Young children can engage in close reading, critical thinking, and historical thinking when age-appropriate texts are coupled with discipline-specific tasks. Prior knowledge is an impediment, though. Primary elementary learners simply do not have much of a historical schema. Because of primary elementary students' familiarity with Thanksgiving,…

The research objective of this study was to describe the frames that students from two culturally distinct institutions used in their argumentative essays on a locally relevant environmental socioscientific issue. Participants (n = 47) were recruited from biology courses designed for pre-service elementary teachers at both a public university and…

Action Research (AR) is recognised as an effective way for language teachers to extend teaching skills and gain more understanding of teaching, learning and the classroom environment (Burns, 2010). It can also be a useful but challenging experience for trainee language teachers. This paper reports on the experiences of Malaysian trainee primary…

This study investigated the influence of culture and discussion participation on rhetorical patterns in the reflective essays of 238 Korean and 196 American 4th-graders. Results showed significant differences between Korean children's essays and American children's essays in types of reasons, uses of argument elements, and uses of rhetorical…

The bilingual poetry and stories of Salvadoran writer Jorge Argueta have been an invaluable resource in this author's classroom. She has used poems from "Talking with Mother Earth" for homework and class analysis during a study of ecosystems, the story "Xochitl and the Flowers" to lead into persuasive writing, and "Bean Soup" to teach…