Drawing on Mikhail Bakhtin's Carnival theory, this article focuses on specific outcomes of a research project the author undertook in Hong Kong, where drama pedagogy has been recently introduced into the official curriculum. It investigates the ways in which laughter, noise, jokes, frolic and popular literacies commonly appear in classrooms where…

User perceptions and experiences of complementary education are neglected in the research literature, yet they are important in providing understanding concerning complementary schools and their impact on educational and social identities. This paper explores the constructions of parents of pupils attending these schools, and of teachers at these…

In compliance with the Indian Education Act (NMSA1976 Section 22), the purpose of the Tribal Education Status Report (TESR) is to inform stakeholders of the Public Education Department's (PED) current initiatives specific to American Indian students and their educational progress. This report examines both the current conditions and recent trends…

Acculturation and language proficiency have been found to be inter-related both from the perspective of second language acquisition (Schumann, 1978, 1986) and socio-psychological adaptation in cross-cultural contacts (Ward, Bochner, & Furnham, 2001). However, the predictions as to the effect of a particular strategy on success differ, with…

In this article, factors inhibiting the use of mother tongue as the language of learning and teaching (LoLT) in rural foundation phase classes is investigated. I analysed qualitative data from focus group interviews with 20 foundation phase teachers that were selected through purposive sampling. Findings show that factors such as prior learner…

Malaysian philosophy, purpose and objective of the education system are rooted and based on policies stated in the National Education Policy 1956 and Education Act 1961. Whereas the Education Ordinance 1952 urged all Chinese and Tamil schools to be given an equal opportunity to learn English and Malay language together with their L1 (mother…

This article focuses on the features of Sami language instruction at the first school grades in Norway. The most important part is to describe what kind of challenges Sami language instruction at the first grades as an indigenous people's language and with the status of a minority language has. This situation introduces some differences and…

This second research paper on science education in Maori-medium school contexts complements an earlier article published in this journal (Stewart, 2005). Science and science education are related domains in society and in state schooling in which there have always been particularly large discrepancies in participation and achievement by Maori. In…

The purpose of this study was to determine if animated illustrations would increase the recall and comprehension of a subject matter, English as a foreign language (EFL), among Chinese college students. The study was specifically designed to identify the influence of graphics on Chinese EFL students' learning by comparing abstract versus concrete…

In this paper, we argue that discussions of transfer in L2 writing and composition studies have focused primarily on the reuse of past learning and thus have not adequately accounted for the adaptation of learned writing knowledge in unfamiliar situations. In an effort to expand disciplinary discussions of transfer in L2 writing and composition…

Two eye-tracking experiments in the Visual World paradigm compared how monolingual Russian (Experiment 1) and heritage Russian-English bilingual (Experiment 2) listeners process contrastiveness online in Russian. Materials were color adjective-noun phrases embedded into the split-constituent construction Krasnuju polozite zvezdovku..."Red put…

The goal of this study is to investigate the role of working memory capacity in L2 attainment and performance. The study uses an L1 reading span task to measure working memory of a group of 59 high-intermediate/advanced learners of English, and a film retelling task to measure their oral production. The analysis first showed a moderate to high…

Administrators in the Chicago public schools are seeking to strike the right balance between providing guidance and permitting flexibility as they put in place the nation's first state mandate for providing bilingual education to preschoolers. New rules approved by the Illinois state board of education in June flesh out a January 2009 change that…

There has been a long history of Chinese learning and teaching (CLT) in the UK, but until recently CLT was predominantly confined to community schools for Chinese children at weekends and a small number of other schools and universities. Therefore, it had remained peripheral for a long time in terms of student numbers and its position in the…

The purpose of the present study was to investigate the L2 use rate in EFL classrooms through introducing three task conditions in learning lexical items. Data were collected from a group of freshman university students (male and female) studying in Islamic Azad university of Sabzevar, Iran (N = 73). Based on their performance on a Michigan TOEFL…