Shared global concerns in education have recently focused on underachievement and the difficulties associated with the education of the children of migrant labor. These priorities unite the communities of Europe and the United States in a growing unease that a large number of young people are not realizing their academic potential through failing…

The study was designed to explore qualitatively developmental differences in disagreement negotiation and resolution skills between adolescent and young adult romantic partners. Twenty adolescent and 20 young adult couples participated in the study. The Knox inventory was used to measure the level of disagreement between partners on ten domains…

This article is based on a textual analysis of European Commission documents that, from 1993 to 2006, construct the discourses of lifelong learning and the knowledge economy. Exploring an apparent conceptual laxity, it finds absolute consistency in the construction of two categories of learner: the high knowledge-skilled learner…

This paper explores issues of teaching and learning Chinese as a heritage language in a Chinese heritage language school, the Zhonguo Saturday School, in Montreal, Quebec. With a student population of more than 1000, this school is the largest of the eight Chinese Heritage Language schools in Montreal. Students participating in this study were…

Improvisational teaching is informed both by students' interests and ideas and teachers' deep understandings of curricular goals; it is purposeful, but not predetermined. This approach contrasts with teacher-dominated classroom discourse in which discussions are controlled by the teacher and focused on the transmission of facts.This paper examines…

This paper analyses the contribution of student agency and teacher contingency in the construction of classroom discourse in adult English for speakers of other languages (ESOL) classes for refugees and asylum seekers, for whom the identity of student itself can constitute a stable point in a highly unstable and potentially threatening lifeworld.…

This study focuses on the subject of PE in state texts and how the PE teacher and gender are constructed. The study is based on discourse analysis of state reports and curricula. Three teacher positions are identified: the body, the character and the lifestyle constructor. At the beginning of the studied period the state explicitly designed the PE…

This paper explores alternative approaches to the conception of scientific literacy, drawing on cultural studies and emerging practices in language arts as its framework. The paper reviews historic tensions in the understanding of scientific literacy and then draws on the multiliteracies movement in language arts to suggest a scientific…

As computer-mediated communication (CMC) is becoming more mainstream in higher education (HE), the issue of social interaction online and its impact on learning has been raised. CMC theorists have argued that shared group identity produces the online social presence necessary for successful interaction but that other identities may be inhibiting.…

The linguistic resources used by academic writers to adopt a position and engage with readers, variously described as "evaluation," "stance" and "metadiscourse," have attracted increasing attention in the literature over the last 10 years and now form an important element of many ESP courses. A relatively overlooked interpersonal feature, however,…

In this study, the oral conversations of primary students were examined in an effort to understand how student participation and role in discourse community affects their learning. Discourse analysis provided both an analytical framework for analysing student and teacher talk and a definition of discourse communities. The concept of discourse…

This study uses systemic functional linguistics and the related critical discourse analysis to examine intertextual links between four eighth-grade students' talk in informal conversations as they generated ideas for the characters of their narrative writing. Data sources included classroom observations, students' drafts and polished writing,…

Thanks to advances in user-friendly, new media technology, many educational organizations around the world are supporting young people who wish to express their views through media production. The term "youth media practice" refers to these media production activities. This paper raises questions about the possibilities and limitations…

This paper approaches the theme of this special issue, the distinctive contribution of new technologies to collaborative thinking and learning, through an analysis of postings to an EdD bulletin board. Bourdieu's concept of habitus as socialised subjectivity is manifestly appropriate to the focus on professionality, the key theme of the course. A…

This article elaborates a model for understanding pedagogy in online educational forums. The model identifies four key components. Intellectual engagement describes the foreground cognitive processes of collaborative learning. Communication processes operating in the background accumulate an ever richer store of shared understandings that enable…