Contemporary scholarship has provided important research regarding the effectiveness and potential for Hip Hop pedagogy to facilitate liberation among Black American learners in formal learning settings. In contrast, there is little research on rap and Hip Hop as lifelong informal transformational learning as a mode of resistance to oppression and…

Questions often arise spontaneously in a curious mind, due to an observation about a new or unknown environment. When an expert is right there, prepared to engage in dialog, this curiosity can be harnessed and converted into highly effective, intrinsically motivated learning. This paper investigates how this kind of situated informal learning can…

This study investigated the relationship between children's attendance at different types of early childhood education and care programmes and their mathematical and verbal skills. Analyses of data from 1314 children participating in an Australian longitudinal study, the E4Kids project, revealed no relationship between children's verbal ability…

In this paper the incidental language acquisition of 11-year-old Flemish children (n = 30) who have not received any formal English instruction is investigated. The study looks into children's English proficiency and the learner characteristics that can be associated with it. In order to measure the children's English proficiency, a receptive…

The home literacy environment is a well-established predictor of children's language and literacy development. We investigated whether formal, informal, and indirect measures of the home literacy environment predict children's reading and language skills once maternal language abilities are taken into account. Data come from a longitudinal study…

This article discusses formal and informal foreign language learning before university level. The focus is on beginning university students' perceptions of their earlier learning experiences, especially in digital contexts. Language learners' digital competence is a part of their everyday lives, but its relationship to learning in and outside…

The words 'children' (Danish: 'børn') and 'young people' (Danish: 'unge') are so often combined that they almost have the character of idiomatic expressions. But what differences in the use of the words can be found? This article seeks to study the prevalent, dominant discourses about children and young people. In particular, it endeavours to…

With the rapid development of information and technology, language learners have more ways to acquire the target language. Recently, WILL has gained popularity, for informal web-based learning of English has been depicted as a process driven by the purpose of communication. Thus, teachers have many challenges when teaching learners who have…

Research shows that participation in school-based arts education has declined over the past decade. A problem for the arts' role in education has been a lack of rigorous scholarship that demonstrates educational benefits. A component of this problem has been a lack of available data. In this study, we use original data collected through a…

This study investigated international and American students' perceptions of structured but informal English conversations with each other. American and international students perceived the effects of these conversations differently. While the international students claimed increased linguistic and cultural competence, the Americans identified…

Recent research and public policy have indicated the need for increasing the physical science workforce through development of interest and engagement with informal and formal science, technology, engineering, and mathematics experiences. This study examines the association of family education and physical scientists' informal experiences in…

The present study is aimed at creating a holistic fractal model (HFM) of autonomous learning for English acquisition in a blended environment of e-studies in adult non-formal education on the basis of the theories and paradigms of philosophy, psychology and education for sustainable development to promote the development of adult learners'…

This article presents findings from TechTales, a participatory design research (PDR) project where learning scientists, public library staff members, informal science educators, and staff members from Native-American-serving organizations collaborated to design a family-based robotics workshop that was grounded in storytelling. We approach this by…

The aim of this paper is to analyse the disparity between the time adolescents devote to various leisure activities and the significance they attribute to them. The gap between amount and significance mirrors the way that adolescents in Israel perceive the concept of leisure and the content with which they fill it. Leisure is a phenomenon that is…

This study investigated the construct of the learning organization in the restaurant industry. Descriptive accounts of learning were gleaned from face-to-face interviews, focus groups, observations, document analysis, and data from the Dimensions of the Learning Organization Questionnaire (DLOQ) from 52 participants employed in three US…