This paper argues that meaning-making with multimodal representations in science learning is always contextualized within a genre and, conversely, what constitutes an ongoing genre also depends on a multimodal coordination of speech, gesture, diagrams, symbols, and material objects. In social semiotics, a genre is a culturally evolved way of doing…

The purpose of this study was to examine the ways in which teachers use language to promote vocabulary development (i.e., vocabulary talk moves) during science instruction in early-elementary classrooms. Twenty-four total science lessons were recorded by eight teachers, providing 894.27 min of observational data across three timepoints. Discourse…

Purpose: This study sought to 1) identify linguistic features important for Chinese text complexity with a theory-based and systematic approach, and 2) address how feature sets and algorithms affect the performance of Chinese text complexity models. Method: Texts from Chinese language arts textbooks from Grades 1 to 6 (N = 1,478) in Mainland China…

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…

Collaborative learning is a complex process during which two or more learners exchange opinions, construct shared knowledge, and solve problems together. While engaging in this interactive process, learners' satisfaction toward their partners plays a crucial role in defining the success of the collaboration. If intelligent systems could predict…

Text complexity in elementary classrooms is typically measured by traditional readability tools, which rely on surface-level measures of word and sentence complexity. Theoretical and empirical work on text complexity, however, indicates that additional measures of semantics, syntax, and discourse structure may be equally important for…

The diversity of vulnerability conditions, that have prevented children and adolescents from exercising their right to school education, also produces a diversity of cultural references of the public that comes to Basic Education programs for Youth and Adults in developing countries. This diversity often forges appropriation processes of numeracy…

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…

This methodological paper presents an approach for examining emotional expressions through discourse analysis and ethnographic methods. Drawing on trends in the current literature in science education, we briefly explain the importance of emotions in science education and examine the current research methodologies used in interactional emotion…

This study begins by connecting semantic elaboration with conceptual understanding and syntactic elaboration with procedural understanding in the context of fractions. Through case studies and discourse analysis, the work and communication of students in fourth through sixth grade is analyzed to determine the extent of their semantic and syntactic…

Just as language reflects one's thoughts, the text of science textbooks reflects the structure of scientific knowledge and thought. Therefore, students' learning of scientific language leads to their acquisition of the structure of scientific knowledge and thought. The purposes of this study were to extract scientific semantic network from science…

The aim of this article is to shift the notion of 'sites' as places of work peculiar to continuous professional development (CPD) to a theoretical level, independent of, yet intimately connected to, their physical meanings, for example universities and schools. Most CPD initiatives have to contend with at least one of these two sites, in which…

This study investigated whether elementary students could collectively advance a knowledge-building discourse through judgments of promisingness and epistemic reflection. Supported by the Promising Idea Tool and its accompanying pedagogical design, 32 grade six students were involved in judging the promisingness of their community ideas, refining…

How do fifth-grade students in a gifted class construct understandings of the opposite sex? In what ways do these constructions manifest in the visual texts created in literacy and language arts classrooms? This qualitative study integrated visual arts to understand how fifth-grade gifted students represented and perceived gender roles. Using…

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…