This study investigates how five teachers of multilingual learners (MLLs), working in an officially English-centric school district, make sense of a reading curriculum based in translingual pedagogies, or instruction that builds on language and languaging practices (e.g., language brokering, translation, and codemeshing) familiar to multilingual…

The growing number of multilingual classrooms led by monolingual teachers necessitates the use of research-informed strategies and methods. Translanguaging, the practice of encouraging students to use their full repertoire of languages to collaborate and respond, is gaining momentum in Emergent Multilingual pedagogy. The following dimensions of…

This qualitative study explores the current practices of K-12 foreign language teachers (FLTs) in using the target language (TL) within an urban school district in the Midwest United States. Focusing on how FLTs engage in professional development (PD) to optimize their TL use in the classroom, the study investigates the strategies and knowledge…

In 1938, Dewey wrote "Mankind likes to think in terms of extreme opposites." In this response to the FORUM essays, Deanna Sellnow writes that she heard Dewey's words as she read the authors' struggle with the either-or question regarding the role of interpersonal communication in instructional research. She argues that this is not an…

The authors begin this article noting that they believe gathering data on student behaviors, traits, and characteristics is essential for understanding how students affect instructional communication processes. They write here that what is equally essential, however, is exploring how student developmental processes (i.e., the ways in which…

This study aims to explore the use of politeness strategies which occur in EFL classroom interactions in a senior high school. This study applied a descriptive qualitative research design to explore the politeness strategies used by the teacher and the students in their interactions. The participants in this study were an English teacher and 30…

Classroom discourse is an interdisciplinary area of study that contributes to multiple domains of knowledge, including pedagogy, teacher training, second language acquisition, and communities of practice, to name a few. As classroom discourse continues to grow and evolve, so too have the approaches used by scholars to investigate the discourse in…

Even though small talk has been investigated in a variety of business contexts and service encounters, it is understudied in instructional settings. This paper explores the occurrence of small talk in a university chemistry lab between a Chinese international teaching assistant (ITA) and American students. Drawing on naturally occurring…

In this article, we assume that discursive language aspects of science education are highly intertwined with students' knowledge-building and meaning-making in science. In an empirical case study, we investigate secondary students' (ages 15 to 16) discursive language use during group interactions. The focus is on how students define and explain…

Unlike continuous whole-class (plenary) interaction, independent task work involves incipient teacher-student talk, as the teacher typically 'makes rounds' to engage in brief desk interactions with students. This article draws on multimodal conversation analysis to investigate how teacher movement during tasks offers resources for re-engaging in…

The Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) strives to shift science learning from the teacher as a single cognitive agent, to a classroom community in which participants are working together in directing the classroom's communal knowledge to figure out questions about how phenomena occur, and building, testing, and refining their ideas to…

This study explores the nature of classroom talk as a way of teaching physics implemented by newly trained teachers. Their training introduced them, among others, to sociocultural theory and the promotion of classroom talk as a deliberate teaching strategy. This study is framed by Mortimer and Scott's framework for productive classroom talk. Data…

Argumentation and modelling are core scientific practices, and studies suggest that incorporating the specific practices in the teaching of science can engage learners. This is a qualitative study of a classroom of 10-12-year-old students working collaboratively in argumentation and modelling. The aim of the study was to explore how primary school…

In this article, we focus on a series of lessons, called "Think Like a Linguist," that we designed and implemented with multilingual adolescents. These lessons were developed as an introduction to a semester-long study on academic vocabulary and word analysis using Latin roots. Our intention in "Think Like a Linguist" lessons…

University mathematics classrooms are continuing to become more linguistically and culturally diverse. Students in these courses bring rich language resources for learning and engaging in classroom mathematical practices. Despite this diversity, little research has examined the role of language in post-secondary mathematics education. Using mixed…