This article discusses the place of thematic coherence in various approaches to educational dialogue and proposes a unifying approach to the analysis of thematic coherence of classroom conversations based on research in educational dialogue, philosophy of language and recent advances in linguistic research on discourse structure. Addressing the…

This paper analyses how 'polarisations' in which social tensions between the religious, ethnic and socio-economic groups are believed to increase are experienced and understood by secondary school teachers in the Netherlands. Based on the idea that polarisation is present in everyday interactions, this study contributes to an everyday perspective…

Racialized descriptions are a constant practice in our societies and a fundamental aspect of racial discourses. This paper uses conversation analytic tools within a Foucauldian perspective on discourse to investigate how discourses of race are (re)produced, and consequently navigated, in talk-in-interaction among speakers of Chinese. Four…

This case study investigates a migrant adult's identity work in playful talk occurring spontaneously in a classroom for Literacy Education and Second Language Learning for Adults (LESLLA). Based on 12 hours of video-recorded interactions among four learners and their teacher, I identified five playful episodes. This paper focuses on two episodes…

Taking a dialogic approach, this edited book engages in analysis and description of dialogic discourse in a number of different educational contexts, from early childhood to tertiary, with an international team of contributors from Australia, Finland, New Zealand and the United Kingdom. The chapters focus mostly on dialogic face-to-face discourse,…

The reformed Finnish vocational education and training (VET) system is a competence-based, customer-oriented educational programme with two overarching aims: to develop a skilled labour force and to promote social inclusion. Support and guidance have become increasingly important in Finnish VET in recent decades. This study focuses on how…

This study contributes to discussions on facilitating students' sense-making in science by analyzing the utterances of high-achieving students in dialogues during practical work and identifying characteristics of their language use and learning processes. The context of the study is a general science course at an upper secondary school in Norway.…

The purpose of this study was to examine the ways in which teachers use language to promote vocabulary development (i.e., vocabulary talk moves) during science instruction in early-elementary classrooms. Twenty-four total science lessons were recorded by eight teachers, providing 894.27 min of observational data across three timepoints. Discourse…

This study quantitatively measures the variation in language derived from a targeted set of digital game mechanics. Mechanics refer to the design elements of a game that make up the overall gameplay experience, determining player actions and the degree of language interaction. A corpus was compiled by extracting the language files from two popular…

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…

Learning Assistants (LAs) are undergraduate peer-tutors who, having successfully passed a particular course, return to assist with teaching that course. Through their work across many STEM courses, LAs have been shown to have positive effects on several student outcomes, but little is known about why LAs' presence in classrooms is positively…

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…

The global expansion of online language courses is on the rise, offering greater flexibility in the approaches to learning design. This study delves into the exploration of the fundamental learning design patterns within a K-12 synchronous language course. Leveraging a rich array of textual data, including syllabi, textbooks, course outlines,…

Much of the language at academic conferences is purely metaphorical, so it is important to understand the cultural-historical significance of the metaphors used in constructing organizational gatherings, especially the metaphor invoked by the town hall meeting. Town halls/meetings were spaces where members gathered for democratic rule in a…

In the United States, adult education for emergent multilingual language learners (EMLL) is governed by the American Education and Family Literacy Act (AEFLA). The AEFLA defines literacy as an individual's ability to read, write, and speak in "English." This definition erases the multilingual and multicultural assets that adult EMLLs…