Supporting students of all levels to move beyond empirical arguments, which employ example based reasoning to endorse universal truths and are thus mathematically invalid, remains a challenging goal in mathematics education. Arguments that make use of generic examples are both mathematically valid and accessible for even young learners. However,…

I report the results of an analysis of an episode of elementary school second language mathematics classroom talk focused on the classification of geometric forms, drawing on a dialogic, sources of meaning perspective. The episode was selected because participants make use of a variety of features of language, including vocabulary, gestures and…

The authors conducted a qualitative content analysis of the 400 National Science Teachers Association Outstanding Science Trade Books for Students K-12 from 2010-2017 selected for their instructional usefulness in science classrooms. The authors examined these expert-recommended science trade books to better understand their design and to identify…

Schools represent a central meeting place where societal inequalities are reproduced and questions of social justice become important. This study focuses on categorisations related to race, nationality, and gender in interactions in Finnish teaching environments, as well as teacher reflections on these situations. We discuss the implications of…

Academic discourse communities and learning circles are characterized by collaboration, sharing commonalities in terms of social interactions and language. The discourse of these communities is composed of jargon, common terminologies, and similarities in how they construe and communicate meaning. This study examines the extent to which discourse…

Introduction: The aim of this study was to analyze how oral argumentative strategies, argumentative sequences and interaction patterns relate to argumentative content and the required learning objectives. Method: Two different kinds of debates were analyzed. In the first, the participants defended one point of view, while in the second the…

Learning a language in a formal context is not the same as learning a language in a natural setting, in that the goal of one of the participants in the communicative events that occur in the classroom, the teacher, is to teach a language. For this reason, the majority of the actions undertaken by the participants are directed at achieving that…

Coherence as one of the criteria for textuality is the main element of a well-produced text. In the literature, there are many studies on the classification of coherence relations. Although there are different classifications on coherence relations, similar findings are reported regarding the acquisition order of coherence relations in different…

The goal of this study was to develop a classification for a range of discourse patterns that occur in text-based asynchronous discussion forums, and that can aid in the distinction of three modes of discourse: knowledge sharing, knowledge construction, and knowledge building. The dataset was taken from Knowledge Forum® databases in the Knowledge…

Educational concepts, such as enrolment, attendance, passing or failing students, school retardation, and school desertion, which made it possible to describe the course of children through the school system, went through a gradual process, beginning in the second half of the nineteenth century and throughout the first decades of the twentieth. In…

This article shares the voices of preadolescent girls as they participated in an eight-month book selection study which enabled them to be active agents in their book and reading experiences. The girls, school-identified as struggling readers and self-identified as resistant readers, complicate current notions of reading, as influenced by…

When children come together to play dramatically they are involved in the creation of an improvised text. This text emerges spontaneously via the moment-by-moment contributions of individual players who must operate in a highly collaborative way in order to achieve cohesion. This paper reports on a research project involving several groups of 11-…

This paper reports on an ESRC-funded project that investigated the use of corpus-based activities in a primary-school context, with children aged 8-10 years. The study explored the contributions that could be made by a corpus--comprising language written for a child audience--and a modified version of the associated software, in helping these…