When evaluating the effectiveness of their program, members of the Brooklyn College SEEK Department, a higher education opportunity program, decided to make their pedagogy more student-centered. They created a method of reading instruction, which they named critical inquiry. Its goals are to build community through teaching students to annotate,…

This qualitative case study explored a third grade bilingual teacher's transformative language ideologies through participating in a collaborative action research project. By merging language ideologies theory, Cultural Historical Activity Theory (CHAT), and action research, I was able to identify the analytic focus of this study. I analyzed…

This paper explores the integration of tablets, such as the Apple iPad, in university classes and provides recommendations for other instructors to consider when adopting tablet technology. During the trial conducted in the summer of 2011 using iPads, we found that tablets had both academic and social uses, which should be considered when using…

With online course development on the rise the challenge for instructors is to enhance and ensure learning through this modality. When direct contact with students in a traditional face-to-face classroom is not feasible, instructors must be innovative in content delivery and provide for students a sense of instructor presence. It has been…

This article reports on an action research project in which two New Zealand classroom teachers worked with a university researcher to investigate the effects of their knowledge, thinking, and beliefs on the ways in which they mediated students' learning in teacher-student interactions. Working in a small community of practice over a two-year…

The purpose of this article is to summarize the methodology and findings in the case studies of three student teachers in secondary school mathematics. The broad area of interest is the relationship between beliefs and practice. In the study, "beliefs" refers to expectations teachers have that students will be successful in learning with…

This study investigates the effects of classroom interactions between a) students and students and b) students and teachers on the learning of English passivization by L1 Chinese adult learners of English as a foreign language during the language input and output treatments. In phase 1, both groups were asked to read and underline the input…

This paper aims to highlight the importance of teaching sociolinguistic competence to ESL learners in Malaysian schools. Sociolinguistic competence is the knowledge of socio cultural rules of language and of discourse. This type of competence requires an understanding of the socio context in which language is used. It is proposed that carefully…

Recent studies of emerging technologies have shown that mobile phone production now exceeds one billion devices globally per year (Johnson, Levine & Smith, 2008). With a level of production that signifies a shift in the ownership of "networked machines" from institutions to individuals, the broad appeal of portable technologies now…

In the classroom, issues including 9/11 and the occupation of Iraq often bring affective and cognitive investments among students and teachers to the forefront. Dialogue, conflicting viewpoints, and critical questioning, all central components of healthy democracies, become fraught with allegiances to long-held and frequently unseen norms. This…

This paper explores how bilingual learners and teachers challenge the monolingual discourses prescribed in language education policy and models in pursuit of voice and agency in classroom interaction. Through an examination of observation, interview and classroom interaction data in selected coloured primary and secondary schools in Cape Town, the…

Social interaction is important for the development of knowledge (M. Chapman, 1991). Social interaction, however, takes many forms, and J. Piaget (1977/1995) proposed that the construction of knowledge is facilitated in cooperative as opposed to constraining relationships. These views of knowledge development were drawn on in a study of classroom…

While a substantial body of research suggests that adult numeracy and literacy learners possess funds of knowledge and informal practices, it is not always clear to what extent these might be used in teaching and learning. In this study of linguistic interaction in adult numeracy classrooms, analysis of naturally-occurring student-student…

A total of 90 small-group, free-flowing, peer-led discussions were analyzed to investigate teacher influence on fourth-grade children's argument construction. Teacher-child and child-child interactions were examined for recurrent patterns. A number of teacher-child discussion moves were clustered into three main categories: (a) prompting for and…

"We can never be sure that there is not some wild, untamed piece of mathematics ready to spring out on us... This is what keeps mathematics enchanting." This is how Jim Neyland, one of the contributing authors to this book, describes mathematics. His enthusiasm and energy are echoed throughout by many of the other writers. This is a book to…