This volume presents state-of-the-art research in early foreign language (L2) education in instructed contexts with a special focus on primary school (ages 5-12). Over the past two decades, early language teaching has become an important factor in both academic inquiry and education policy. Studies have attested to the value of early L2 learning…

Sourcing involves interrogating historical documents, asking questions about their attributes to determine their relation to the historical event or time period under study. In this article, a university researcher and a sixth-grade teacher describe a set of heuristics that the teacher developed for supporting her students' sourcing of historical…

This paper reports on a longitudinal ethnographic study of beginning primary school teachers in rural and regional Victoria, Australia. The study uses a conceptual framework of "place" and "workplace learning" to ask: How do new teachers learn to do their work and how do they learn about the places and communities in which they…

In order to develop successful teaching approaches to transformations of matter, we need to know more about how young students develop an understanding of these processes. In this longitudinal study, we followed 25 students from 7 to 13 years of age in their reasoning about transformations of matter. The questions addressed included how the…

An ethnographic study of a Philadelphia elementary school program in English as a second language focused on the way children's first and second languages were used in the classroom, and how this use of language was connected to the learning process. It was found that despite teachers' claims of emphasis on communication skills, a number of…