Analyzes and compares transcriptions of ten one-to-one conferences between teacher and student. Concludes that successful conferences focus on criteria for successful writing, evaluating students' work, and on the work itself; unsuccessful conferences are characterized by repeated requests for explanation, and by tutor dominance that excludes…

Describes a program for adults in which they read about working class people like themselves and then respond in writing. Argues that while they became initiated into the academic community, they also felt powerless to change their situations. Emphasizes the importance of not destroying students' histories while teaching them academic discourse.…

This paper focuses on the scientific dialogue of a small group following an experiment on motion under gravity. This research was designed to investigate ways in which practical activities can be used to foster links between upper elementary children's spontaneous concepts and Newtonian mechanics. Implicit in this is the notion that teaching…

The linguistic behavior of individuals and people in the official literature on lifelong learning (LL) was examined and interpreted in light of the theories of individualization in late modern culture and society, particularly the theories of Ulrich Beck and Anthony Giddens. The analysis was performed to shed light on that literature's ideological…

Using a Vygotskian perspective, this study investigated the possibility of secondary school second language students providing scaffolding for each other's learning during dyadic verbal interaction on a dictogloss task. Participants in the study were 19 English-as-a-Second-Language students from China, Hong Kong, and Korea, who studied at a girl's…

Describes how Oyster Bilingual School's (Washington, DC) two-way Spanish-English language plan functions in its sociopolitical context. It is noted that this plan is part of a larger identity plan aiming to promote social change by socializing children differently from the way they are socialized in mainstream US educational discourse. (46…

Praises the theoretical and methodological potential of the field of political communication. Calls for greater interaction and cross fertilization among the fields of political science, sociology, economics, and psychology. Briefly discusses relevant research methodologies. (MJP)

After describing the principles of culturally compatible education, the characteristics of Native American and mainstream narrative discourse are compared, and teaching the structure, content, and style of mainstream narratives is advocated. A program designed to facilitate Native American elementary school children's abilities to comprehend and…

Explores role of college textbooks in students' acquisition of special disciplinary literacy, focusing on use of metadiscourse as manifestation of writer's linguistic and rhetorical presence in a text. Features are compared from 21 textbook extracts in microbiology, marketing, and applied linguistics with similar corpus of research articles,…

Much has been written about the power of media to influence the public through instruments of advertising and a variety of venues (Considine & Haley, 1999; Cortes, 2000; Kilbourne, 1999). In this chapter, the author has chosen to use a singular media focus--news--to support the critical importance of teaching media literacy skills to students. She…

In recent years there has been growing awareness of the need to support primary and secondary students in developing competencies for active and participatory citizenship. Among the essential competencies identified in a recent study of politically active teachers was the ability to expand ideas into arguments. This article reports on the early…

This article focuses on the social practices of propagating and circulating memes within Internet environments as a significant dimension of cultural production and transmission. Memes (pronounced "meems") are contagious patterns of cultural information that are passed from mind to mind and which directly shape and transmit key actions and…

This paper provides a critical analysis of the EU's "Memorandum on lifelong learning" in light of the evolution of the concepts of lifelong education and lifelong learning from the late sixties onward. It also analyses this document in light of the forces of globalisation that impinge on educational policy-making in Europe as well as the…

Universities commonly rely upon International Teaching Assistants (ITAs) to teach basic courses. This use of ITAs is a considerable benefit to universities; however, there is substantial evidence to suggest that undergraduate students quite often object to being taught and graded by ITAs. If universities and their academic departments wish to…

This study investigated the degree of communicative competence of 8-year-old (n=45) students in five Welsh language immersion programs or Welsh-medium schools, comparing the children's skills with those of 10 native Welsh-speaking children. All were asked to retell a story show previously on video, and to participate in a group discussion task. In…