Describes a writing assignment designed to help students incorporate into a single essay Moffett's writer-subject progressions: dramatization, narration, exposition, and logical argumentation. Describes one student's progress through successive drafts to arrive at this goal, and how discussions of her draft helped the other students. (HTH)

Explores the assumptions underlying the use of composition textbooks based on nineteenth-century forms and modes of discourse: description, narration, exposition, and argumentation. Presents alternatives to this approach, developed from schema theory and developmental psychology. (HTH)

Outlines the current situation in critical pedagogy, and examines the relation of language to formation of subjectivity and praxis. How language works to construct and mediate reality and interacts with experience is explored, and provisional elements of a critical pedagogy that has the potential to create active learners are presented. (SLD)

Presents a study in which children in four grade 2 classrooms learned about transformational geometry and symmetry by designing quilts, while their four teachers participated in professional development focused on understanding children's thinking in arithmetic, and two of the teachers participated in additional workshops on students' thinking…

The study set out to investigate the impact of interactive whiteboards (IWBs) on teacher--pupil interaction at Key Stage 2 in the teaching of literacy and numeracy. As part of the National Literacy and Numeracy Strategies, IWBs have been made widely available as a pedagogic tool for promoting interactive whole class teaching. In order to…

College students, when writing essays in writing courses, are generally called upon to show that they have an ability to organize the essay according to an established pattern which includes an introduction, the body of the text, and a conclusion. This pattern of discourse, called "Essayist Literacy," is most favored by mainstream…

Two exercises were developed to demonstrate how Mikhail Bakhtin's conception of novelistic language and creative interpretation are instrumental in teaching students to read creatively. The text chosen for these exercises was "Crime Against Nature" by Minnie Bruce Pratt. According to Bakhtin's scheme, a fiction can be read most…

Discusses James Britton's "English" course, which progresses from participant to spectator and from the transactional to the poetic in writing, as an alternative to the impractical and unnatural five-paragraph essay. (HTH)

Suggests that oral skills classes provide the ideal forum in which to address discourse issues, and that target-language discourse norms, particularly as they relate to another cultural belief system, must be taught explicitly. (Author/VWL)

The paper presents an intensive study of a micro-event aiming at the characterization of teacher's discourse from a multimodal communication perspective in a secondary school science classroom dealing with the topic of "water cycle." The research addresses the following questions: (a) What communicative modes are used by the teacher?, (b) what…

In this article, Bardige and Segal discuss how teachers can help a toddler's language and literacy development through conversation. They suggest an array of tactics, from asking young children open-ended, intellectually challenging questions to going beyond the here and now when carrying on a conversation. Research has shown that the practice of…

The purpose of this article is to describe Discourse Time (D.T.), a teaching practice that aims to integrate argumentative literacy, the third piece of the literacy puzzle, into math learning environments. Snapshots from a tenth grade classroom at Skyview Academy High School in Thornton, Colorado is used to paint a vivid picture of what D.T. looks…

This study details an innovative approach to coordinating and enhancing multiple levels of assessment and discursive feedback around an existing multi-media curricular environment called Astronomy Village[R]. As part of a broader design-based research programme, the study analysed small group interactions in feedback activities across two design…

This paper is designed to extend a dialogue on the nature of explanations to include instructional explanations. The paper explores the distinctions between specific types of explanations, (common, disciplinary, self, and instructional) with respect to specific features (problem type, initiation, evidence, form, and audience). Given this context…

Using software and a coding system developed by the author, the text of all spoken and written discourse was analyzed from four face-to-face (FTF) courses and two courses taught via computer-mediated communication (CMC). Results indicated that interaction patterns in the CMC courses resembled discussion, whereas patterns in the FTF courses…