Researchers have demonstrated that dialogue-based intelligent tutoring systems (ITS) can be effective in assisting students in learning. However, little research has attempted to explore the necessity of equipping dialogue-based ITS with one of the most important capabilities of human tutors, that is, maintaining polite interactions with students,…

The initial high expectations of applied linguistic work did not endure. Applied linguistics is divided between adopting either a modernist or a postmodernist approach. Despite their relevant critique of modernism, the relativism promoted by postmodernist perspectives is an inadequate response to the challenges of the field. A non-reductionist…

This study aimed at investigating the similarities and differences between Vygotsky's perspectives on child language development with nativism and behaviorism. Proposing the idea of the Zone of Proximal Development, Vygotsky emphasized the role of collaborative interaction, scaffolding, and guided participation in language learning. Nativists, on…

The learning of mathematics poses specific linguistic challenges. Amongst them, teachers and students need to be able to unpack the language used in mathematics word problems to understand its context, discern the relationships between the known and unknown information, and identify relevant solution strategies. Prior research has described some…

Over the last few decades there has been a strong narrative "turn" within the humanities and social sciences in general and educational studies in particular. Especially Jerome Bruner's theory of narrative as a specific "mode of knowing" was very important for this growing body of work. To understand how the narrative mode works Bruner proposes to…

Vygotsky measured his 'zone of proximal development' in years. To do this, he needed a scheme of age periods, and a set of tasks that could diagnose the next age period without defining it. In this paper, we compare the age periods in his late lectures with Halliday's categories of logico-semantic expansion as used by three adolescent…

One of the most salient arguments in favor of a semiotic approach, put forward on various occasions among others by Luis Radford, claims that semiotics is most appropriate to treat the interaction between socio-cultural and objective aspects of knowledge problems. But if we want to take such claims seriously, we have to undertake revisions of our…

This study compared the communication of two older male adolescents (aged 17 and 19 years) with each other (peer interaction) and with a teacher (non-peer interaction) in three different types of activity (casual conversation, providing/listening to a recount and collaborative problem-solving). Conversation analysis, selected analyses from the…

Proper Names appear at the heart of several debates in philosophy and the cognitive sciences. These include "reference", "intentionality", and the nature of "belief" as well as "language acquisition", "cognitive development", and "memory". This dissertation follows a cognitive approach to the philosophical problems posed by proper names. It puts…

One of those features that set human societies apart from animal societies is the use of language. Language is a vital part of every human culture and is a powerful social tool that we master at an early age. A second feature of humans is our ability to solve complex problems. For centuries philosophers have questioned whether these two abilities…

The fundamental difference hypothesis (FDH), as formulated by Bley-Vroman (1990), claims that SLA tends to be nonconvergent because domain-specific linguistic mechanisms available in early childhood cannot be used for language learning in adulthood: Instead, second language (L2) learners deploy domain-general problem solving skills. I claim that…

The Structured Planning and Debugging Editor (SPADE) is a new kind of interactive programming environment in which computer programs are generated by explicitly articulating planning decisions. The design of SPADE is based upon the development of a grammar of plans from a taxonomy of basic planning techniques. The utility of this approach to…

A unified theory of planning and debugging is explored by designing a problem solving program called PATN. PATN uses an augmented transition network (ATN) to represent a broad range of planning techniques, including identification, decomposition, and reformulation. (The ATN is a simple yet powerful formalism which has been effectively utilized in…