Although the Lao People's Democratic Republic has speakers of up to 230 different languages belonging to four ethnolinguistic families, the Lao Government's policy as stated in its Education Law is that Lao is the official language of education at all levels. This creates a challenging situation for teachers in ethnic minority villages throughout…

The influence of one teacher's scaffolding moves on children's performance in free-flowing child-led small-group discussions was investigated. Three moves were examined: prompting for and praising the use of evidence, asking for clarification, and challenging. Lag sequential analysis was applied to a corpus of over 5,300 speaking turns during 30…

In sub-Saharan Africa, education conducted through a European language is associated with low school achievement. Both teachers and learners may often not be fluent enough to use the language as a medium of instruction. In these circumstances, both also make use of a common African language. They switch between two languages in the plenary…

Teaching thinking skills is one of the most important elements in the learning process. This paper examines how teachers "open up" and "close down" opportunities for promoting thinking skills in EFL classrooms in China through the analysis of the interactions between the teacher and students. A sociocultural analysis of…

This paper draws on Wenger's model of community of practice to present preliminary findings on how processes of negotiation of meaning and identity formation occur in knowledge construction, meaning-making and interaction in two secondary Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) science classrooms. It uses a multimodal conversation analysis…

This article reports on the views of seven Asian female Social Science students following a class seminar on religious issues and schooling at a university in the UK. It explores the importance of the post-class spontaneous student dialogue where participation in much teaching and learning is voluntary. The concern is with engaged pedagogy and…

This article presents the findings of an observation study of reading lessons in English at Primary Three in Singapore. The aims of the study were first to establish whether a common pedagogy to teach reading in English exists at this transition year of children's schooling, and second what the cultural effects of this pedagogy might be for…

When the author recently turned her attention to the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM) "Principles and Standards," she was startled to see communication as key. She adjusted her teaching to meet the NCTM Communication Standard and promote communication in her classroom by providing a safe environment, developing discourse and…

The National Institute of Education in Singapore (which is part of the Nanyang Technological University) is the leading national pre-service and in-service teacher training tertiary institution. It offers diploma, undergraduate and postgraduate programmes. The academic departments are called Academic Groups (AGs). The English Language and…

The dynamics of discourse in literacy classrooms offers a complex paradigm for describing the communication patterns that exist among the agents (teachers and students) involved. The discourse patterns that exist in classrooms contextualize the pathways individuals take to assume understanding. Through interviews and case studies of two teachers…

Successfully evaluating students' work challenges teachers to achieve both corrective task and identity-protection goals in interaction. This study investigated how face-threat mitigation that students received from their teachers during feedback influenced students' judgments about the quality and usefulness of the feedback their instructors…

This article analyzes the interaction between teachers and children in kindergarten classrooms in order to identify and describe the discursive strategies of teachers that retrieve children's previous expressions to clarify and specify concepts represented in them. Data analyzed include 90 situations of teacher-children exchanges in 7 kindergarten…

In a significant book, Cameron suggested that we study metaphor as "prosaics" (i.e. as a feature of mundane talk). In this article, by means of a few brief examples, we point to instances of such talk in the setting of preschool. We also discuss some opportunities for learning that such talk could offer children, and what the…

Fidelity measurement has increasing significance when making claims of educational practices being effective in today's classrooms. This study explored the reliability, using multi-informants, and convergent validly, using multi-sources, for curriculum fidelity. There were significant differences between the outside observer and teacher and…

The goal of this paper is to explore qualities of mathematical imagination in light of a classroom episode. It is based on the analysis of a classroom interaction in a high school Algebra class. We examine a sequence of nine utterances enacted by one of the students whom we call Carlene. Through these utterances Carlene illustrates, in our view,…