Despite the effectiveness of dialogic instruction and whole-class discussion, it does not happen with regularity in the English Language Arts classroom. To examine this discrepancy, this study focused on the beliefs of teachers as they thought about discussion. To this end, the question addressed in this study was: How do high school English…

The right to share the social heritage of a nation is an element of citizenship closely associated with education. Social heritage is understood as the negotiation of understandings within a dialectical understanding of social practice across multiple timescales. In this paper the meaning-making practices of one young child concerned with beavers…

Research in educational linguistics is now challenging the efficacy of monolingual approaches that often dominate educational practices in multilingual settings. In most African nations where multilingualism is the norm, there remains a persistent reluctance by educational stakeholders (principals, teachers, parents, and students) to embrace…

Teachers have an agentive role as they interpret, evaluate and develop language policies and practices. In the current study we interviewed a bilingual pre-school teacher in Finland during the first year of implementing a new way of working bilingually with a class of monolingual children. Applying nexus analysis, we explored the teacher…

Much of the debate regarding outcomes of various types of dual-language programs has focused on linguistic and academic results, and with good reason: improving the educational outcomes of language minorities and supporting societal multilingualism are vital goals. More rarely explored, however, are these programs' ethnolinguistic outcomes: the…

In this paper, we present excerpts from ethnographic data collected when a diverse classroom of children, some of whom were multilingual and others monolingual in English, used iPads to make videos. We discuss the practices, social relations, objects and material conditions that emerged as the children engaged in this production, with special…

Conducting research into young learner experiences of school poses methodological challenges which are compounded when, as is increasingly the case, the classroom interaction is multilingual and the research methods are participatory. Each new or adapted method sheds further light on the issues that can arise. Researcher-initiated role play is a…

This article is informed by van Lier's ecological approach to linguistics in considering the affordances Korean-born students perceived in using Korean or English language in an Aotearoa New Zealand high school setting. Here, I regard affordances as the students' perceptions of their languages as linguistic resources enabling them to act, or…

This paper reports on the classroom languaging practices of a group of science teachers in rural and township schools in South Africa where the majority of learners learn through the medium of English, despite the fact that it is the home language of only a small minority; and learners' poor English proficiency frequently restricts their access to…

Twenty years after democracy, the legacy of apartheid and hitherto unmet challenges of resourcing and teacher development are reflected in a severely inequitable and underperforming education system. This paper focuses on second language writing in the middle years of schooling when 80% of learners face a double challenge: to move from…

Drawing on interviews, observations, and videorecorded data collected in a "sheltered" grade 7 social studies class in a Mid-western US city, the current paper explores the learning opportunities provided for English language learners (ELLs) and the discursive strategies used by a teacher, consciously or unconsciously, to help her students become…

Suggests that data from interviews with teachers and other educational participants can be analyzed differently when interviews are studied as instances of language in education themselves. The paper analyzes data from previous research, and uses data from two interviews with a beginning secondary level English teacher to highlight ways that…

Discusses the literacy of public discourses 20 years after Graff's exploration of the literacy myths that dominate community and research discussion. Illustrates the fundamental interconectedness of literacy with social practice and with the moral and political organization of contemporary cultures through examination of interview materials…

This paper aims to improve the understanding of some aspects of campus life faced by a mature student and to help inform institutional strategies for enhancing student retention. The "fit" between students' production of their own identity and their perception of the successful student (both academically and socially) in their…

Traced four Canadian Grade 10 students' descriptions and interpretations of evaluative discourse in their junior high school, focusing on the use of effort and ability attributions to explain successes and failures. Each student participated individually in five semi-structured interviews with the researcher that were audiotaped, transcribed, and…