than advice on grammar, standard formats, etc., which are not necessarily totally useless but seldom worth the time. BUT... we should not get the idea that, because lectures don't teach much about how to write, they don't teach much about anything. I teach a course on the history of media to 100 students. There's a lot of information in that course, and some of that information is better delivered in multiple channels...ie in a lecture as well as readings. Most people learn in different ways, and even a monologic lecture is different from a monologic print text and augments understanding. Second, there are lectures and lectures. We tend to use a straw-man definition of lecture with an image of a prof droning on and on and on and students dutifully writing things down that could have been printed out and faxed to them and save everyone the trouble. But when I "lecture," I can have various dialogues with various members of the 100 students. I can stop for tem minutes and give them little group tasks and get them to report back. I don't walk around the classroom very much because the damn thing has rows of benches I can't get through, but it's only four rows deep so I can walk up to the class, eyeball them and actually talk *with* them about stuff. I can give them lab work to do which they bring in and trade around. Etc etc etc. Active learning, in other words. Third, there is a philosophical objection to lecture which comes from Vygostky by Bruffee with a little Bakhtin on the side that says everything is dialogic in principle so everything must be dialogic in literal fact. But we seem okay with reading long stretches of print which are dialogic only to the extent that we talk back to them in our heads, place them next to other texts and prior knowledge and all that stuff. I don't see why students can't be seen to be doing similar things with a lecture--ie. doing "dialogic" reads on it even through they are not talking or doing anything physically at the moment. Of course some lectures encourage these dialogic moments and others don't, but the Burkean parlour does not preclude some patches of relatively lengthy conversational turns--say 50 minutes or so. So I don't think that we have to write off the lecture in which the prof talks somewhat more than the students do. It has its time and place and style, its good ways of doing and bad ways of doing like everything else. It's just that what most of us teach most of the time doesn't work very well in this format. All that being said, I still fight like the devil to keep my classes down, and sometimes even succeed. When I do, I have a better experience. Now will someone tell me why so-called experts in rhetoric so often go to conferences and read a 40-minute paper verbatim in twenty minutes? And why conference organizers then supply a respondant to use up any remaining dialogue time so the audience never gets a chance to utter a peep? Now *that's* monologic! Doug