Current reforms in mathematics education place dialogue at the heart of the development of conceptual understanding. Underlying these ideas is strong criticism of transmissive teaching styles, often referred to as "teaching by telling" However, there is little in terms of specific guidance for teachers about how best to achieve these…

This essay takes as its starting-point the recent announcement that GCSE English, the high-stakes test taken by 16-year-olds in England, will no longer include the assessment of speaking and listening. It attempts to place this decision, and other recent policy interventions that will have an impact on how talk in the classroom is conceptualised…

Collaborative learning and critical pedagogy are widely recognized as "empowering" pedagogies for higher education. Yet, the practical implementation of both has a mixed record. The question, then, is: How could collaborative and critical pedagogies be empowered themselves? This paper makes a primarily theoretical case for discourse…

This paper reports on the findings of an observational study of information literacy instruction in a college writing course. Using a sociocultural approach, the study explores how classroom discourse can influence the ways in which students conceive of information literacy and the process of research and writing. We found that a discourse that…

This study investigated how student characteristics predict the nature of girls' and boys' verbal interactions with their teachers in physics classes. The sample included (N = 1378) students from 81 randomly selected high-school physics classrooms in Germany and the German-speaking part of Switzerland. At the beginning of the school year, the…

In this article, I (1) argue for approaching processes, events-in-the-making, by means of process categories--to learn, to teach--not by means of categories that denote differences in state and (2) exemplify doing and writing research consistent with process philosophy. To understand process we must not think, research, and write them in terms of…

The authors of this article propose structured and focused classroom discussion to engage students in thoughtful dialogue. They present a model for principled discussion and suggest ways to engage students in focused discussions drawing from their experiences, offering guidance for helping students make the most of the dialogue sessions. The…

This article reports on a small-scale study conducted among first and second-year students of English at the University of Graz in the winter semester 2013-2014. The aim of the study was to determine the extent to which students in their peer-group interactions were using language efficiently as a means of thinking and learning together. To this…

The dialects that college students speak represent a type of diversity that can influence many elements of their experiences in college, including academic experiences. In this study, we examined the influence of speaking a stigmatized dialect on academic experiences for White and African American students (both male and female) from rural…

The present article deals with language choice as communicative strategies in the language learning environment of an English-medium content and language integrated learning (CLIL) workshop at an auto mechanics class in a Swedish upper secondary school. The article presents the organisation and functions of language alternations (LAs) which are…

There has been a high failure rate of Grade 10 learners in the year end examinations in the Caprivi Education Region of Namibia over a number of years. The objective of this study was to investigate whether the use of mother tongue in English medium classrooms enhanced learners' academic achievement.The study investigated 12 teachers at 12 schools…

Purpose: The purpose of the paper was to explore students' learning experiences in culturally diverse urban higher education environments. Design/methodology/approach: The project used an action research method approach with a mixed-method collection of data. The data consist of a survey of undergraduate students from the two different faculties,…

In the current reform of mathematics classrooms teachers are charged with the role of facilitating collaborative groups during problem-solving activity. The challenge is for teachers to engage students in making mathematical meaning during collaborative group discussions. In this paper we draw on the concept of adaptive expertise to report on…

This study explored how one third-grade teacher facilitated daily peer-led discussions around articles from a local newspaper. Two students were assigned to select and summarize an article, then lead a whole-class discussion with the teacher's help. The teacher differentially scaffolded engagement with newspaper articles, adaptively responding to…

This paper is a re-engagement with some ethnographic data, originally analysed using a sociocultural approach. It makes use of a recent proposal that Lacan's "mirror stage" when applied to an analysis of classroom settings and interactions can offer a fruitful way of explaining and understanding classroom lives, identities and…