Brazilian education activist Paulo Freire (1970) argues that to create social change, oppressed people must have critical consciousness about their conditions, and that this consciousness is developed through dialogue. He theorizes that dialogue allows for reflection and unity building, tools needed to transform society. When considering racial…

Theory building is complex and ongoing. Theories need to be constantly tested and the underlying constructs explored, as knowledge of a field evolves. This study, which is in support of Moore's (1980, 1993) theory of transactional distance, is exploratory and descriptive, and focuses on one of the key variables in the theory dialogue. As…

The scripts of 318 movies were analyzed in this study to determine the vocabulary size necessary to understand 95% and 98% of the words in movies. The movies consisted of 2,841,887 running words and had a total running time of 601 hours and 33 minutes. The movies were classified as either American or British, and then put into the following…

Dialogue journals have been used in a wide range of educational settings for quite some time. These written conversations between teachers and students are especially well suited for the ESL classroom. This article describes how many of the conditions known to foster second language acquisition are inherent in the dialogue journal. Traditionally,…

This study provides an empirical examination of how American learners of German accomplish the social action of requesting in L2 conversation, demonstrating how L2 learners use their linguistic and interactional resources to orient to preference structure in their talk. The data illustrate the sequential contingencies surrounding requests and…

When preparing teaching materials about communication between people from different linguistic backgrounds, many factors require consideration; these include theoretical orientation, purpose, context, educational needs, study level, as well as the cultural backgrounds of the teachers and their target learners. The classroom activity described in…

With the modernization of Chinese society, beginning in the early-20th century, the Chinese language has experienced a fundamental change that has transformed Chinese pedagogic practices. Modern Chinese discourses, whether of social or scientific practices or on China's intellectual heritage, are largely articulated in westernized discourses that…

This qualitative Case Study explored the integrative process of pre-service teachers' disposition development for cultural reciprocity and responsiveness. Over the course of ten months, pre-service teachers completed two Early Childhood Special Education practica in diverse urban communities. The pre-service teachers were placed in public…

The issue of introducing the target culture into language classroom practice has long been an object of debates as well as the opinions of the learners towards it. Eventually, modern practitioners found a way of having the language learners acquainted with the target culture and introducing culture through culture-based textbook activities.…

In this article, the author highlights theoretical positions from the field of contemporary art that articulate the dialogical and relational aesthetic of contemporary socially-engaged art practices. To illustrate and examine the dimensions of such a social aesthetic in practice, the author shares the practice of Canadian artist, Julie Fiala,…

We outline ideas and research in training parents to help their children to appreciate historical patterns of social contingencies as well as contingencies in the present. Parents' use of "lessons and dialogue" is presented as a means of guiding the children's efforts to describe their past experiences in narrative format, along with teaching the…

The objective of this study was to develop a model for building professional learning communities (PLCs) in schools. Samples were public primary schools that consisted of 1,826 teachers from 185 schools in Thailand. They randomized by using two-stage random sampling. The questionnaire was used to survey the level or magnitude of teacher…

Intergroup dialogue provides what students need in order to relate and collaborate across differences, something they have to do in community projects that usually involve interactions across racial, social class, religious, and geographical divides. In this article, the authors demonstrate the efficacy of intergroup dialogue, drawing from a…

Psycholinguistic studies dealing with Alzheimer's disease (AD) commonly consider verbal aspects of language. In this article, we investigated both verbal and non-verbal aspects of speech production in AD. We used pauses and hesitations as markers of planning difficulties and hypothesized that AD patients show different patterns in the process of…

The present paper based on extensive fieldwork D conducted on Kalasha, an endangered language spoken in the three small valleys in Chitral District of Northwestern Pakistan, exposes a spontaneous dialogue-based elicitation of linguistic material used for the description and documentation of the language. After a brief display of the basic typology…