To maximize our teacher candidates' learning about culturally and linguistically diverse students, we developed and implemented "Case-Based Instructional (CBI) Modules" (Language, Identity, Family, Assumptions) in two teacher preparation courses at a US university. We examined the "Modules'" impacts on teacher candidates'…

Indigenous language rights and identity practices are marginalised in education, bringing a need for mainstream educators to understand and respect Indigenous ways of knowing, being, and sharing knowledge. Engaging elementary students (ages 4.5 to 12 years), the cross-cultural participatory research was conducted for three years to understand…

This article argues that theoretical understandings of multimodality have enormous potential for assessment purposes in secondary school contexts. Informed by the work of three researchers in three North American high schools, the article offers vignettes of the effective assessment of communicative competence in English classrooms that draws on…

In two experiments, we investigated predictions of the "collaborative theory of language use" (Clark, 1996) as applied to instant messaging (IM). This theory describes how the presence and absence of different grounding constraints causes people to interact differently across different communicative media (Clark & Brennan, 1991). In Study 1, we…

Our research project was guided by the assumption that students who learn to understand phenomena in everyday terms prior to being taught scientific language will develop improved understanding of new concepts. We used web-based software to teach students using a "content-first" approach that allowed students to transition from…

A study of five adult males with autism investigated which combination of input/output modalities (typed or spoken) enhanced the syntactic, semantic, and/or pragmatic performance of individuals with autism when engaging in conversations with a normal language adult. Results found that typed communications facilitated the use of longer utterances.…