Describes Book Sharing Sessions, in which struggling readers are immersed in peer discussions about books they have read. Discusses how, through this immersion and through modeling and explicit instruction, children learn to think about what is important in a book; how to convey its meaning; and how to ask questions, listen, and lead discussions.…

Focuses on whether teachers' enabling styles in talking with young pupils depends on supportive strategies on teacher's part or whether any more specific teacher discourse-moves can be identified as productive. Analyzes one extended recording in which the teacher talks with a group of 5-year olds for approximately 30 minutes. Conclusions are drawn…

Illustrates how classroom talk that includes students, families, and teachers can create spaces in which students from diverse cultural backgrounds negotiate purposeful literacy practices. Presents two versions of a story of a family visit, the first version reflects an educator's understanding of the visit at the time and the second reflects the…

Focuses on university- and school-based teacher researchers attempting to alter or interrupt certain gendered discursive practices that threatened to reproduce some of the same inequities in classroom talk about texts that were noted in the past, but were not challenged. Finds four types of interactions: self-deprecating, discriminatory, and…

Argues that appropriate use of technology lies in supplemental instruction intended to complement classroom activities, not replace them. Favors the use of inquiry, discussions, and cooperative learning methods in higher education. (Contains 53 references.) (ASK)

Presents a case study of an adult Japanese learner's second language (L2) learning through her teacher's recasts in an English-as-a-Foreign-Language (EFL) classroom in Japan. Investigated the relationship between the student's awareness of feedback and her L2 learning. Findings suggest recasting is a complex verbal behavior influenced by the…

Examines the kinds of inquiry fourth-grade children accomplished in a cross-curricular unit involving various kinds of texts. Identifies the circumstances that accompany the best examples of student thought, talk, and questions. Describes procedures used as well as the talk that accompanied each type of text (biography, historical fiction, and…

This case study identified: (1) differences in academic culture that an American educator may experience in an international exchange; (2) cultural and communications difficulties and how these difficulties impact classroom conduct; and (3) pedagogical challenges in conducting an American graduate economics course in a French university. (EV)

In three sixth-grade classrooms, students' independent writing activities and interviews were analyzed to identify affective links to prior experience that were used in students' knowledge construction efforts. Learner-centered teacher strategies related to classroom dialogue and activity choice can increase affective/emotional affordances in the…

Five subtypes of directiveness were examined in the interactions of day care teachers with toddler and preschooler groups. Results confirmed that instructional context is an important mediator of teachers' directiveness and suggest that subtypes of directiveness have different effects on child language output. (Contains references.) (Author/DB)

Investigates a preemptive focus on form, occasions when either the teacher or a student chose to make a specific form the topic of discourse. Found that in 12 hours of meaning-focused instruction, there were as many preemptive focus-on-form episodes (FFEs) as reactive FFEs (i.e., corrective feedback). (Author/VWL)

This article provides an empirically based perspective on the contribution of conversation analysis (CA) and sociocultural theory to our understanding of learners' second language (L2) practices within what we call a strong socio-interactionist perspective. It explores the interactive (re)configuration of tasks in French second language…

Social studies educators advocate discussion as an influential instructional method to encourage students to apply knowledge and develop higher-order thinking and understanding. The classroom reality, however, is that teachers only use the discussion method sparingly. Instead, teachers predominantly use a quasi-discussion form called recitation to…

This article is republished from "The Canadian Modern Language Review," 60, 4, pp. 501-526. It is published as an article exchange between the "MLJ" and the "CMLR." The articles for the exchange were selected by committees from the Editorial Board of each journal according to the following criteria: articles of…

In this paper, we draw upon a framework for analyzing the discursive interactions of science classrooms (Mortimer & Scott, 2003, "Meaning Making in Secondary Science Classrooms," Maidenhead, UK: Open University Press), to probe the movement between authoritative and dialogic discourse in a Brazilian high school science class. More…