This text introduces teachers to research methods they can use to examine their own classrooms in order to become more effective teachers. Becoming familiar with classroom-based research methods not only enables teachers to do research in their own classrooms, it also provides a basis for assessing the findings of existing research. McKay…

The study was designed to explore qualitatively developmental differences in disagreement negotiation and resolution skills between adolescent and young adult romantic partners. Twenty adolescent and 20 young adult couples participated in the study. The Knox inventory was used to measure the level of disagreement between partners on ten domains…

This article is based on a textual analysis of European Commission documents that, from 1993 to 2006, construct the discourses of lifelong learning and the knowledge economy. Exploring an apparent conceptual laxity, it finds absolute consistency in the construction of two categories of learner: the high knowledge-skilled learner…

This paper explores issues of teaching and learning Chinese as a heritage language in a Chinese heritage language school, the Zhonguo Saturday School, in Montreal, Quebec. With a student population of more than 1000, this school is the largest of the eight Chinese Heritage Language schools in Montreal. Students participating in this study were…

This paper analyses the contribution of student agency and teacher contingency in the construction of classroom discourse in adult English for speakers of other languages (ESOL) classes for refugees and asylum seekers, for whom the identity of student itself can constitute a stable point in a highly unstable and potentially threatening lifeworld.…

This paper explores alternative approaches to the conception of scientific literacy, drawing on cultural studies and emerging practices in language arts as its framework. The paper reviews historic tensions in the understanding of scientific literacy and then draws on the multiliteracies movement in language arts to suggest a scientific…

Thanks to advances in user-friendly, new media technology, many educational organizations around the world are supporting young people who wish to express their views through media production. The term "youth media practice" refers to these media production activities. This paper raises questions about the possibilities and limitations…

This article elaborates a model for understanding pedagogy in online educational forums. The model identifies four key components. Intellectual engagement describes the foreground cognitive processes of collaborative learning. Communication processes operating in the background accumulate an ever richer store of shared understandings that enable…

This paper represents part of an ethnographic study conducted in a small college town in the northern United States. Based on Fairclough's conceptualization of language as a site of social meaning construction and power struggle, I conduct critical discourse analyses on data collected at broad, mid, and micro level contexts. I demonstrate how…

Previous research into teachers' questions has focused on what types of questions are more conducive for developing students' communicative language use. In this regard, "display questions," whose answers the teacher already knows, are considered less effective because they limit opportunities for students to use genuine language use (Long & Sato,…

To interrogate pedagogical discourses relating to child behaviour as "practices that systematically form the objects of which they speak" this paper features the analysis of three texts through the development and deployment of what might be called a poetics of pedagogical discourse. The principal text is a statement describing…

This paper introduces a rationale for change in roles and practices of the participants in mathematics education MA courses and their instructor, based on the integration and use of a web log, both as a medium for asynchronous communication, and as a mechanism for provoking professional reflection, through changes in the discursive style and the…

The United States blood plasma industry uses various rhetorics to access donors and markets its products while managing its stigma and potential legal liability. The industry includes both the public "nonprofit" sector and the private, for-profit blood collection and manufacturing businesses owned by pharmaceutical companies that rely on…

This book presents different ways of viewing the teacher supervision process, based on a study of supervisors and teachers in a graduate program for beginning teachers sponsored by a college of education in the northwestern United States. Data were obtained through interviews, observation, and conversation analysis. Chapter 1 examines beliefs…

Just as minority spoken languages borrow from surrounding majority languages, so British Sign Language (BSL) borrows signs from English. BSL may borrow from both spoken and written English, but here we focus on the processes involved in borrowing from the written English word, using the manual alphabet. The end result of borrowing depends on an…