We report two sets of experiments that demonstrate syntactic priming from comprehension to comprehension in young children. Children acted out double-object and prepositional-object dative sentences while we monitored their eye movements. We measured whether hearing one type of dative as a prime influenced children's online interpretation of…

This study describes the development of social reasoning in school-age children. An irony task is used to assess 5-, 7-, and 9-year-olds' (N = 72) and adults' (N = 24) recursive understanding of others' minds. Guttman scale analysis demonstrates that in order to understand a speaker's communicative intention, a child needs to recognize the…

Most current idiom processing models acknowledge, after Gernsbacher and Robertson (1999) that deriving an idiomatic meaning entails suppression of contextually inappropriate, literal meanings of idiom constituent words. While embedding idioms in the rich disambiguating context can promote earlier suppression of incompatible literal meanings,…

Guided by theories of institutions, organizations, and sense-making, this manuscript examines how public, charter, and Catholic school staff in a large urban area organize for instruction and respond to educational change. To build theory about institutional processes of "organizing" from participants' perspectives, data included a…

This theoretical analysis employs a poststructuralist lens to reveal the constructs behind the word "fit", an oft used descriptor integral to the discourse of school hiring practices, personnel decisions, and politics. Although the term is a part of the everyday culture of school politics, it is rarely considered with any depth. Using the metaphor…

Situated within the framework of the systemic-functional linguistics (Halliday, 1994) and language-based theory of learning (Halliday, 1993), this article examines a shift toward a more objectified and "scientific" representation of reality in texts written by foreign language (FL) learners at various levels of acquisition. It argues that…

Motivating students is a central challenge for many teachers, particularly in subjects students commonly perceive as "impenetrable," such as statistics. One line of motivation research by C.S. Dweck (2006) has found that when students believe their intelligence is malleable (i.e., a growth mindset) and that learning is a function of effort, they…

In response to test-based accountability (No Child Left Behind, 2001), schools and districts across the country are adopting a variety of supplemental assessments aimed at improving student performance. These interim assessments are administered more than once during the school year for the following purposes: (1) predicting student performance on…

Research with young people who "do not fit the mould" requires innovative and unconventional methods, but what are the implications of such methods for scholarly representation? This paper reports on the development of such a method with students diagnosed Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder and offers one view of the borderland…

In order to help teachers understand the importance of intentional design for inclusive education, this article describes the design process an engineer might use when designing a new project. If teachers learn to think like engineers, it is possible for them to design inclusive education. This conceptual design can then be combined with…

Teachers are never free from metaphor. Whether or not they consciously design and choose their own comparisons, teachers' work is continually constructed in metaphorical terms, perhaps more so than any other profession. Like Kristy, whose course of study was determined by a television ad lasting less than a minute, teachers and potential teachers…

The process of disciplinary socialisation has been linked to a gradual mastery of a discipline's genres. This article takes a view of genre, as indexing a wide range of often implicit understandings about knowledge creation and use within a discipline, and as fully rhetorical. Within such a framework, novice and near-expert examples of one…

The student-as-employee metaphor emphasizes student accountability and participation in learning and provides instructors with work-oriented methods for creating a productive class environment. The authors propose that the tenets of performance management in work organizations can be applied to the classroom. In particular, they focus on three…

In the paper the lexical ambiguity resolution is presented. The paper is specifically focused on the processing of words, models of word recognition, context effect, trying to find an answer to how the reader-listener determines the contextually appropriate meaning of a word. Ambiguity resolution is analyzed and explored in two perspectives: the…

Two eye movement experiments examined effects on syntactic reanalysis when the correct analysis was briefly entertained at an earlier point in the sentence. In Experiment 1, participants read sentences containing a noun phrase coordination/clausal coordination ambiguity, while in Experiment 2 they read sentences containing a subordinate clause…