Describes the use of mini-dialogues in the English-as-Foreign-Language class to improve students' communicative competence. (Author/VWL)

Activity structures such as classroom lessons and initiation-reply-evaluation sequences are important cultural tools that help students and teachers accomplish everyday activity, but they are not well adapted to open-ended inquiry conducted by students in small groups with teacher guidance. In this research, I identified alternative activity…

In the current debate about the abstractness of children's early grammatical knowledge, Tomasello & Abbott-Smith (2002) have suggested that children might first develop "weak" or "partial" representations of abstract syntactic structures. This paper attempts to characterize these structures by comparing the development of constructions around…

Drawing on material gathered during case studies of a Jewish and a Catholic secondary school, I introduce a number of different stories from the staff, and students in the schools and from myself as the researcher. I argue that these can be understood as forms of dialogue in which voices can be heard in some detail. They throw light on various,…

This paper presents a case study that describes and discusses the problems encountered during the design and implementation of a blended learning course, largely taught online through a web-based learning environment. Based on Moore's theory of transactional distance, the course was explicitly designed to have dialogue at its heart. However, the…

This paper draws on the work of Mikhail Bakhtin and Norman Fairclough to show how dialogue is central to the construction of identity in networked management learning. The paper is based on a case study of a networked management learning course in higher education and attempts to illustrate how participants negotiate issues of difference,…

The emergence of what is increasingly becoming known as the knowledge age implies that higher education should prepare students to be, primarily, knowledge workers. This proposition triggered a small scale study in which structured interviews were carried out with 25 second-year undergraduates registered for a psychology module on motivational…

This study describes the effectiveness of a read-aloud cross-age partnership in service learning among students of various age groups (pre K-college sophomore) attending the different schools located on a university campus. Research-based theories of read-aloud to children were used to train the reading volunteers. Multicultural story books aided…

A literature review was conducted on the subject of dialogue. The review examined these topics: how professionals learn and come to reflect critically upon their practice through talk; the barriers that are embodied in prevalent communicative structures and dominant discourses that impede reflective learning through talk; and how these barriers…

The guide to Hebrew language learning is a set of lessons and activities with a functional, conversational approach. It contains 16 units presenting language patterns and expressions typical of everyday Hebrew usage, with exercises and opportunities for simulation of familiar situations, role-playing, and dramatization. Each unit contains a…

These instructional materials are designed to help non-English speaking students in electronics classes to improve their knowledge of English. Covered in the six units are the following topics: safety, hand tools, measuring electricity, component identification, component function, and basic soldering. The lessons include readings, vocabulary…

This article tries to understand, by using some poststructural tools, practices with children that were performed by a Left action group in Sweden in the 1960s and 1970s. Modernist resistance discourses of enlightenment and liberation from obedience, silence and innocence can be seen as being produced, together with postmodern acts of unfolding…

The study described here offers a model of target-context relations in language comprehension. It is based on the hypothesis that the same formal mechanisms that produce cohesion in discourse and texts are critically involved in language comprehension. The model posits that: (1) the comprehension of a target turn is primarily dependent on the…

Four activities for language learning are presented, including: class completion of incomplete dialogues excerpted from major literary works; games for learning vocabulary and civilization using words beginning with the same letter; a lesson using cartoons to elicit description and dialogues; and a unit on appropriate and inappropriate…

Communication breakdowns occurring in the speech of seven language learning-disabled children (aged 9-11) were examined in conversation and narration and compared to normal peers. Length of communication unit and rate of communication breakdowns per communication unit were greater in narration than conversation compared to controls. No differences…