The discourse on preparing job-ready graduates has led to calls for more authentic methods of teaching and learning that allow higher education students to enhance their employability. The literature identifies authentic approaches to teaching as those that situate learning in contexts that correspond to the 'real world'. However, little is known…

The authors feel there is a need of a new and different kind of classroom conversation about free speech--one that not only considers the legal and aspirational dimensions but also weighs the practice and impact of speech in daily life. Two factors make this new conversation particularly urgent. First, the avalanche of social media communication,…

The past 40 years have been characterized by an ongoing shift in the rationale underlying the use of educational technologies -- an earlier emphasis on efficiency and engagement has been overshadowed by a vision centered on educational technologies' capacity to facilitate authentic learning in the inauthentic school context. However, despite its…

The dominant image of mathematics as an abstract, universal, disinterested, and pure body of knowledge both misrepresents disciplinary practice and alienates many students. Undergraduate proof-based courses such as real analysis, which are supposed to introduce students to contemporary academic mathematics, often contribute to such idealized…

Despite the recent growth of mobile instant messenger (MIM), research into the correlation between English learners' learning gains, learning engagement, and how this engagement helps develop authentic relationships remains underexplored. This mixed-method study involved 222 college English learners to investigate their engagement in team-based…

This study addresses how Chinese learners of English as a second language (L2) perceive conversations in English materials as compared to speakers of English as a first language (L1). Data were collected through questionnaires completed by 48 participants (28 L2 English learners in China and 20 L1 English speakers in the UK), eliciting evaluations…

This article reports on the use of "discourse maps" in conjunction with genre and discourse analysis to help teach communicative practices for contract negotiation. Using one map as a baseline to understand the intertextual process of negotiating a contract in communication with business clients and counterpart lawyers, other maps can…

Listening materials are commonly developed so students show their understanding of a specific oral discourse. Oral interactions provided in textbooks are resources in which different interactional practices are involved, repair practices being one of these. This article seeks to explore, first, the types of repair practices found in Spanish as a…

Background: There is a need to find ways of productively engaging K-12 students with engineering design. I investigate a new class of physical models, referred to as Improvable Models, as scaffolds for helping middle school students productively engage in engineering design practices. Purpose/Hypothesis: The purpose of this study is to answer two…

This article discusses why pedagogical discourse analysis (PDA) can be seen as the departure point to teach through discourse and how language teachers can efficaciously use it in order to bring discourse analysis into the language classroom. To make PDA feasible in language teaching, it requires to be coordinated with actual discourse-based…

In L2 (second language) pedagogy, texts are commonly distinguished based on whether language instruction was a consideration in their creation. Texts that are not created for L2 instruction, or "authentic texts," have been thought to represent the target language in an accurate and reliable way (Zyzik and Polio 2017). Conversely, texts…

For Foucault, discourses shape people's knowledge and inform how they act in a society. Power over others is legitimated by dominant discourses, a means through which hegemony discloses itself: a given group is entitled to oppress another. As a parent-educator based in Italy, I see such discourses manifesting themselves in actions and speeches. As…