Establishing a communication-rich classroom can be difficult. This article describes the process and findings of a practitioner action research study addressing the question of how teachers can interact with their students while they are working in groups to encourage and enhance student-to-student communication. Recommended research-based teacher…

This study investigated the interrelationship between students' foreign language anxiety, perceptions of teachers' classroom behaviour and their achievement in English as a Foreign Language (EFL). The participants were eight teachers and their Year 10 and 11 students (N=344) from two different schools, International Standard School (ISS) and…

Classroom discourse can affect various aspects of student learning in science. The present study examines interactions between classroom discourse, specifically teacher questioning, and related student cognitive engagement in middle school science. Observations were conducted throughout the school year in 10 middle school science classrooms using…

This study examined emotional climate in relation to the teaching and learning of grade 7 science. A multi-method and multi-theoretic approach used sociocultural frameworks as a foundation for interpretive research, conversation analysis, prosody analysis, and studies of nonverbal conduct. Emotional climate varied continuously throughout a lesson.…

The article is centred around the concept of "language competence of a foreign language (FL) teacher" and the ways it can be evaluated. Though the definition of teacher language competence might sound obvious it has not yet been clearly structured and, therefore, no component has been thoroughly described. I use this fact as a starting…

The use of manipulatives is an essential key to teaching mathematics to young children. Throughout history, different types of manipulatives have been used to aid in comprehension of mathematical concepts including quipu, abaci and pattern blocks. Today, concrete and virtual manipulatives are the tools that early childhood teachers are using in…

African American students are not achieving at the levels of their white and Asian counterparts on all measures of achievement including standardized assessments, particularly in mathematics. The existence of a mathematics achievement gap signifies a breakdown in the teaching and learning of mathematics for African American students. This…

This research investigates the interconnectedness of scientific inquiring at the early childhood level, as we explore the discourse-in-interaction processes occurring within small inquiry groups of 5- and 6-year-old children. The rationale behind this research is to explore the nature of science-related discourse, and to that end, this work…

Despite the theorized centrality of pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) for teaching, we have little evidence of the relationship between PCK and students' learning and know relatively little about how to help teachers to develop PCK. This study is a preliminary attempt to address these gaps in our knowledge of PCK through exploration of two…

Although research has come to recognize the importance of studying classroom-based student-teacher discourse in science, the emphasis remains largely on teachers' abilities to ask questions and provide students with feedback, or on students' abilities to ask questions or engage in argumentative discourse. Consequently, little research has focused…

In this theoretical paper the role of power in classroom interactions is examined in terms of a dominance continuum to advance a theoretical framework justifying the emergence of three ways of distributing power when it comes to dealing with the control over the teaching-studying-learning (TSL) "pattern of teacher domination," "pattern of…

This article investigates the relationship between classroom climate and performance in postsecondary French as it is generated by student-to-student connections and interaction, rather than instructor-to-student interaction. The study applies an instrument originally developed to measure classroom climate in native language public speaking…

This article presents the authors' critique on "Differentiating Low Performance of the Gifted Learner: Achieving, Underachieving, and Selective Consuming Students" (Figg, Low, McCormick, & Rogers 2012). The authors of "Differentiating Low Performance of the Gifted Learner: Achieving, Underachieving, and Selective Consuming Students" endeavored to…

This article explores the usage- and exemplar-based roots of second language (L2) negation construction learning. Based on two longitudinal case studies involving two adult L2 English learners and a corpus of 63 three-hour sessions of recorded classroom interactions, the study shows that L2 learning follows the predictions of usage-based models of…

This article explores the ways in which what counts as "legitimate" knowledge is produced and negotiated in two multilingual classrooms of two different programmes designed to "attend to diversity" at secondary schools in the Madrid region. Following a sociolinguistic approach, the article focuses on the ways in which local…