Highlights the articles included in this special issue, which focus on a common set of questions that permit readers to read contrastively across articles with differing goals, data sets, and analytic traditions. (Author/VWL)

Background: In the era of education reform when new teaching approaches are being advocated, it is important to investigate how different classroom discourse patterns are related to different educational outcomes. Aim: The purpose of the study was to analyse the whole classroom discourse of two teacher interns' writing classes. It was conducted…

The ideology of monolingualism prevails throughout society, including within minority ethnic communities who are bilingual and multilingual. Some minority ethnic communities in Britain believe that the response to the dominance of English language is to replace it with other languages. Complementary schools--language and culture classes organised…

New views of proficiency in K-8 science that highlight the importance of engaging children in the discourses and practices of science have raised the stakes for elementary teachers and the teacher educators who prepare them. In this paper, a framework for teaching science as argument is presented. The framework is advanced as a means of addressing…

This research explores learner-learner interactions (n = 18) in an authentic EFL classroom. First, we examined the nature of interactional feedback provided during two decision-making tasks. We then investigated whether the learners had made use of the feedback by looking at whether (and if so, how) they had modified their output immediately after…

This article explores the construction of a bilingual professional identity in a bilingual creative-writing graduate program in southwest Texas by analyzing a classroom event and the participants' interpretation of it. In bilingual classrooms the resources available to construct professional identities include a large repertoire of linguistic…

Five questions guided a case study exploring the relationship between oral narrative and discussion in middle school literature study: (a) Relative to similar classrooms in a large-scale study, how can overall literature instruction be characterized? (b) Relative to similar classrooms in a large-scale study, how well do students achieve in the…

The preceding two essays focus on the ongoing challenge to engage students in meaningful conversation with the course content, their reading, their instructor, and one another. The authors, Maureen Neal and Ed Jones, have read each other's essays and provided the following brief responses. This cross talk between the writers is an attempt to make…

Drawing on recent developments in dialogic approaches to learning and teaching, I examine the roots of dialogic meaning-making as a concept in classroom practices. Developments in the field of dialogic pedagogy are reviewed and the case for dialogic engagement as an approach to classroom interaction is considered. The implications of dialogic…

This longitudinal study was designed to (a) examine changes in children's deliberate memory across the 1st grade; (b) characterize the memory-relevant aspects of their classrooms; and (c) explore linkages between the children's performance and the language their teachers use in instruction. To explore contextual factors that may facilitate the…

Older students (aged 65+) in the language classroom may be presenting hearing deficits not experienced by their traditional university classmates (aged 18-24). L2 teachers need to be aware of the main processes involved in hearing, as well as such important factors as the temporary threshold effect and masking effects, in order to encourage…

This article describes the A, E, I, O, U technique, designed to help teachers ensure that teaching and learning are not mutually exclusive in the classroom. Most teachers would agree that motivating average teenagers to communicate how they got an answer or justify their problem-solving strategies can be as difficult as teaching a dog to whistle.…

Two-way immersion is a model for bilingual education designed to help language-minority students develop additive bilingualism while at the same time offering language-majority students a chance to learn a second language. There is a great deal of rhetoric around two-way immersion that claims these programs aim to improve overall equity among…

Mainstream ESL pedagogy has been dominated by monolingual methods for the past century, but the default teaching mode in many EFL contexts is in fact bilingual. A challenge we currently face is to find fresh ways of describing such bilingual teaching. This paper attempts to begin to do so by taking the notions of scaffolding and…

Interactive whiteboards (IWB) are an innovation that is gaining considerable presence in many contemporary classrooms. This paper examines the use of IWBs in mathematics classrooms. Using a productive pedagogies framework to analyse classroom videos, it is proposed that the classrooms observed used a restricted approach in their use of IWBs. It…