In her well known keynote address at the Responsibilities for Literacies Conference, Mary Louise Pratt defined "contact zones" as "social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power." Pratt's view of a contact zone hints at the fact, but does not make explicit, that…

In this paper we look at three identity positions salient in research of young people studying in complementary schools in Leicester, a large linguistically and ethnically diverse city in the East Midlands, England. Our discussion of identity focuses on three identity positions: multicultural, heritage and learner. The first two of these are…

Classroom communication has been recognized as a process in which ideas become objects of reflection, discussion, and amendments affording the construction of private mathematical meanings that in the process become public and exposed to justification and validation. This paper describes an explanatory model named "interpreting games", based on…

It is often claimed that working and talking with partners while carrying out maths activities is beneficial to students' learning and the development of their mathematical understanding. However, observational research has shown that primary school children often do not work productively in group-based classroom activities, with the implication…

Teachers discovered that the mathematics classroom is an ideal setting for the development of a more precise use of language that leads to better communication. It is found that students are enthusiastically engaged in lively discussions during every phase of the activity, striving to outsmart their partners, by continually correcting each other,…

How could we design course programmes in a teachers' learning community context? Is it possible to conceive a concrete and appropriate course model? And if so, how could we assess the effectiveness of such a course model in such a complex learning situation? In this paper, a model implementation of technology-based courses is presented. The model…

Background: Early research exploring teacher expectations concentrated on the dyadic classroom interactions of teachers with individual students. More recent studies have shown whole class factors to have more significance in portraying teachers' expectations. Recently teachers having high or low expectations for all their students have been…

This article explores the long-standing problem of ascribing meaning to individual acts of codeswitching. Drawing on ethnographic data from bilingual classrooms in Corsica, I situate the analysis of codeswitching within the more general question of the interpretation of speaker stance, which is defined as speakers' positioning with regard to both…

Like their counterparts in other disciplines, accounting educators are gradually moving away from talk-and-chalk lectures to project-based learning, real-world problem solving, and team collaboration. Slower to change are the ways in which the impact of these innovative teaching methods have been assessed, with student reactions and traditional…

Noting that language minority and culturally different students are the fastest growing group of students in the public schools, this Digest offers practical strategies for language arts teachers to use when working with language-diverse students in the classroom and discusses some recent research on the subject. The Digest points out that…

This study investigated the cross-cultural differences in American and Finnish elementary teachers' evaluations of their classroom teaching behaviors. The self-evaluation instrument developed for the study was administered to 167 American elementary teachers from Indiana and Texas and to 172 Finnish teachers (also elementary) from two different…

This paper examines insights offered by communication research that may be valuable to researchers looking for evidence of gender bias affecting student ratings of their college professors' teaching effectiveness. The paper offers an overview of the teaching evaluation processes, and conceptualizations of the validity of their measures. It then…

Iowa's first-in-the-nation statewide fiber-optics telecommunications network is bringing both excitement and concern to educators. One application of the fiber-optics network is the offering of college courses through live, interactive television instruction. The teacher in the origination site classroom is linked with students in one or more…

The western intellectual tradition promotes a unique style of thinking and writing that cannot readily embrace other ways of understanding human experience and communicating about it. Three fundamental differences in the ways east and west approach oral and written communication and the thinking that lies behind it are: first, a preference for…

Graduate programs which typically produce college instructors rarely teach "how to teach." There is an instructional tool, however, which is invaluable for developing instructional communication skills: the case method. It can also be an effective means of helping pre-service teachers develop teaching skills. The case method is an…