The contemporary South African subject English classroom is a complex space requiring ongoing attention to issues of cultural and linguistic diversity, and frequently manifesting the need to work across historically constructed differences in race, ethnicity and socioeconomic status. This article reports on one aspect of a broader research…

Teacher education is effective when pre-service teachers are able to transfer knowledge from content areas to practice. This study investigates the extent to which curriculum and assessment designs, along with teaching practices, supported pre-service teachers to transfer knowledge gained about language from a first-year course into a second-year…

As public health concerns about physical inactivity and childhood obesity continue to rise, researchers are calling for interventions that comprehensively lead to more opportunities to participate in physical activity (PA). The purpose of this study was to examine the characteristics and attitudes of trained physical education teachers during the…

Existing research on language in South African schooling frequently draws attention to the problematic hegemony of English and the lack of access to quality education in the home language of the majority of learners, often drawing on the metaphor of a gap or a disjuncture between post-apartheid language in education policy (LiEP) and its…

According to many research findings, the presence of discourse markers (DMs) enhances readers' comprehension of the texts they read. However, there is a paucity of research on the relationship between knowledge of DMs and reading comprehension (RC) and the present study explores the relationship between them. Knowledge of DMs is measured through…

Considerable research, policy, and programmatic efforts have been dedicated to addressing the participation of particular populations in STEM for decades. Each of these efforts claims equity-related goals; yet, they heavily frame the problem, through pervasive STEM pipeline model discourse, in terms of national needs, workforce supply, and…

Adult education curricula such as literacy textbooks present blueprints for living, including different ways of being and relating as men and women. However, educators and scholars seldom consider the underlying assumptions about gender in literacy workbooks, especially in international settings. This study used Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA)…

Informed and inspired by neo-Vygotskian theory, this article outlines a study exploiting a contemporary conceptualization of Wells's (2002) joint activity system model as an exploratory framework for examining and depicting the social-cultural-historical contradictions in second-language (L2) learners' joint activity. The participants were a pair…

Contemporary notions of childhood overweight and obesity have become increasingly influential in curriculum and pedagogy in school-based Health and Physical Education (HPE). Teachers' delivery of HPE subject matter and related school practices are likely to have a considerable impact on the attitudes and beliefs of the children they teach,…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to analyze the use of blogs as part of a formative assessment practice, to report how reflective peer-to-peer learning can be designed and provided in online higher education. Design/methodology/approach: The research relies on a qualitative approach. The empirical setting comprised an online higher education…

The study focused on immigrant parents' discourses about strategies for their children's preschool bilingual development and education. The article investigated how immigrant parents described and explained these strategies. The study was based on semi-structured interviews with 4 families. The 8 parents were Russian-speaking immigrants to Israel…

Support for children with special educational needs in inclusive classrooms is increasingly provided by teaching assistants (TAs). They often have a direct pedagogical role, taking responsibility for instruction in mathematics. The quality of TAs' oral skills is crucial for learning but has rarely been researched. Using conversation analysis, this…

In this study, positioning theory was used as a theoretical framework for analyzing facilitator presence and identity in online discussion transcripts. The study has two purposes. First, the study provides a description of naturally occurring facilitator positioning by facilitators and students in two online and two blended classes. Second, it…

Based on Byram's (1997) definition of intercultural communicative competence (ICC) and on specific types of discourse analysis proposed by Kramsch and Thorne (2002) and Ware and Kramsch (2005), this article explores how online exchanges can play a role in second language learners' development of pragmatic competence and ICC. With data obtained…

This study examines how Japanese students perceive the qualities of written arguments that were constructed to have different forms. Based on the theoretical dimensions of verbal communication styles that Gudykunst and Ting-Toomey (1988) proposed, the research questions asked whether the respondents would perceive direct arguments to be of higher…