As global challenges increasingly require an interdisciplinary approach, this study highlights the urgency of taking stock of the forces that guide how teachers navigate complicated concepts in their classrooms such as climate change. This study takes up science education more specifically and emphasizes that not only is it important that students…

Unlike continuous whole-class (plenary) interaction, independent task work involves incipient teacher-student talk, as the teacher typically 'makes rounds' to engage in brief desk interactions with students. This article draws on multimodal conversation analysis to investigate how teacher movement during tasks offers resources for re-engaging in…

This study examined emotional climate in relation to the teaching and learning of grade 7 science. A multi-method and multi-theoretic approach used sociocultural frameworks as a foundation for interpretive research, conversation analysis, prosody analysis, and studies of nonverbal conduct. Emotional climate varied continuously throughout a lesson.…

Seven years ago The New Zealand Curriculum (NZC) was launched with its emphasis on key competencies as "the capabilities that young people need for growing, working, and participating in their communities" ("Ministry of Education," 2007, p. 38). This raises the question of what dispositions are required for students to…

The aim of this qualitative case study is to investigate how learning in "democratic participation" is constituted by the social interaction and conversation pattern in school democratic meetings in a Swedish primary school. According to the findings, a pupil control discourse and the Initiation-Response-Evaluation pattern dominates the…

The purpose of this project is to present the results of the authors efforts to analyze classroom discourse into strategies. The source of data used in this investigation is the same as that which was used in the previous study of the logic of instruction. It consists of recorded classroom discourse at the high school level including grades nine…

Explores a writing-project teacher's premises about writing and illustrates how those underlying principles drove her instruction, influenced children's work, and created a particular theory of writing in her classroom culture. Finds that writing conferences are important instructional conversations for teaching writing; learning to write involves…

Explicates how teachers' control over classroom discourse patterns during teaching-learning activities influences the types of knowledge children create and acquire. Examines the relationship between two types of teacher-child discourse commonly used in early childhood classrooms and the semiotic tools children appropriate through participation in…

Building on previous work that showed the importance of discussion for teaching literature and that discussion in low-achieving high school English classes is particularly infrequent (Nystrand, 1997), this study investigated a low-achieving class that featured regular discussions to gain insights into how dialogically organized instruction emerged…

Study of the language produced by teachers in American university mathematics classrooms suggests that teachers redefine or remap the semantic domains of the first and second person pronouns to include third person and indefinite reference. There were five sets of discourse-defined semantic mappings for the pronoun "we." (Author/CB)

This paper presents and analyzes two examples of classroom discourse which belong to the genre of "talk about texts." Both are extracts from discussions between a small group of primary school students and their teacher (in England) on the topic of short texts of narrative fiction which they have just read together during the…

A study analyzed the multiple purposes of songs in which children in early childhood classrooms sing and move their bodies to the lyrics, the discourses the songs mobilize, and the gendered positions the songs accomplish. Subjects, 28 students entering their first year in a suburban primary school in a large regional center in southern Victoria,…

Generally, classroom discourse in foreign language teaching and learning is formalized and does not contain impromptu speech. However, analysis of classroom discourse in a German university foreign language course revealed that teachers' evaluative acts (followups) and "glides" linking one teacher-learner exchange to another do contain…

The patterns of moves in one type of teaching setting is very fixed: the teacher sets the stage for the learning, then sets tasks or asks questions for others to respond to and then comments on the performances. The problem with this pattern in language classrooms is that language is used differently in non-teaching settings. If students are…