Scholars and practitioners have increasingly come to recognise the centrality of learner agency in generating learning opportunities. Such agency is most clearly observed in the initiatives that learners take in the language classroom. Despite the importance of learner initiatives, however, a precise and comprehensive understanding of what such…

The application of classroom discourse analysis of foreign language teaching and learning can reveal much about how teachers perform in their teaching practice and how to make improvement. In this paper, the author tries to reveal the present state of EFL (English as a foreign language) classrooms in a vocational college from the angle of…

Using Mikhail Bakhtin's conceptions of dialogue, monologue, and chronotope, the authors ask readers to consider how different values and actions ultimately create the teaching and learning spaces in which children are recognized as literate. Using qualitative data that focus on the relational writing practices of two preschoolers, this…

Historically, rurality and rural education have been marginalised bodies of knowledge in South Africa. The post-1994 era has seen an emerging government concern to address the continuing interplay between poverty, HIV/AIDS, underdevelopment, and underachievement in schools categorised as rural. To address these concerns, scholars in South African…

Utilizing a grounded theory analysis of interviews with 17 children and their 8 mothers anticipating a father's prison release within 12 months, the authors propose a theory of participants' experiences, focused on the child-father aspects of reentry. Among other expectations, all participants wanted fathers to be involved with the children after…

Engaging teachers in discussing and analyzing problems of practice has great potential for teacher professional development, yet little is known about how to facilitate such discussion. This study examined the strategies that experienced facilitators used to promote productive discussion among science teachers. Participants were 6 facilitators and…

This article focuses on how issues of power and identity were negotiated when doing a critical sociolinguistic ethnography as a Spanish researcher in the Chinese educational context. Data come from fieldwork conducted in 3 different primary and secondary schools together in Zhejiang province, where inside- and outside-classroom…

Four experiments tested a hypothesized function of signaling devices, namely, to communicate information about text organization. Experiments 1 and 2 compared headings that communicated the hierarchical organization of text topics with headings that did not communicate the hierarchical organization. Signaling organization led to more complete and…

The research presented in this paper aimed to investigate the linguistic and discourse characteristics of narratives produced by upper-intermediate foreign language learners in a bilingual secondary school. In our analyses we used a variety of linguistic and discourse variables and a recently developed computer tool (Coh-Metrix 2.0: McNamara,…

In the United States, undergraduates--regardless of their field of study--generally must complete a mathematics course to meet breadth-of-study requirements. This report is aimed at providing a research foundation for practical efforts to improve teaching and learning in such college mathematics service courses (e.g., college algebra, liberal arts…

This paper introduces an approach to analyzing temporal patterns of knowledge construction (KC) in online discussions, including consequences of role assignments. The paper illustrates the power of this approach for illuminating collaborative processes using data from a semester-long series of discussions in which 21 university students were…

While from a technological perspective Computer Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL) systems have been improved considerably, previous studies have shown that the social aspect of the CSCL is often neglected or assumed to happen automatically by simply creating such virtual learning environments. By distinguishing between students' non-task…

Narrative discourse is an essential component of day-to-day communication, but little is known about narrative in Lewy body spectrum disorder (LBSD), including Parkinson's disease (PD), Parkinson's disease with dementia (PDD), and dementia with Lewy bodies (DLB). We performed a detailed analysis of a semi-structured speech sample in 32 non-aphasic…

This paper attempts to shed light on the role of language in keeping religion relevant to the individual and society in present times. In the context of postmodernity, religion has become more of a meaning system to address the existential questions of the individual. Religious institutions have had to accommodate the changes brought about by a…

This study examined the presence of identity in diverse online courses and explored how presence of identity correlated with content and students' participation in online discussion and hence knowledge building in online educational spaces. Epistemic and participation data regarding online interaction and knowledge building were collected from a…