The communication pattern of Initiation/Response/Follow-Up (IRF) has long been an important instructional sequence in language classrooms. When language teachers combine IRF with the Response to Intervention (RTI) approach, they create a powerful model to evaluate student oral practice and self-assess effectiveness in creating language communities…

The aim of the study is to investigate the influence of gender and gender pairing on students' learning performances and knowledge elaboration processes in Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL). A sample of ninety-six secondary school students, participated in a two-week experiment. Students were randomly paired and asked to solve…

This article states that in order to exercise citizenship with responsibility, language teachers need to popularize a discourse for criticism in which students and teachers transcend tacit knowledge and common sense due to meta-cognition and argumentation and reach systematic knowledge and procedures posed by experts in the different disciplines.…

The purpose of this article is to offer an interpretation of the images of Colombian English teachers constructed in official discourse, particularly (but not exclusively) in the document "Estándares básicos de competencias en lenguas extranjeras: inglés. Formar en lenguas extranjeras, el reto". This is part of a larger critical…

From Facebook to Twitter, ordinary citizens' use of social media to discuss, organize, and participate in the political process continues to grow in popularity (Davis, 2005; Rainie, 2005; Kohut, Keeter, Doherty, & Dimock, 2008). Researchers interested in this area have explored the demographics, patterns of behavior and motives of participants…

Basal readers have long been problematized for a lack of diversity among the characters and experiences represented in the text selections. Building on this, and informed by critical theory, critical race theory, and Bourdieuian perspectives, this dissertation examines racist discourses in a set of third grade basal readers. In order to explore…

This study investigates how students in third-, fourth- and fifth-grade classes at a rural school are socially constituted as "struggling readers," and how this social status impacts reading achievement. It examines the ways that some students are positioned as inferior readers in relation to their classmates during peer-to-peer literacy events.…

Contrary to the dominant discourse metanarrative, this dissertation explores, re-exposes, and updates the generally hidden realities of what is actually taking place in the current operation of the American criminal justice system. The government/dominant discourse benefits from the amorphous ambiguity of the law in conjunction with its usage of…

Internal state language is a unique indicator of children's social understanding. In the current study, the role of context and type of internal state language was investigated. Mother-child internal state discourse in 32 middle-class Canadian families (child M age = 46.4 months) was examined across four contexts: (1) a reflective picture task,…

Elementary school children are capable of reproducing sophisticated science process skills such as observing, designing experiments, collecting data, and evaluating evidence. An understanding of the nature of scientific knowledge requires more than teaching and learning the performance of these skills. It also requires an appreciation of how these…

As increasing numbers of educators explore the use of virtual worlds for education, there is a need to consider which pedagogical approaches can provide an opportunity to do more than recreate the traditional classroom by leveraging the unique characteristics and potential that the technology can offer. This study identifies Communal…

The placement in colleges is a crucially formative experience for trainee teachers on pre-service Further Education (FE) initial teacher training courses. A project at the University of Huddersfield researched these placements in four colleges in the north of England and the relationships that were formed between the trainees, their mentors, other…

This research focuses on the adaptation strategies of students from an innovative elementary school run as a community of learners who have been involuntarily "thrown into" competitive, credentialism-based high schools. We apply the anthropologist John Ogbu's comparative historico-ecological framework of "minority" to the innovative school…

Essentialist representations of the Orientalised Other abound within the literature of intercultural communication. The dominant discourse constructs Chinese-speaking students as members of a homogenised collective: passive recipients of knowledge who are reliant on a reproductive approach to learning. This article seeks to offer a corrective to…

Over the past several years, educators have been exploring the potential of immersive interactive simulations, or video games for education, finding that games can support the development of disciplinary knowledge, systemic thinking, the production of complex multimodal digital artifacts, and participation in affinity spaces or sites of collective…