The current special issue is dedicated to studies exploring social interaction in second language educational environments that feature technology. In this introduction article, we contextualize the empirical studies included here with respect to the changing role of technology in education and situate them in the research tradition of multimodal…

The main goal of this paper is to analyze adolescents' experiences when they play SimCity (EA, 2008), a commercial videogame, in an innovative learning environment designed around the concept of participatory culture. By using this video game in the classroom and machinima productions created in relation to the game, we sought to generate a…

This article is intended to highlight peer response discourse trends and to initiate a dialogue about the ways in which educators, and designers of educational environments, can play a central role in creating more democratic discourse in classrooms. We report on a research and development project involving education experts, computer engineers,…

Classroom discourse is structured by socially accepted ways in which knowledge is presented and by established procedures for carrying out educational activities. However, the underlying linguistic and social ground rules are usually implicit, for students as well as for teachers. The implicitness of these ground rules has been attributed to…

We report on a case study examining the effects of a technology adaptation on patterns of discourse in a sheltered English high school science unit on electricity. The focus here is on how the tool, a classroom response system (CRS), affected access to and participation in classroom discourse with regard to developing science literacy among…

Electronic classroom response systems (CRSs) have been in use in large college lectures for over three decades. Such systems are designed to provide instructors and students with immediate statistical analyses of student electronic responses to multiple-choice questions posed to the class by the instructor. The technique known as peer instruction…

Background/Context: This article describes how we refined an innovative methodology for equitable collaboration between university researchers and classroom practitioners building and refining theory together. The work builds on other coinquiry models in which complementary professional expertise is respected and deliberately exploited in order to…

Teachers using interactive whiteboards (IWB) effectively can engage and motivate students with a range of digital resources to explore science's role in making sense of our world and to construct knowledge of key scientific concepts. The case study research described in this paper illustrates how interactive pedagogies in the IWB classroom were…

In this study the authors have looked at the use of interactive whiteboards (IWBs) in Mexico from a linguistic anthropological perspective. Twenty lessons were video recorded to compare the use of IWBs and traditional boards in different areas of the curriculum in primary schools. Data were analysed as a set of sequenced communicative events in…

Learning is a changing phenomenon, depending on the advances in theory and research. This book presents a relatively new approach to learning, based on meaningful human activities in cultural practices and in collaboration with others. It draws extensively from the ideas of Lev Vygotsky and his recent followers. The book presents ideas that…

This study examines how one student pair working face-to-face at a computer and engaged in a web-based discussion environment negotiated meanings for their activity and what contextual resources they used in this negotiation process. The aim was also to study how the students themselves interpreted the learning activity. The subjects were two…

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…

Explores evolutionary changes in students' (n=46) motion-related language mediated by computer-based Newtonian microworlds. Documents how ways of talking emerge and how the convergence of meaning arises from the affordances provided by the interpretive flexibility of the microworld, conversations with the teacher, and the microworld which assures…

Presents 29 brief descriptions of research in the teaching of English (published July through December, 1999) in the areas of: bilingual/foreign language education; classroom discourse; discourse processes; literature; professional development; reading; research methodology; technology and literacy; and writing. (SR)

Sharing information orally is an important skill that public speaking classes teach well. However, the author's students report that they do not often see informative lectures, demonstrations, presentations, or discussions that follow the structures and formats of an informative speech as it is discussed in their textbooks. As a result, the author…