This qualitative research study examined the connections made by refugee and immigrant youth to a teacher proposed mirror text at an elementary ESL book group. Mirror texts, or books in which youth with marginalized identities can see themselves reflected, have been argued to promote text connections and reading comprehension for minoritized…

This dissertation research is a longitudinal classroom ethnography in a second-grade classroom in a public Northeastern suburban school. It is a story of surprise for me as researcher, as I discover the multiplicity of how engagement can be conceptualized in this English-medium classroom with emergent bi/multilingual children. As tensions flowed…

The understanding of the basic principles of inclusive education motivates the inclusion of children with special needs in general education schools. The paper presents the process of implementing inclusive education in Latvia and the teachers' and parents' understanding of the role of communication in including children with special needs,…

In this work, we focus on a relatively new theory in mathematics education research, which views thinking as communication and characterizes mathematics as a form of discourse. We discuss how this framework can be utilized in different educational settings by giving examples from our own research to highlight the insights it provides in the…

The purpose of this study was to examine the mathematics instructional practices of 75 second-year elementary teachers (K-5) in terms of the learning opportunities provided to their students. On average, each teacher completed instructional logs for 43 days across the school year. Select items were analyzed in order to better understand the…

Teacher telling continues to be poorly understood within inquiry. In this paper I extend prior efforts to reimagine telling within contemporary pedagogical thought. Using a case study, I investigated a well-regarded teacher's use of mathematical telling while supporting groups and individuals working on tasks. The teacher used seven unique types…

I have spent much of the last two years working in a school in Ramallah, Palestine, supporting new teachers of English. I worked in the classroom, in partnership, sharing the planning and teaching of lessons. This essay is about exploring what happens to texts in a specific classroom context, about how a particularly English text, "Romeo and…

The term translanguaging has received a great deal of attention in recent years in applied linguistics. Originally coined to describe a bilingual pedagogical approach Ofelia García extended the definition to encompass the multiple discursive practices of bilingual communities. This broader definition has been taken up in many different ways by…

Informal formative assessments (IFAs) are classroom interactions teachers use to gather information about their students' learning, interpret it, and act on this information to achieve academic goals. One of the responses science teachers can enact as the result of IFA is constructing explanations to clarify science concepts to their students.…

This article reports on a collaborative action research project, conducted in a pre-primary school in South Central Uganda, which explores the opportunities for children to draw upon and integrate their home and community-based knowledge and experiences through mother tongue (MT) instruction and resources. We use the funds of knowledge (Moll,…

The paper outlines the peculiarities of Applied Linguistics as a branch of science and specialty provided by universities worldwide. Its scope, relevance in modern labour market and immediate relation to communication and language studies have been analyzed. Its advantages as a flourishing educational program for tertiary education and as an…

It is widely accepted that the learning of a new language, among other advantages, promotes respect and interest of the students towards other cultures and languages. The question is how learning languages can be promoted in educational settings. The aim of the present study is to explore the principles of communicative language teaching in…

This study examines how language-minority and language-majority students and their teachers created a community of practice which allowed for meaningful participation of diverse learners in literacy practices, within a high school context in which language-minority students were historically marginalised. Drawing from ethnographic data, interviews…

Ghana's language-in-education policy, which mandates the use of L1 as medium of instruction at the lower primary classroom, is not strictly adhered to in majority of Ghanaian classrooms. One factor that has militated against the smooth implementation of the policy is the multilingual nature of Ghana and its classrooms. This sociolinguistic survey,…

Recent migration combined with strategies to diversify the teacher workforce has led to complexities in teacher diversity identified by the term 'superdiversity' (Vertovec, 2006). This article builds on recent work on the processes of convergence and superdiversity (Wessendorf, 2011) by focusing on meaningful encounters in the mathematics…