The present article examines the outcomes derived from a task on intensive reading carried out by university students. The main goal is to analyze the frequency of use and the success of idiom solving strategies used by the subjects while reading. Additionally, our interest is to compare the above outcomes and the reading time scores of a group of…

Idiomatic expressions pose substantial learning difficulties for learners across languages and tend to be acquired later in the course of language development both in L1 and L2. A number of factors have been identified as contributing to this difficulty. However, cross-linguistic studies on figurative language acquisition are still rare. The…

The teaching of English grammar to second language learners is usually a tedious, stressful and time consuming activity and even after all the effort, students have generally found these lessons boring and confusing. As such, innovative language instructors have been trying different approaches to the teaching of grammar in their classrooms. Using…

This article explores the perceptions of development through metaphor use by students of International Business Management Studies at The Hague University. Students' reflections upon the concepts of nature and development before and after educational intervention are examined through discourse analysis and narrative analysis. Results show that…

In this qualitative study, we examined preservice teachers' articulations of what it meant to teach literacy in urban settings and the roles that we as university instructors played in their understandings of the terms "urban," "literacy," and "teacher." We framed the study within extant studies of teacher education…

This papers looks into whether combining Skype, blogging and class discussions reinforces or refutes stereotypes. The hypothesis was that some students do not have an adequate chance to reflect on their skype experience and course content. To see if students have made improvements in reducing stereotypes, the Standards for Foreign Language…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to investigate the ways in which charter school leaders influence the understanding and conception of accountability policy and how that understanding translates into practice. In particular, this paper draws from sense-making theory and research on charter school leaders to identify their pre-existing…

This study investigated comprehension of indirect meaning among learners of L2 Spanish via an original computer-delivered multimedia listening test. The comprehension of implied speaker intention is a type of indirect communication that involves the ability to understand implied intention by using linguistic knowledge, contextual cues, and the…

This dissertation uses syntactic, semantic and morphological evidence from English nominalization to probe the interaction of event-structure and syntax, develop a typology of structural complexity within nominalization, and test hypotheses about the strict ordering of functional items. I focus on the widely assumed typology of nominalization…

New approaches to emergent learner-directed learning design can be strengthened with a theoretical framework that considers learning as a dynamic process. We propose an approach that models a learning process using a set of spatial concepts: learning space, position of a learner, niche, perspective, step, path, direction of a step and step…

In recent years there has been a global call for more scientific knowledge about education as a basis of governance. This means that exact descriptions of the reality of schooling should inform decisions about what works in education. In this article, evaluation and testing are analysed as cartography, the art of mapping educational spaces, which…

Acknowledging that an interested and enthusiastic teacher can create excitement for students and promote learning, the author discusses how teachers can improve their appearance, and, consequently, how their students perceive them. She offers concrete suggestions on how a teacher can be both a "visual aid" and an "audio aid" in the classroom.…

We investigated how preschoolers use their understanding of the actions available to a speaker to resolve referential ambiguity. In this study, 58 3- and 4-year-olds were presented with arrays of eight objects in a toy house and were instructed to retrieve various objects from the display. The trials varied in terms of whether the speaker's hands…

This Scholarship of Teaching and Learning project discusses the effectiveness of using distance metaphor-building activities along with a case study exam to help undergraduate nonscience majors understand and apply geologic time. Using action research, we describe how a scholarly teacher integrated previously published and often-used teaching…

Purpose: Several paradoxes have been presented in the literature as inherent in supervision of doctoral students. The purpose of this paper is to explore these paradoxes and offer the concept of praxis as a way of effectively engaging with complex and paradoxical dimensions of supervision, rather than denying or avoiding them.…