Trickle-down economics is a fallacious metaphor that hurts working people and the civic commons. In this paper, we discuss the role and impact metaphors have in economics education. We explore the stickiness of "truthy" but ultimately false metaphors and offer economics educators alternative metaphors to displace this problematic…

The work of science is a linguistic act. However, like history and philosophy of science, language has frequently been isolated from science content due to factors such as school departmentalization and narrow definitions of what it means to teach, know, and do science. This conceptual article seeks to recognize and recognize--to understand and…

This paper begins by exploring the anti-colonial work of Tunisian scholar Albert Memmi in his classic book "The Colonizer and the Colonized" and determining whether the characteristics of colonization that he names can be successfully applied to the current relationship between modern humans and the "natural world". After…

In this commentary, the author presents his thoughts on two papers appearing in this special issue. The first, "The Importance of Language in Students' Reasoning about Heat in Thermodynamic Processes," by David T. Brookes and Eugenia Etkina (See: EJ1060728), and the second, "Varying Use of Conceptual Metaphors Across Levels of…

Researchers believe that the way that students talk, specifically the language that they use, can offer a window into their reasoning processes. Yet the connection between what students are saying and what they are actually thinking can be ambiguous. We present the results of an exploratory interview study with 10 participants, designed to…

The article addresses the long-standing issue over the role of the mother tongue in the foreign language classroom. In the first part it is argued that the mother tongue lays the cognitive foundations for all subsequent language learning. Double comprehension as the basic requirement for learning to take place is explained. The second part is…

Language plays a crucial role in the classroom. The use of specialized language in a domain can cause a subject to seem more difficult to students than it actually is. When words that are part of everyday English are used differently in a domain, these words are said to have lexical ambiguity. Studies in other fields, such as mathematics and…

This is a conceptual paper, based on several semesters of collaboration in which the American author interacted with students in the Taiwanese author's EFL classes in Taiwan. The best native language users are typically those who read extensively, especially reading for pleasure in their youth. This gives them a large vocabulary and an intuitive…

This paper introduces a theory about the role of language in learning physics. The theory is developed in the context of physics students and physicists talking and writing about the subject of quantum mechanics. We found that physicists' language encodes different varieties of analogical models through the use of grammar and conceptual metaphor.…