This article argues that imaginative play can fulfil a valuable role in the development of reading among pre-school children. It uses Feuerstein's Mediated Learning Experience as a theoretical lens and defines the concepts related to imaginative play, focussing particularly on symbolic and dramatic play. Drawing on an ethnographic case study of…

Disparate goals that learners might have in learning second or foreign language pronunciation and the scant classroom time that can be dedicated to teaching this target language subsystem dictate that learner autonomy is of vital importance in this case and adept use of pronunciation learning strategies (PLS) can be viewed as key to the…

The vignettes approach has emerged as a popular tool in quantitative and qualitative research. It has proven to be particularly effective in measuring sensitive topics. This paper focuses on the construction and validation process of questionnaire-based vignettes, which were used as an instrument to examine Omani secondary school girls' cultural…

Teaching socioscientific issues (SSI) necessitates dialogic discourse activities. However, a majority of science teachers prefer monologic discourse in SSI contexts. In addition, some of these teachers are resistant to change (from monologic to dialogic discourse) despite certain professional development attempts. The purpose of the present…

This paper discusses the effects of children's exposure to violence against their mothers. It particularly considers the sided-effects of this violence on the children's behaviour, self-image and school performance. The research indicates that (1) violence against women victimises not only the mothers but also their children, even if the children…

This research examined whether prospective teachers' emotion regulation styles, dispositional empathy, and conceptions of competent student emotion and behavior were predictive of their attitudes about bullying and proposed responses to peer conflict. Overall, participants perceived physical bullying as more serious than verbal and relational…

This article reports the findings of a demonstrator project to evaluate how effectively Immersive Virtual Worlds (IVWs) could support problem-based learning. The project designed, created and evaluated eight scenarios within "Second Life" (SL) for undergraduate courses in health care management and paramedic training. Evaluation was…

The purpose of this study is to explore and describe individual Pennsylvania rural elementary principals' experiences of ethical decision-making in a complex era. Ethical dilemma, in this case, is the term used to depict an incident which calls for a decision to be made when moral values or ethical principles were in conflict. Also, to learn how…

Recent scholarship has proposed a pedagogy of multiliteracies to frame FL curricula and instruction, and encourage critical reflection about language use through a variety of discourses and textual genres. One pedagogical framework conducive to fostering learners' intersemiotic awareness is Global Simulation (GS). GS consists in the creation of a…

Software Engineering (SE) education has been reported to fall short in producing high quality software engineers. In seeking alternative solutions, Case Method (CM) is regarded as having potential to solve the issue. CM is a teaching and learning (T&L) method that has been found to be effective in Social Science education. In principle,…

The purpose of this study was to (a) investigate the effectiveness of explicit nature of science (NOS) instruction in the context of controversial socioscientific issues and (b) explore whether the transfer of acquired NOS understandings, which were explicitly taught in the context of one socioscientific context, into other similar contexts…