With examples from junior science lessons on magnets, Gibbons (1998, 2001a, 2002) argues that Teacher-Guided Reporting (TGR) is a familiar teaching stage with potential for the development of academic registers when there is linguistic task sequencing, significant student initiation, and press on linguistic resources. In exploring the potential of…

This article explores conversations between preschool children and their teachers in the classroom environment. Teachers have an opportunity to engage students in cognitively challenging conversations at critical times during the day: book reading, playtime, and mealtimes. The article provides examples of the types of conversations preschool…

Drawing on observations and audio-recordings of classroom language use in two postcolonial societies, the Republic of Botswana in Africa and the Sultanate of Brunei Darussalam in south-east Asia, this study seeks to explore how teachers and pupils face the challenge of accomplishing teaching and learning using a language which is not their own. In…

"Is academic speech "more like" casual conversation or academic writing?" [Swales, J. (2001). "Metatalk in American academic talk. The cases of 'point' and 'thing'." "Journal of English Language," 29(1), p. 37]. Taking a corpus-based perspective to the analysis, this study compares the language of university classroom talk to academic prose and…

How speaking turns are taken and allocated in the language classroom, who takes them, and in what sequence (Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson 1974), allows mundane talk to be heard as "intellectual quality" and "connectedness" within the "productive pedagogies" framework adopted over the past five years by Education Queensland (2001). This paper…

Second language acquisition researchers have claimed that feedback provided during conversational interaction facilitates second language (L2) acquisition. A number of experimental studies have supported this claim, connecting interactional feedback with L2 development. Researchers have suggested that interactional feedback is associated with L2…

One could focus on many different aspects of improving the quality of mathematics teaching. For a better understanding of children's mathematical learning processes or teaching and learning in general, reflection on and analysis of concrete classroom situations are of major importance. On the basis of experiences gained in a collaborative research…

This article is part of a year-long ethnographic study conducted in an English dominant kindergarten in the United States. The classroom comprised 6 Spanish-bilingual English language learners and 17 native English speakers. The study was based on a theoretical framework that views language as the site for constructing social meaning and…

In this article, the author talks about two elementary classroom activities used as teaching tools, namely "Show and Tell" and "Sharing Time." As a teaching tool, Sharing Time has several advantages over Show and Tell. It avoids children bringing valuable items to school, reduces emphasis on materialism, allows opportunities for extended oral…

This research project was conducted at a high school in a suburban metropolitan area in the Midwest from August 21, 2006 through October 26, 2006. The purpose of the research was to improve student achievement and motivation through the posting and communicating of daily learning objectives. The research participants included 150 students and five…

This paper presents a multimodal discourse analysis of children using "drill-and-practice" literacy software at a primary school in the Western Cape, South Africa. The children's interactions with the software are analysed. The software has serious limitations which arise from the global political economy of the educational software…

This case study investigated spontaneous interpersonal communication in a high school Spanish classroom, using instructional conversation as a framework for analysis. Instructional conversations are collaborative, extended verbal exchanges in which students develop a coherent topic, supported by the teacher's contingent questions and feedback. The…

Being a Hispanic female faculty member in South Texas can be a challenge. This chapter discusses three pedagogical tools (caring, challenging, and consulting) that we use to create a classroom climate that enhances Hispanic students' success by engaging and motivating them to succeed in one of the poorest areas of the country.

Oral language is an important component of literacy development, yet is often ignored in research and stifled in the classroom. The varied contexts for literate talk in a first-grade classroom were explored. Oral sharing time, writing workshop, reading workshop, whole-class reading time, and project-centers time provided opportunities for rich…

There is considerable interest in reading assessment and the influence that reading assessment can have on what is taught and learned in school. However, little is known about how teachers, administrators, parents, and students communicate and understand reading assessment information. Lacking this knowledge, educators do not know what kinds of…