Using Ivanic's (2004) framework, the study of 20 elementary teachers examines the relationships among teachers' beliefs about writing, their instructional practices, and contextual factors. While the district-adopted curriculum reflected specific discourses, teachers' beliefs and practices reflected a combination of discourses. The nature of the…

This article presents an overview of the perceived importance and accelerated spread of English language education, both formal and informal, in three East Asian countries (i.e. China, Japan and South Korea) against the backdrop of globalisation and emergent ideological, sociocultural and educational trends. It begins with a review of the recent…

This paper develops a new analysis of homework by building on feminist scholarship which documents the invisible labour done by women in support of their children's education. While numerous studies have examined the relationship between homework and achievement, little attention has been paid to the largely gendered and potentially stressful…

Traditional, cognitive-oriented theories of English language acquisition tend to employ experimental modes of inquiry and neglect social, cultural and historical contexts. In this paper, I review the theoretical debate over methodology by examining ontological, epistemological and methodological controversies around cognitive-oriented theories. I…

Historically speaking, reading and writing among African Americans were collaborative acts involving a wide range of texts that held social, economic, political, or spiritual significance. One of the constants of literacy collaboratives was being regularly and purposefully engaged with print within a meaningful social context. During the summer of…

This article explores Vygotsky's concept of the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) in the Malaysian context to support local reform of the Moral Education (ME) classroom. Small groups of students in three different types of school were involved in a participant action research (PAR) project. Such classrooms in Malaysia bring together students from…

This essay explores some of the areas in which language teaching and intercultural education overlap. We position language teaching as embedded within sociocultural practices and shaped by attitudes toward bilingualism and native vs. nonnative speaker status. Specifically, we question language practices that exclude or downplay the benefits of…

In this Teaching Tips article, the author argues for a dialogic conception of voice, based in the work of Mikhail Bakhtin. He demonstrates a dialogic view of voice in action, using two writing examples about the same topic from his daughter, a fifth-grade student. He then provides five practical tips for teaching a dialogic conception of voice in…

This article tells the story of a child immigrant's L2 acquisition process. The narrative demonstrates the effects of social and academic factors on motivation to acquire an L2 and the result of immigration at a young age on cultural identity formation. The article begins by discussing the need for research into sociocultural factors in the second…

This paper reports on a research project completed with graduate students of the adult-education programme at the Leuven University in Flanders, Belgium. The research focused on cultural policies and practices in urban contexts that try to facilitate the learning of democratic citizenship in non-formal settings. In the first part we introduce some…

The "Research & Action Report," published twice a year, is a window on the activities and initiatives at the Wellesley Centers for Women. The report typically features news about the Centers, interviews with researchers, commentary on recent events or social trends affecting women and girls, announcements of new publications, and much more.…

This article investigates research on the use of network-based three-dimensional virtual worlds in computer-assisted language learning (CALL). The significant features of the major types of virtual world currently utilized are examined, as are the hypothesized advantages and issues associated with their use. This is followed by a critical review…

To update and extend research on teachers' expectations of students of different sociocultural groups, 57 Black, White, Asian, and Hispanic teachers were asked to evaluate responses spoken by Black, White, and Hispanic 2nd- and 3rd-grade boys and girls. The results show that responses perceived as spoken by minority boys, minority girls, and White…

In the American educational system, school transitions are frequent and predictable, but they can disrupt student functioning across developmental domains. How students experience school transitions has been a focus of research for some time, but the high school transition has received less attention, and the limited research often focuses on a…

The present article presents an understanding of beliefs as conceptualizing activity from a Vygotskyan dialectical perspective. The proposals I develop here, emerging from a contextual understanding of development, aim to help us reconsider in pedagogical terms the specific relationships between beliefs and actions and the nature of beliefs as…