The novel, it has generally been assumed, was from its very beginnings a literary form designed to be read by solitary, silent individuals. One consequence of this assumption is that the class novel, read amid all the noise and sociality of the classroom, tends to be treated as a preparation for more authentic, private reading, or even as a poor…

In English as a foreign language (EFL) classes, teachers face the common challenge of demonstrating the importance of English to students who do not have much contact with users of English in their daily life. This often translates to a lack of progress in English language learning in settings such as Thailand, where in spite of the emphasis put…

For adolescents who struggle with reading, a lack of confidence and reluctance to read in content areas such as history/social science presents challenges to learning. More specifically, difficulties with text comprehension and analysis limit content knowledge acquisition and self-expression, which can impact academic success. Therefore, it is…

For centuries, the titans of educational reform--Plato, Rousseau, Dewey, Piaget, Erikson, Csikszentmihalyi and others--have championed the educational benefits of play. Yet many professors and administrators are boggled by the idea of playing academic games in college. They instantly dismiss faculty initiatives like "Reacting to the…

This personal reflection looks at the benefits of using performance pedagogy in the Shakespeare classroom, both in terms of a general understanding of the period and a student's personal connection to the text. Though the essay acknowledges our profession's ongoing dialogue in this area, it mostly seeks to look at how a student may change once she…

Nominal and pronominal address forms, which play a central role in the construction of interpersonal relations (cf. Bargiela et al. 2002; Clyne et al. 2009), have been the focus of attention in different linguistics subfields for several decades now. Less attention, however, has been paid to these forms from a variational pragmatics (Schneider and…

We have used a role-play exercise to help students understand the role of the whips in British parliamentary politics, a subject with which students often struggle. In itself, this proved a valuable learning and teaching tool, but we found it became even more useful when we incorporated a practitioner into the exercise. This overcame some of the…

Social interventions during physical education classes can help students increase their appropriate behaviors and decrease inappropriate ones. Many educators assume that students develop appropriate social skills as a byproduct of participating in physical education and sport. However, the physical education literature shows that appropriate…

Children learning to read and write in rural areas in Southern Africa perform poorly compared to children in urban schools. The poor results of rural schools in national assessments of reading literacy are explained by the deficits of rural areas: poverty, under-resourced schools and under-qualified teachers. Children in rural areas are frequently…

Soft skills programs (SSPs) for staff are now an established part of staff learning and development in organisations. The lived experience of university staff attending these types of programmes has until now remained largely unexplored. As part of a professional doctorate in education, I used autoethnography to investigate the 'social world' of…

Translanguaging, the movement between communicative modes and features of different languages, is becoming an established research tradition in content-focused second language learning contexts. Pedagogic translanguaging practices nevertheless remain under-applied and under-researched in foreign language instructional settings, whether…

Interdisciplinary and collaborative projects between industry and academia provide exceptional opportunities for learning. Project Sanitarium is a serious game for Windows PC and Tablet which aims to embed learning about tuberculosis (TB) through the player taking on the role of a doctor and solving cases across the globe. The project developed as…

Recent years have seen increasing awareness of the wide range of mental health problems faced by students. Gatekeeper training has been shown to have a positive impact on knowledge and attitudes about suicide prevention, although the evidence for skills acquisition is limited. We utilised the STORM® training package in an exploratory study to…

In this paper, a practical course for listening, speaking, reading and writing was designed using authentic video material. The aim of this paper is to offer tools to the TEFL teacher in order to design new course materials using video material. The development procedure is explained in detail, and the underpinning main theories are also…

The concept of "perezhivanie" has gained theoretical attention and is beginning to feature in empirical studies of young children, where the role of emotion is foregrounded (e.g., Ferholt, 2010). However, the idea of a "collective perezhivanie" of adults and children in early childhood settings has not yet been researched. In…