Research on the effectivity of PowerPoint presentations as an adjunct to theoretical and practical content during university lectures has garnered significant yet inconclusive findings. Specifically, how multimodal academic content should be organised to aid communication remains unclear. Legitimation Code Theory (LCT) introduces the concept of…

This exploratory study attempts to understand how bilingual instruction can be incorporated effectively in a non-English speaking higher education context by examining the effectiveness of bilingual Korean instruction for Chinese international students at a South Korean university. Using quantitative and qualitative data sources consisting of an…

Teachers and parents intuitively judge the 'level' of the child and the 'level' of the text and try to match them; they know that overestimation or underestimation of either will be met with restlessness or boredom. In this way, they have an empirical understanding of Vygotsky's ZPD--the zone of proximal development he envisioned as measuring the…

The late Ruqaiya Hasan was an enthusiastic but exacting reader of Vygotsky: she reproached him for lacking a theory of language use, for using an asocial model of education without class variation in semantic code, and above all for using an atomistic unit of analysis, namely lexical word meaning. In this paper, I take up these criticisms and…

Few studies in language teacher education programs provide insight on how knowledge of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) is developed by teacher candidates to support their metalinguistic awareness and preparation to teach language. Building upon the contributions of Johnson and Byrnes, we combined Halliday's language-based theory of learning…

The Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) call for students to exhibit an in-depth understanding of scientific inquiry practices, including direct observation, creative design thinking, and argumentation based on evidential learning. To support academic equity for multilingual learners, these new expectations require reconceptualization of…

Mapping the knowledge formations of language teachers within their pedagogic practices is underresearched, particularly for subject English, a multi-faceted, elusively defined discipline. Deeper knowledge of the pedagogy of subject English teachers is critical, especially within South African education, given the socio-economic power of English in…

This paper examines the key linguistic arguments underpinning Basil Bernstein's theory of "elaborated" and "restricted" "codes". Building on a review of selected highlights from the collective critical response to Bernstein, the paper attempts to clarify the relationship of the theory to "deficit" views…

This paper uses a study of the photo-sharing website Flickr to examine new online spaces for writing. On this site, people write titles and descriptions for their photos, they annotate their photos with semantic tags, they provide profiles of themselves and they comment on other people's photos. In these activities, people are engaging in new…

This paper examines the idea that in mathematics education it is important to wean pupils off the use of informal everyday language and to privilege the use of formal technical vocabulary. I will first make some observations on the use of formal and informal language in the Dimensions transcript. The main focus of the next part of the discussion…

Previous research suggests that young ESOL learners in mainstream English-medium classrooms are afforded limited opportunities to engage with curriculum content. This paper reports on a study of a five-year-old boy from Samoa who was just beginning to learn English in a mainstream New Zealand classroom. Interactions between the boy and his …

Focuses on the sophisticated means used by teachers to influence students to do things. The article discusses the resources available for modulation, presents the semantic continuum from subjective realizations via objective realizations to "demodalised" realizations, and applies this framework to teacher talk extracts. The article…

Explores whether children acquire semantic structures from early book reading experiences by examining similarities between discourse structures of stories read to and written by two small children. The generative relationship of prototypic and derived stories is demonstrated by the high correspondence between both constituent structure and…

This paper describes the contribution the analysis of visual design can make to a critical reading of educational texts. Drawing on recent work on visual design, the paper analyses the composition of a newspaper advertisement seeking responses to an educational report. It illustrates the way elements of composition work to present a particular…

Investigates the role of language in adult numeracy classrooms, utilizing the resources of systemic functional linguistics and constructs derived from conversational analysis and ethnomethodology to examine how these classrooms are constructed in discourse. The study characterizes these classrooms as mixed-mode discourse sites and examines how…