Using social realist theory and critical discourse analysis, this article examines a number of discourses which construct academic staff attitudes to teaching and learning in their disciplines. It seeks to explain academics' resistance to engaging in activities aimed at professionalising academic practice. The research described in the article…

While respect for human rights has long been endorsed as a goal of education, only recently has significant attention been paid to the need to incorporate rights within educational processes. Current support for human rights within education, however, has a variety of motivations. This paper provides a theoretical exploration of these diverse…

This article explores the discourse of international educational reform that aims at meeting the various challenges of globalisation and a knowledge-based economy and preparing students for a better future in the twenty-first century. Specifically, it reviews the dominant themes, trends and goals of modern education. It does so by exploring the…

When a course designed around cooperative, problem-centered instruction attracts learners with a wide range of experience in the topic, should learners be grouped heterogeneously or homogeneously in terms of their relative expertise? In this study, learners were randomly distributed between the two types of groups; learning gains, satisfaction,…

In this article, we will examine some contrasted discourses on multilingualism that circulate nowadays in the field of education. Focusing on the cases of French-speaking Belgium and of the Franco-Ontarian community in Canada, we will show the existence of two discourses on multilingualism: one that insists on the positive value of multilingualism…

This paper reports on the development of a prototype tool which shows how learners can be helped to reflect upon the accuracy of their writing. Analysis of samples of freely written texts by intermediate and advanced learners of English as a foreign language (EFL) showed evidence of weakness in the use of tense and aspect. Computational discourse…

This article describes the structure of academic discussions during the implementation of a literacy curriculum in the upper elementary grades. The authors examine the quality of academic discussion, using existing discourse analysis frameworks designed to evaluate varying attributes of classroom discourse. To integrate the overlapping qualities…

The moment-to-moment dynamics of student discourse plays a large role in students' enacted mathematics identities. Discourse analysis was used to describe meaningful discursive patterns in the interactions of 2 students in a 7th-grade, technology-based, curricular unit (SimCalc MathWorlds[R]) and to show how mathematics identities are enacted at…

This article focuses on the methodological use of reflective narratives from discourses and activities of an experienced primary teacher as evidence of her professional identity. The teacher's reflective narratives emerge from her participation in a 3-year developmental and research project, Learning Communities in Mathematics, conducted at the…

In literature, several processes have been suggested to describe conceptual changes being undertaken. However, a few parts of studies analyse in great detail which students' learning processes are involved in physics classes during teaching, and how they are used. Following a socio-constructivist approach using tools coming from discourse…

This research investigated the emergent discursive modes and their pedagogical functions found in model-based inquiry (MBI) science classrooms. A sample of four high school physics classrooms was video-recorded and analysed using a newly established discourse mode analysis framework. Qualitative methods were employed to identify the most salient…

This paper provides a basic introduction to the genre-based literacy research undertaken over the past three decades by educators and functional linguists in Australia and their innovative contributions to literacy pedagogy and curriculum. It focuses on the concept of genre, its place within the model of language and context developed as systemic…

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…