Although research has come to recognize the importance of studying classroom-based student-teacher discourse in science, the emphasis remains largely on teachers' abilities to ask questions and provide students with feedback, or on students' abilities to ask questions or engage in argumentative discourse. Consequently, little research has focused…

Performance on integrated tasks requires candidates to engage skills and strategies beyond language proficiency alone, in ways that can be difficult to define and measure for testing purposes. While it has been widely recognized that stimulus materials impact test performance, our understanding of the way in which test takers make use of these…

This article discusses the relationship between values expressed by "Hindu children" in Norway and hegemonic "Norwegian values". The discussion is based on interviews with children from the Indian Punjabi and the Sri Lankan Tamil traditions and on observations in religious education (RE) lessons. The children emphasise the…

A wealth of research demonstrates that as young children acquire literacy they also approximate literate roles and relationships. Such literate identifications, or storied selves, are complex, sometimes contradictory and under construction for young people. Less research has focused on "how" young children's storied selves are…

Assessments have a significant influence on what and how students learn. While there has been debate as to the merits of examinations as an assessment tool, they will form a major component of assessment in many disciplines for the foreseeable future. To ensure examinations fulfil the dual roles of an assessment tool and motivation for student…

Changes in political, social and educational curriculum policies over the past four decades have created discursive shifts in writing theory and practice for New Zealand primary teachers. While these policies have historically privileged a particular view of writing over others, very little is known as to how teachers engage with experienced…

Mathematics teacher educators are confronted with numerous challenges and complexities as they work to inspire prospective teachers to embrace inquiry-based pedagogies. The research study described in this paper asks what a teacher educator and faculty advisor can learn from prospective secondary mathematics teachers as they construct (and are…

This article examines how students and teachers at an urban public high school embodied and understood various social categories of difference. Although ascriptions and experiences of racial and gender identities varied, these identities were often viewed as biological in origin and static in nature. The complexities and contradictions evident in…

On film studies courses, students are asked to treat as objects of study the same films which they may more commonly experience as entertainment. To explore the role of academic writing in this, an action research project was carried out on a university film studies course using a systemic functional linguistics approach. This paper presents a key…

This article examines email exchanges between eight Master's-level school counseling student interns and their internship supervisor to investigate how politeness strategies contribute to professional identity development in supervisory discourse. Our analysis demonstrates how identity development occurs via collaborative facework accomplished…

This study investigates the impact of language on students' learning of mathematics. A comparison has been made between English and Korean speaking university students' discourses on "infinity". In Korean, unlike in English, there is a disconnection between colloquial and mathematical discourses on infinity, in that the mathematical word for…

Focusing on the interplay of context and language, this study examined a group of high school students and their mentors' use of language during a robotics competition. This informal setting allowed us to gain insights into the mediation and manifestation of power within the group. Using critical discourse analysis of competition transcripts and…

In "Doing God in education", Trevor Cooling aims to defeat what might be called the "marginalising" view of the place of religion in education. I am sympathetic to this aim; but I think Cooling conflates two different arguments, predicated on two different concepts marked by the term "world-view", and that only one of the arguments is plausible.…

This paper draws on case study data from a study of independent schools in Scotland, to examine school space as a site of mediation of educational dis/advantage and in/exclusion. A threefold and scalar conceptualisation of space is used together with social capital theory to analyse staff and student identifications with relations within and…

The present study investigates the rhetorical structure of academic lecture closings, and the impact of class size on this part genre. A framework of "stages" and "strategies" is developed to analyze the rhetorical structure of lecture closings. Large and small classes are further compared to find how class size may influence the ways lecturers…