Quantitative analyses using CLASS 3.0 software and qualitative discourse analyses were conducted of the instructional and institutional effects of tracking in high-and low-track American literature classes taught by the same teacher, a participant in a national study of the effects of dialogic classroom discourse patterns on student achievement.…

The northern part of Sweden is characterised by depopulation and relatively high levels of unemployment among young people. As a consequence, a number of projects have been established for the purpose of strengthening young people's creativity and spirit of enterprise. The aim of this article is to problematise the concept of "enterprise…

A large portion of the early childhood literature in the area of cultural, racial, and linguistic diversity addresses the practices of institutions for young children, immigrant/refugee parents' understandings of their situation, and provides recommendations for more inclusive practices. This body of literature has proved very useful in bringing…

The historical process of the institutionalisation of childhood is in a period of intensification, as children enter institutions at ever earlier ages and remain in them for longer periods. This intensification presents great opportunities but also involves many risks since everything is dangerous. A particular set of risks are produced from the…

Active communication with others is key to human learning. This straightforward premise currently undergirds much theory and research in student learning in general, and in second language and literacy learning in particular. Both of these academic areas have long acknowledged communication's central role in successful learning with the exact…

In October of 2001, the Leggatt Inquiry into salmon farming traveled to four small communities (Port Hardy, Tofino, Alert Bay, and Campbell River) close to the centers of operation for the finfish aquaculture industry in British Columbia. In doing so, it gave local people, particularly First Nations people, an opportunity to speak about salmon…

Computer mediated conferencing (CMC) has been widely viewed as a valuable forum for providing opportunities for interaction among learners in a distance education setting. Interaction in distance contexts; however, is not well understood, and it has been argued that social markers are cued in online communications and that gender influences…

In preparing students for their future discourse communities, the EAP/ESP literature has shown interest in the role of hedges in scientific literature. This interest has resulted in several studies that define and classify hedges, and hypothesize about their purpose. With these as our theoretical basis, we are led to ask "What is the relation to…

This article reports some outcomes from an exploratory study that compares children diagnosed with ADHD and without language impairment with typically developing children for aspects of language use. Discourse analysis based on a systemic functional linguistics approach is applied to spoken and written samples from three different text types that…

Our research focuses on bilingual adults enrolled in the Teachers for English Language Learners (TELL) program. TELL is a scholarship program whose goal is to increase the number of critically-minded bilingual educators in the state of Georgia in the United States. In this paper, we use critical discourse analysis to inform theoretical and…

A critical question for me as a teacher/researcher in the field of inclusive education is how to reposition children with moderate and severe intellectual disabilities as participants rather than subjects in the debate. In this paper, I develop a methodology of inclusion that comprises an ethics of consent and a pedagogy for research participation…

The academic study of Education (as a social, historical, and theoretical phenomenon) is complicated by the fact of our immersion in it. This paper combines Said's idea of "contrapuntal reading" with Bourdieu's notion of reflexivity to explore what happens when students on an Education course directly confront the fact of their everyday…

The paper's focus is "The Dakar framework for action--education for all: meeting our collective commitments", which presents the UNESCO, G8, World Bank and International Monetary Fund's blueprint for the "development" of education globally by 2015. Taking a discourse analytic approach, discussion of the "Dakar framework" make two claims. The first…

When composition instructors discuss teaching diversity, the concept of tolerance often takes over the conversation. Tolerance constructs an ideal "comfort zone" where every student's voice can be heard and respected. While tolerance is perceived as an admirable goal, Marinara has concluded that the ideal of the comfortable classroom space from…

In two experiments, students overheard two computer-controlled virtual agents discussing four computer literacy topics in dialog discourse and four in monologue discourse. In Experiment 1, the virtual tutee asked a series of deep questions in the dialog condition, but only one per topic in the monologue condition in both studies. In the dialog…