Until recently, the assumption of the language-teaching literature has been that new languages are best taught and learned monolingually, without the use of the students' own language(s). In recent years, however, this monolingual assumption has been increasingly questioned, and a re-evaluation of teaching that relates the language being taught to…

Students read text through the sociocultural perspective from which they emerge. They interpret the text that is read through personal and cultural cues, through experiences acquired within a particular cultural context. When no cultural cues are familiar, students have difficulty identifying with and understanding literary text. In…

First-generation Bangladeshi grandparents in the UK have consciously taken on the role of maintaining the linguistic and cultural identity of their grandchildren. Through their life experiences, they have built up "funds of knowledge" and skills that they are able to use to promote learning using strategies that are personalised and…

This article examines how Southern Arizona principals conceptualize and enact successful leadership in border schools with shifting demographics and high percentages of colonized populations. Beyond global neoliberal and neoconservative pressures for accountability and standardized curricula, Arizona principals must also navigate immigration and…

This exploratory study investigates the linguistic and social interaction of four intermediate EFL learners during game play in a massively multiplayer online role playing game (MMORPG). Twelve illustrative episodes drawn from the participants' text chat, collected in four 70-minute sessions held over a one-month period, are analyzed from a…

Using sociocultural and poststructuralist theoretical lenses, this study examines the narrative construction of language-learner identity across time and space. We applied cross-narrative methodologies to analyze language-learning autobiographies and interview data from three English users who had recently transitioned to a U.S. context for…

The article discusses aspects of an action research study, with the aim of exploring how the cultural dimension within the education of English as a foreign language could evolve from a transmission of target-culture facts into an exploration of generic and value-related aspects such as awareness of diversity and respect for difference. The…

Using a theoretical framework that integrates socio-cultural theory, postcolonial perspectives, and the ethic of care, we (a) characterize the relationship between immigrant parents and their children's teachers, (b) offer reasons for the relationship, and (c) suggest some strategies for improving them. Several focus group discussions were held…

This paper considers how shifts within the social sciences towards conceptualising spatiality in relational terms have unfolded in rural studies in particular ways over the past decade or so. A period in which networks, connections, flows and mobility have all established themselves as compelling conceptual frames for research, the rural has…

The purpose of this study was to explore strategies for the development of aspiring female coaches based on the ideas of existing high-performance female coaches. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with national-level female coaches in the United Kingdom, four recurrent ideas for developing female coaches in a male-dominated profession emerged.…

Theories of human development and learning provide an essential framework in which to understand the mechanisms involved in the process of formal instruction as a specific form of teaching and learning in the school setting. The sociocultural theory of development, founded on the works of Lev Vygotsky, espouses the view that social interaction…

In this article, I touch upon the complex and largely ignored controversy surrounding the Tibet question. Casting a critical eye on the "official" or dominant stature of the Dalai Lama in the West, I examine the socio-cultural construction of the common view of him. Specifically, I explore the question: what social discourses have…

Education seeks to unfold the latent qualities of a person, thereby giving full development to the individual. As such, it has been described as the act or art of developing, or creating, cultivating the various physical intellectual, aesthetic and moral faculties of the individual. Scheduled Tribe has a history of social and economic deprivation,…

The increasing influence of sociocultural theories of learning on assessment practices in second language education necessitates an expansion of the knowledge base that teacher-assessors need to develop (what teachers need to know) and related changes in the processes of language teacher education (how they learn and develop it). Teacher assessors…

Vygotsky-inspired sociocultural theory (Vygotsky, 1962) indicates that human learning is mainly a social and cultural process that occurs through meaningful negotiation and interaction (scaffolding) between learners. The present study investigates whether training student reviewers can help them provide stronger scaffolding for their peers through…