Although traditional analytical techniques can characterize learners' internal cognitive abilities laterally and indirectly, it is difficult to present learners' learning development characteristics and changes comprehensively and dynamically. Epistemic network analysis, on the other hand, is an emerging educational research method that integrates…

Thinking together in primary classrooms has received much scholarly attention in recent years, with a focus on educational dialogue at the forefront of studies concerned with identifying what constitutes effective language for learning. Whilst the expression of explicit reasoning is often discussed, less attention has been given to the role that…

Students' engagement and determination require the use of self-regulated learning strategies to facilitate adequate preparation. This article reports a research study that looks into how eight instructors, who were trained to promote self-regulation, interact with 18 students of a Bachelor of Arts program in English language teaching in Bogotá.…

Background: This study examined the use of student-teacher interactions through dynamic assessment (DA) to diagnose and promote the learner's comprehension on Chinese writing patterns. Debates over the uses of standardized tests to assess language learners' performance have been ongoing in the field of second language acquisition for many years.…

Although many college courses adopt online tools such as Q&A online discussion boards, there is no easy way to measure or evaluate their effect on learning. As a part of supporting instructional assessment of online discussions, we investigate a predictive relation between characteristics of discussion contributions and student performance.…

Psycholinguistic studies dealing with Alzheimer's disease (AD) commonly consider verbal aspects of language. In this article, we investigated both verbal and non-verbal aspects of speech production in AD. We used pauses and hesitations as markers of planning difficulties and hypothesized that AD patients show different patterns in the process of…

Analysis of interaction between pairs of deaf and hearing preschoolers indicated that both roles in dialogue (speaker-initiator and speaker-responder) were used by dyads, but their pattern of performance was different. Deaf speaker-initiators displayed a narrower range of complexity in their utterances while deaf speaker-responders were less…

Sought to determine whether two low-rising intonation contours should be accepted as distinct patterns in American English, alongside three other widely accepted contours. Dialogues varying only in their intonation contour were presented in a random order to 47 speakers of Midwestern American English. Subjects interpreted the meaning of the…

Indicates a periodic structure in the distribution of between-turn silences in two-party conversation, a finding that is inconsistent with current stochastic or signaling models, which view social interaction as an exchange of stimuli and responses. Finds that social interaction is fundamentally a collaborative activity. (JD)

The flow of normal conversation is often impeded by error. These errors can be divided into at least three categories: phonological, lexical, and pragmatic. A study was designed to assess whether different kinds of errors affect conversation in different ways. Forty-four subjects listened to tapes of conversations. Each conversation contained…

Tested the fine-tuning hypothesis of language acquisition, which postulates that parents fine-tune their speech to their children's language level, by examining local patterns of interaction within the conversations of three parent-child dyads. The high positive correlations between parent-child dyads for the different interactional patterns…

A study investigated the use of connectors in English conversation between native Japanese-speakers and teachers outside the classroom. Data were drawn from six videotaped conversations between pairs of Japanese students, all learning beginning-level English, with conversational support provided by English teachers. The functions of four…

Spoken communication between residents (n=10; ages 12-21) and staff members in an institution for people with mental retardation was examined. Findings suggest that staff members and residents differed in their use of topics, with staff members talking primarily about instructional and behavior management topics and residents focusing mostly on…

A study analyzed four dyadic conversations for evidence of the signals operating in the turn-taking process and facilitating the smooth exchange of turns. It found over 20 syntactic, prosodic, and semantic features occurring frequently with turn-taking. The five most significant factors correlating with turn-taking were a prosodically completed…

Reports on data concerning language environments in classes with children who had been in the Home-School Study of Language and Literacy Development project when they were three and four years old. Activities and types of talk used in preschool classrooms changed as children grew older. (BB)