With President George W. Bush's unprecedented call in January 2006 to expand the foreign language capacity of the United States, it has become clear that languages other than English (LOE) are of great interest to public policy in the United States. Yet the language capacity of the United States remains poorly documented. The 2000 General Social…

The aim of the paper is to examine current and evolving supply side transition policy initiatives in the light of (a) particular demand side needs of urban young people classified as those most disadvantaged and potentially marginalized; and (b) the emerging realities of accessing and operating within particular examples of high value-added…

This study examines the discursive practice of participation in an elementary classroom community aiming towards collective meaning-making and joint creation of knowledge. The theoretical and methodological basis of the study is shaped by the sociocultural and socio-linguistic approaches. Through examining the communicative practices and…

Cross-national stability in private speech (PS) and short-term memory was investigated in Saudi Arabian (n=63) and British (n=58) 4- to 8-year-olds. Assumed differences in child-adult interaction between the 2 nationality groups led to predictions of Gender ? Nationality interactions in the development of verbal mediation. British boys used more…

Faculty and their work are the heart, and thus determine the health, of every college and university and have a lasting impact on the many lives they touch. Well over a million faculty members now teach about 15 million students at over 4,000 colleges and universities in this country. The continued vitality of the academic profession is therefore…

This article examines the integration of social justice in teacher education and defines dimensions of teachers' opportunities to learn. Findings come from a comparative case study of two elementary teacher education programs: the Teachers for Tomorrow's Schools Program at Mills College and the Teacher Education Intern Program at San Jose State…

The purpose of this study was to examine the effect of multicultural music instruction on classroom learning outcomes. Fifth-grade children (10-11 years of age; N = 170) from four schools were randomly assigned to one of two instructional treatments: music concept and sociocultural context. The former approach used formal elements of music as a…

Research in Mexican and British schools provides an empirical basis for arguing that, by the use of certain kinds of interactional strategies, teachers can enable children to become more able in managing individual and joint reasoning and learning activities in the classroom. The research described is based on a sociocultural conception and…

We examined the relationship between parents' behaviour and children's use of simple arithmetic strategies while playing a board game in contrast to solving arithmetic problems. In a microgenetic study spanning 3 weeks, 5-year-old children who were just beginning kindergarten played a modified game of "Chutes and Ladders" with one of…

In this article we describe an educational leadership faculty's collective efforts to improve its curriculum by examining meanings, implications, and challenges of sociocultural identity differences for its graduate programs in educational leadership. We employed a case study method to examine the process and interim effects of faculty engagement…

This study is a modest attempt to use three Korean primary school children and their English diaries as go-betweens to mediate in an apparent dispute between the founding fathers of socio-cultural theory about the nature of language and language awareness. According to Bruner, Vygotsky holds that mediation by others and self-mediation of written…

This article reports on the life history narratives of nine female EFL teachers working in higher education in Japan. An interpretive qualitative analysis of the stories suggested that gender cannot be viewed as a free-floating attribute of individual subjectivities but rather must be seen as one of many components in an ever-evolving network of…

Postpartum depression (PPD) is a major mental health disorder that affects at least 13 percent of new mothers and has detrimental consequences for populations that are of concern to social workers, such as low-income women, women of color, young women, and single mothers. Despite the relevance of PPD to multiple social work problems and…

National educational reform must be interpreted from a broader sociopolitical vantage point. Following the introduction, "The Change Process and Educational Reform" by Val D. Rust, the four papers in part 1 are devoted primarily to conceptual issues related to educational reform. They include: (1) "Problems of Educational Reforms in a Changing…

A cultural profile of the French-Canadian business community of Quebec is presented, focusing on seven aspects of business communication: language; environment and technology; social organization; degree of contextual understanding; authority conception; nonverbal behavior; and temporal conception. The history of French and English language use in…