Using a sociocritical approach to the study of language and literacy and discourse analysis, this article examines student initiated challenges in a sheltered English course with two types of English learners: native+, ESL students; and, recently, arriving ESL students. The analysis draws on 19 hours of video-recorded observations of…

Transitions in early childhood classrooms are changes from one activity to another or from one place to another. Well-planned transitions can be positive learning experiences for children. During transitions children can sing songs, follow a leader by copying his or her physical motions, practice counting, or even recite a favorite poem or nursery…

Task-based learning has been recommended in immersion classes in order to provide relief from the usual teacher-fronted lessons and increase the opportunities for student output. This paper presents one aspect of the data collected during the on-going evaluation of a late partial immersion French programme in an Australian school. It presents the…

This study examines the effectiveness of a classroom response system (CRS) and architecture students' perceptions of real-time feedback. CRS is designed to increase active engagement of students by their responses to a question or prompt via wireless keypads. Feedback is immediately portrayed on a classroom projector for discussion. The authors…

The purpose of this paper is to examine how dialogue is involved in learning and teaching in the classroom. Dialogue is present in many forms as it is used in group interactions, used with technology and how pre-service teachers communicate with their school supervisors during their training. Research was conducted through Educational Resources…

This mixed method study examined the oral contributions and personal journal writing of 8 focal students in an eleventh-grade integrated history/English classroom to ascertain whether and to what extent the students had appropriated three types of cognitive strategies desired and modeled by their teachers. Quantitative and qualitative analyses of…

This study introduces performative identity as a lens for understanding student participation in discursive classroom routines and potentials for fostering student agency and enhanced learning. We argue that student negotiation of performative identities can facilitate productive transformations of individual and group trajectories. This study…

This paper studies high school classroom sequences, compiled through critical sociolinguistic ethnography, where norm-transgression is made explicit, and how authority is recovered by the teacher after an open period where class participants generally seize to digress. This way, we will be able to approach several dimensions of linguistic…

This paper examines the media coverage of the murder of a young Muslim girl in Mississauga, Ontario in December 2007. We examine how that coverage moved from concerns for a terrible family event to the use of the language of Samuel Huntington's "Clash of Civilizations." We explore the nature of this exaggeration that occurs in times of…

We report an analysis of the language used by two instructors teaching two undergraduate mathematics classes that exhibited high student participation yet differed in their level of dialogical engagement. We focus on the way instructors' language contributes to opening or closing the opportunities for students' engagement with mathematical dialog,…

The development of transcripts is central to the work of many researchers yet questions of what and how researchers transcribe, and why, receive little attention in research literature. Conversation analysis is one research approach that has consistently addressed the integral relationship between theoretical and methodological perspectives,…

This study examines the effectiveness of using scholarly descriptions of inquiry-based teaching as a professional development strategy aimed at improving elementary teachers' social understandings (i.e., how teachers perceive their own and their students' social roles and relationships in the context of inquiry-based science instruction). The…

This paper is part of a larger project on teacher-student interaction and the contextual issues which shape them. It reported that the reticence of English majors is caused by the communicative environment that the teachers create in their interactions with their students. The data were collected through observations, audio- and videotaping, and…

This paper describes how teachers employ gaze, head nods and pointing gestures in allocating response turns to students in whole-class instructional interaction. Specifically, it focuses on examining teachers' embodied allocations--that is, turn-allocations produced (mostly) by embodied means--and the sequential positions in which they are…

We set out to understand how different instantiations of inquiry emerged in two different years of one elementary teacher's classroom. Longitudinal observations from Mrs. Charles' 5th grade science classroom forced us to carefully and deliberately consider who exactly was responsible for the change in the class activities and norms. We provide…