This article discusses the relevance and construction of the concept of 'literariness' within pedagogy for an effective engagement with works of literature and literary theory. By juxtaposing Mikhail Bakhtin's dialogic mode of understanding, with Bhartrhari's doctrine of the "dhvani" and the "sphota," this article attempts to…

Vygotsky chose consciousness as a foundation for his approach to psychology, although it took several iterations to arrive at his final conception of a dynamic, semantic system, which included not only thought and language, the subject of most of his work up to that point, but how we refract our experience of the world through personhood as well.…

The evolution of concept mapping has benefitted from the robust theoretical basis provided by Ausubelian learning theory. However, for concept mapping to maintain its relevance and to keep pace with the evolutionary changes in the educational context, it is vital that educational researchers and classroom practitioners can augment this theoretical…

Many educational philosophers have criticized the shift from lifelong education to lifelong learning. Gert Biesta, in particular, claims that learning individualistically promotes 'learnification', that is, a pernicious politics at the expense of relational educational experiences. While I endorse many of his critical points, I have argued that…

The study of language acquisition has a long and contentious history: researchers disagree on what drives this process, the relevant data, and the interesting questions. Here, I outline the Starting Big approach to language learning, which emphasizes the role of multiword units in language, and of coarse-to-fine processes in learning. I outline…

While the importance of reading development for understanding Chinese literacy acquisition and impairment is well documented, what underlies Chinese spelling development is not well understood. Although some spelling development theories have been proposed and have provided rich and detailed descriptions of the processes and skills involved in…

Gert Biesta astutely criticizes the politics of learning through which learning has been popularized and exalted. He offers a valuable critical diagnostics of this politics, but, I argue, his conclusions about 'going beyond learning' incriminate learning wholesale. Through a close reading of one of Biesta's related articles, I show that he…

The grounding of cognition in embodied actions has resulted in both theoretical formulations of encoding of information and instructional applications of these encodings. Actions on objects typically occur within matched formats: physical actions on physical objects, virtual actions on virtual objects, or mental actions on mental objects. Instead,…

Vygotsky considered vraschivaniya, or 'ingrowing', an indispensable stage in the 'internalization' of meaning and described three different ways this could happen. But were these different ways options or substages? By logico-semantic analysis of Vygotsky's notebooks and published texts, and by recontextualizing them historically, I show that what…

Teachers and parents intuitively judge the 'level' of the child and the 'level' of the text and try to match them; they know that overestimation or underestimation of either will be met with restlessness or boredom. In this way, they have an empirical understanding of Vygotsky's ZPD--the zone of proximal development he envisioned as measuring the…

Taken together, the Coherence Principle of Multimedia Learning Theory and the Integrated Systems Hypothesis propose that co-occurring and semantically congruent verbal and visual information should be integrated into one mental representation that enhances memory. The purpose of this paper was to examine how learning pseudowords with matching…

In order to gain a deeper insight into second/foreign language (L2) classroom discourse, teacher talk, as one of the most important aspects of this discourse, needs to be studied from different perspectives. So, the purpose of the present study is to address the association between teachers' experience and different types of semantic schemata in…

Students attending object-oriented analysis and design (OOAD) courses typically encounter difficulties transitioning from requirements analysis to logical design and then to physical design. Concept maps have been widely used in studies of user learning. The study reported here, based on the relationship of concept maps to learning theory and…

Few studies in language teacher education programs provide insight on how knowledge of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) is developed by teacher candidates to support their metalinguistic awareness and preparation to teach language. Building upon the contributions of Johnson and Byrnes, we combined Halliday's language-based theory of learning…

In this "First Person Singular" essay, the author describes her education, teaching experience, and interest in understanding the learning of language. Anyone reading this essay will not be surprised to learn that the author's questions about language learning and optimal teaching methods were only met with further questions, and no…