Pre-school children's engagement with activities in child-initiated play is taken to be an important mediating factor in their learning. The adult's role in supporting and enhancing children's play is an area of significant study. However, how children play when play is child-initiated, and how this maps to our assumptions and expectations about…

Requesting plays a key role in human communication. One can request the same thing in multiple ways (e.g., "Pass the salt" vs. "Could you pass the salt?"). How do speakers determine which request form to produce? And how does this choice affect a recipient's evaluation of a request? Previous analyses of naturalistic…

This article examines the use of the phrase "best practices" in academic literature that discusses online learning. Results of our study indicate that, despite the ubiquity of this phrase in academic literature concerning online pedagogy, the majority of articles lack empirical support for promoting certain approaches as "best…

The study examined code-switching in retail encounters involving sales personnel of cars, credit cards, beauty products, and food products with a Chinese customer. Altogether 27 retail encounters were audio-taped and transcribed. Analysis of the 14,944-word corpus was conducted using Gumperz's [(1982). "Discourse strategies." Cambridge:…

This article seeks to contribute new perspectives to the ontology and epistemology of preschool science education by exploring the idea of using everyday verbs, rather than nouns, to discern possibilities for science learning in preschool. Herein, the author merges empirical examples from preschools with findings from research on children's noun…

The past decades have seen dramatic improvements to dictionary content and format. Yet dictionaries -- both paper-based and digital -- remain disappointingly underused. As a result, it is widely acknowledged that more needs to be done to train people in dictionary-consultation skills. Another solution would be to build lexicographic resources that…

Crosscutting concepts, such as "structure" and "function," are present in courses at multiple educational levels across the disciplines. These two terms are used individually in everyday language and have a long, rich history. The authors explore the meaning and presentation of biological function, which often is not clearly…

The Documentational Approach To Didactics (DAD) aims to study teachers' professional development through their interactions with their resources for/from teaching. It has been introduced in the French community of didactics of mathematics in 2007, then extended at an international level. It has been introduced as an entry in the Encyclopedia of…

The Office of English Language Acquisition (OELA) has synthesized key data on English learners (ELs) into two-page sheets on a variety of subjects. This fact sheet focuses on: (1) Most Common Home Languages and Language Categories (Excluding Spanish) Spoken by English Learner Students in K-12: 2016-17 School Year; (2) Numbers of Reported English…

Dialogic frameworks make visible the nature of social interaction providing insights into the formation of epistemic awareness. The conscious design of classroom interaction as both pedagogic practice and pedagogic tool for knowledge co-construction remains under represented in initial teacher education programs of study. This empirical research…

Disproportionality is defined as the extent to which membership in a given group, such as gender, race/ethnicity, or socioeconomic strata, differentially affects the probability of a given outcome (e.g., being placed into special education or being assigned an out-of-school suspension). Underpinnings of disproportionality study include the broad…

The history of Nepal gives some insight into its current status as a diverse and multilingual nation with more than 123 languages. Multilingualism is part of the founding philosophy of the country but since it was unified in 1768, government attitudes to language and language education have fluctuated. Though historically education in Nepal has…

The primary aim of this study was to investigate prosodic prominence across three groups of Sylheti-English bilinguals: first-generation who arrived as adults, first-generation who arrived as children, and second-generation, i.e., born in the United Kingdom to parents who grew up in Bangladesh. To measure prominence, f0, duration, and intensity…

The present study investigates the frequently used speech acts related to positive and negative politeness techniques employed in requests and apologies by faculty members at King Abdulaziz University. Social interaction on University Campus reflects Hejazi culture located in the Western Region of Saudi Arabia. The significance of the study arises…

This study aimed to examine language at the teacher/classroom level among second-grade classrooms that differ in socioeconomic backgrounds. Measures of teachers' vocabulary input across the school day throughout the school year were examined. There was a significant difference in the proportion of academic word use between classes that differed in…