This study aimed to design a task in an everyday context to support high school students' exploration of the truth values of propositional conditionals and to understand their difficulties. The results showed that students could identify that the truth value of a propositional conditional is determined by two variables (the truth values of the…

orInverse relations, or "trade-off effects," are a common outcome of interlanguage development: a learner may increase performance in one linguistic domain while simultaneously decreasing performance in another. In this study, we investigate the relationships between one aspect of fluency (pause usage) and two aspects of syntactic…

Anthropogenic climate change is a scientific fact, but U.S. public discourse around the issue remains mired in controversy, including in education. Our study leverages natural language processing methods to give a precise look into the extent to which climate change-related topics are covered in 30 of the most widely used high school history…

In this study, we explore the potential of a natural language processing (NLP) approach to support discourse analysis of in-situ, small group learning conversations. The theoretical basis of this work derives from Bakhtin's notion of speech genres as bounded by educational robotics activity. Our goal is to leverage computational linguistics…

For academic success, it is increasingly important that students of all ages can produce and comprehend expository discourse. This article provides guidance to clinicians and educators on using language sample analysis (LSA) to assess the expository language abilities of students across grades. Focusing on microstructural and macrostructural…

This study applies multimodal conversation analysis to examine how pupils of L2 English in Sweden make use of online translation tools (OTTs), i.e. bilingual dictionaries and Google Translate, in a range of digital collaborative writing tasks. The collection of sequences where pupils use OTTs comes from 31 hours of video-recorded data from four…

Today, L.S. Vygotsky's concept of a 'zone of proximal development' (ZPD) is often used to just mean best practices in early years teaching, like scaffolding. But in his original theory, the zones linked age periods distinguished by age-specific neoformations -- one of which was the formation of concepts at adolescence. So Vygotsky rejected Stern's…

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…

In this paper we used natural language processing to review hundreds of thousands of negative student reviews of their teachers submitted to the website RateMyTeacher.com. Our analysis identified several issues raised by students when rating teachers poorly, which adds to the literature that defines "bad teachers" from the student…

The ability to interact with others has gained recognition as part of the L2 speaking construct in the assessment literature and in high- and low-stakes speaking assessments. This paper first presents a review of the literature on interactional competence (IC) in L2 learning and assessment. It then discusses a particular feature--"producing…

This paper reports on a study of peer interaction in ten foreign language (FL) classes, six secondary and four primary, over a period of four months. The focus of this paper is the nature of peer interaction, including the purposes of second language use, and language choice. The data, comprising observation, audio and video recordings of five…