Communicative techniques in English Language Teaching (ELT) have their origins in Western English-speaking contexts and have been transplanted into EFL environments. This has occurred without a great deal of research about how they work in these new situations. Group work is one well known technique of communicative language teaching now commonly…

A conference event is mediated through keynote speeches, power point presentations, professional role-playing and the turgid language of policy agendas, initiatives, benchmarks and outputs. Serious human concerns rarely surface in the orchestrated and anodyne arena of professional conference-going. The ready recourse to ritual and procedure means…

Serious incidents at school have profound consequences for many people the direct or indirect victims-and often cause major tensions within the school. The school board has few or no means at its disposal for giving a constructive response. The positive results of restorative group conferencing in a judicial framework created the expectation that…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to present a case study on the creation of an intelligent discussion board (IDB) that promotes active participation of all students, better threading, and re-uses vast collections of discussions. Design/methodology/approach: This paper presents an IDB that was modeled like an intelligent tutoring system with a…

Most students who engage in name-calling or tell demeaning jokes don't have deeply thought-out and deep-seated bias towards particular groups. Often, they're just picking up on the messages they hear repeated again and again in the schools. When peers challenge the language, it not only cuts down on the degrading messages themselves, but it also…

In recent years in Spain there has been a growing popular concern as well as research interest in the study of social relations pertaining to coexistence at school, including a desire to know the real incidence and nature of conflicts involved. Thus, a great variety of school interventions have been underway, with the aim of reducing the…

This study explored ways to increase authentic participation of Mexican American parents in the education of their children. It focused on direct dialogue between Spanish-speaking parents and English-speaking school personnel and how dialogue facilitated group development. The design of the study included phenomenological inquiry and action…

This phenomenological study sought to identify the attributes of meaningful learning experiences as found in an outdoor education program. Thirteen students in the Wilderness Writing Program at Brigham Young University were the sample of this study. Their participation in outdoor recreational activities and their reflections about their…

Immigration to a different country can change one's socioeconomic status, familial and social networks, cultural behavioral norms, language, and values. Immigrants to the United States usually reevaluate themselves and their identity as a result of this acculturation process. Group counseling can help alleviate the sense of isolation many…

In this article, the author examines the character of the conversations generated in an elementary teacher group as they worked on mathematical problems together and analyzed their students' work. Two distinct forms of talk--"exploratory" and "expository"--were found. The first type of talk occurred most prominently when discussions centered on…

In this article, we examine the construction of word meaning by students during collaborative activities in a multicultural classroom at a Dutch primary school. The analysis is based on recordings of student talk in small groups of four or five students during mathematics lessons. Difficulties with specific terms and expressions frequently arose…

This study involved fourth grade children as co-researchers of their engaged, aesthetic reading experience. As members of the "Readers as Researchers Club," they documented their engagement with text--how they create, enter, and sustain the story world. The children, who self-identified as avid readers, explored the activities central to their…

This article describes how professors became magnets for crackpots bearing pet theories and searching for validation. Scott A. Hughes, an associate professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, received a 22-page, single-spaced screed this May just begging for a place in the crackpot file. The subject line read, in part,…

The action research study described in this report outlines the design and implementation of a unit of blended instruction in a traditional high school English classroom. Twenty technical high school students in an 11th grade Honors English class engaged in a variety of internet-based activities in conjunction with traditional learning activities…

As part of a Howard Hughes Program for Innovation in Science Education grant at Iowa State University, a series of interdisciplinary graduate teaching assistant learning communities (TALC) were developed. The purpose of these communities was to create an environment to facilitate teaching assistants' pedagogical development and training to enhance…