The goal of this study is to explore new tools for analyzing scientific sense-making in out-of-school settings. Although such measures are now common in science classroom research, dialogically based methodological approaches are relatively new to informal learning research. Such out-of-classroom settings have more recently become a breeding…

Two experiments were conducted to examine the on-line processing mechanisms used by young children to comprehend pronouns. The work focuses on their use of two highly relevant sources of information: (1) the gender and number features carried by English pronouns, and (2) the differing accessibility of discourse entities, as influenced by…

Experiments in bilingual education in Europe increasingly appear under the abbreviation "CLIL" (Content and Language Integrated Learning). The main concept in it seems to be that of integration, as yet little described in research and insufficiently made conscious and explicit in the teaching process. This paper aims at studying the…

Current guidelines on teacher--student rapport, while providing helpful suggestions, fail to address the question of how rapport building can be achieved in contextualised classroom interaction in which a balance needs to be reached between rapport and instructional tasks. Using discourse analysis informed by a conversation analytic approach and…

This study focuses on a group of practitioners from a school district that adopted reform-oriented curriculum materials but later rejected them, partially due to the inclusion of alternative algorithms in the materials. Metaphors implicit in a conversation among the group were analysed to illuminate their perspectives on instructional issues…

As its title suggests, this is an account of "the Second E-Forum on Competency-based Approaches" and summarises the opinions and experiences expressed by the participants. The forum was based on a discussion paper prepared by the Canadian Observatory of Educational Reforms and a series of questions raised by Philippe Jonnaert were used to…

It is essential to develop future teachers' views of diversity, as contemporary teachers teach large numbers of students who are not like them linguistically or culturally. Teacher educators are responsible for preparing preservice and inservice literacy teachers to be effective in these increasingly diverse classrooms. They should continue to…

In this case study, we examined the influence of five groups of communication activities on the quality of student's contributions to online discussion. The activities were the nominal group technique, debate, invited expert, WebQuest and reflective deliberation. Quality of discussion was operationalised as "cognitive presence", a construct…

This paper explores whether an urban school teacher's participation in an inquiry based Master's degree programme contributes to any shifts in her understanding of her non-dominant students and her own teaching. In the first section I define the theoretical constructs of critical education and dialogic discourse. The second section, through a…

A study investigated properties of children's naturally occurring arguments. The arguments were sampled from transcripts of 20 discussions held in 4 fourth-grade classrooms. The principal findings were that children's arguments are filled with seemingly vague referring expressions; that the arguments sometimes do not contain explicit conclusions;…

A study analyzed the choreography of turn-taking and cohesion in classroom computer-mediated communication (CMC) to assess its efficacy as a linguistic intervention. Of the kinds of discussions made possible by CMC, it is the pseudonymous, synchronous conversation that most attracts those who would aspire to the project of changing linguistic…

Since written reports are completed on most calls to which emergency medical technicians (EMTs) respond, report writing is an important part of their professional lives. Discourse analysis focused on how EMTs establish professional authority using specific rhetorical strategies when completing "run reports." One way of understanding the…

This study analyzed writing in prominent British newspapers concerning homosexuality and lesbianism, focusing on these elements of discourse: discourse themes and assumptions underlying their choice; information treated as given or implied in the text; relationships with other discursive formations and texts; signification about the writer's…

Sociopragmatic ambiguity (SPA) is claimed here to differ from other, better-known types of ambiguity, in terms of its locus, cause, and effect. SPA is characteristic of whole-discourse features rather than of lexical items or phrases. The ambiguity is one of social rather than ideational or semantic meaning. It is claimed that SPA arises through…

This paper discusses how to treat code-switching in translations. Examples include use of a word or phrase that is a common expression in the ordinary source language but comes from a related classical language (e.g., "terra nullius," a Latin phrase used in English, a word or expression borrowed from a dialect related to the source language (e.g.,…