Despite certain important critiques, much of the work on teacher questions has centered on the distinction between referential and display questions as well as their roles in creating more or less communicative classrooms. With some notable exceptions, few have delved into the specificity of how questions work in the details of classroom…

This paper examines the tensions created in a Greek Cypriot primary classroom between the legitimate variety of the school, Standard Modern Greek, and the home variety of the students, the Greek Cypriot Dialect. Ethnographic data are presented to indicate that language use in the classroom, contrary to what language policy-makers argue, is…

Taking broadly sociocultural or sociolinguistic perspectives, the five contributions to this special issue investigate various aspects of the co-construction of knowledge, as this is manifested in K-16 classrooms in Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States. While the authors of these papers address different educational settings, student…

This paper is part of an ongoing study of discursive behaviour both at home and at school. The overall goal of the analysis presented was to explore the level of dialogicity (Linell, 1998) manifest in Israeli classrooms. This quest was motivated by a sociocultural inclination towards learning, which places instructive dialogue at the core of…

Presents a part of a larger study attempting to retrieve the versions of the child implicit in the everyday life of a literature classroom. Focuses on a children's novel, "Magpie Island" (Thiele, 1974), and the classroom talk about that novel. Findings reveal that the version of the child implicit in the novel and that enacted in the classroom…

Endeavors to reassert the validity of a many-faceted agenda to which qualitative analysis of classroom talk remains central and to present a review of advances made in the gathering and interpretation of talk-evidence so that possible lines of further development can be indicated. (44 references) (Author/CK)

This paper presents a multimodal discourse analysis of children using "drill-and-practice" literacy software at a primary school in the Western Cape, South Africa. The children's interactions with the software are analysed. The software has serious limitations which arise from the global political economy of the educational software…

Mathematics is a central part of school curricula around the world. There has been much interest in linguistic aspects of the teaching and learning of mathematics, both from mathematics educators and from applied linguists. This short paper introduces a set of five articles exploring the intersection between these two communities. The articles all…

The paper considers the consequences for research in classrooms of regarding "lessons" of all sorts as elaborate sequences of discourse, or "text", as part of a move towards a greater emphasis in research, teacher education and policy on education as cultural ("vis a vis" social or linguistic) practice. A quadruple…

Describes role of student-teacher interactions in development of English, focusing on more formal academic registers of school, among 9- and 10-year-old English-as-a-Second-Language students in an inner-city mainstream primary classroom in Sydney, Australia. Interactions between teachers and learners appeared to play a significant part in…