Sápmi is a geographical area that runs across the Kola Peninsula in Russia to northern Finland, Norway and Sweden. All Sami languages have been going through a rapid language change process and many of the traditional language domains have disappeared during the last decades due to previous national and local language policies. Nevertheless,…

This article presents a reflexive and critical discourse analysis of classroom events that grew out of a cross-cultural partnership with a secondary school teacher in Singapore. I aim to illuminate how differences between researcher and teacher assumptions about what participation in classroom activities should look like came into high relief when…

In an attempt to understand how a narrowed version of accountability in the form of high-stakes assessment deepens inequity rather than improves educational equity, we examine three education documents in Jamaica using critical discourse analysis. Our two research questions were: How did each government document position the Grade Four Literacy…

In this piece I explore the concept of 'growth' in English teaching. Starting with John Dixon's 'growth' model, I argue that, by re-imagining his ideas in current contexts, practitioners might re-focus and re-invigorate the priorities of English teaching. Dominant conceptions of 'growth' are explored, along with their influence on teacher working…

This study aimed to determine the role of the special assistant teacher (SAT) compared to the general teacher as English teacher (ET) through instructional interactions in helping slow learner students (SLS) in the English lesson. Twenty-three grade 9 students were observed; interviews were also conducted with the two teachers and several students…

This study is an endeavor to find how English native and nonnative EFL/ESL (English as foreign language/English as second language) writers use adversative conjunctions to connect ideas together so that texts have both coherence and cohesion. Regarding the problems nonnative writers of EFL face when composing a piece of writing, we attempted a…

Early adolescents undergo immense developmental changes which consequently impact their middle level educational experiences. These changes are also mediated through social forces such as race, class, gender, and sexuality. Despite the intersection of early adolescent development with social and institutional forces, critical concepts such as race…

This dissertation explores the contemporary educational construct known as Social and Emotional Learning, or SEL. It investigates how the child, the teacher and the relationship between children and teachers are figured in the SEL-managed classroom. The dissertation also examines the extent to which SEL is produced by, and productive of, culture,…

Research has established the central role of high quality discussion in the developing understandings of readers and writers (e.g., Applebee, 1994; Freedman & Delp, 2007; Nystrand, 1997). Studies particularly have focused on the promise of dialogic teaching, or instruction that provides students with ongoing opportunities to engage in…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to investigate leadership curricula in UAE business and education management programmes and examine the extent to which they are derived from and linked to students' cultural and Islamic values using Habermas' critical theory. Design/methodology/approach: The study employs a mixed methods approach that takes…

This study examined borderland discourse emergent from the practicum experiences of non-native English speaking pre-service teachers (PSTs) in a Thai primary school. Borderland discourse is defined as a space where personal and professional constructs intersect, which is often in a state of dissonance. Over a ten-week practicum period, the PSTs…

This paper examines explicitness in English as lingua franca (ELF) spoken interactions. Using a conversation analysis procedure, about 11h of audio-recorded naturally occuring ELF interactions of 79 incoming Erasmus students were analyzed for this purpose. The corpus was compiled by means of 54 speech events, 29 interviews and 25 focus group…

To help EFL learners realize the use of nominals and clauses in practicing productive skills of academic writing in English writing tests, experiments have been exploited using the tasks similar to those of internet-based test of English as a foreign language to determine the nominal and clause level information during sentence and paragraph…

This study visually and linguistically examines the various manifestations of power and language in mainstream and alternative children's picture books, and analyzes the students' linguistic production by utilizing critical discourse analysis (CDA) as a tool to uncover misrepresentations of race, class, and language. The aim of the study is…

Whether or not we are teachers, all of us must make sense of language. In doing so, we encounter representations of language, implicit or explicit descriptions which shift over time and are always tied to social and political interests. Teachers' work necessarily depends on these descriptions, which are deeply embedded within their…