The purpose of this study was to analyze what a group teachers say to English Language Learners as part of the curriculum and instruction, and to categorize the comments along the lines of scientific curriculum inquiry. Observations and interviews were the primary methods of data collection for this proposed study. An analysis was made of what the…

Discourse, especially dialogic communication between students in collaborative problem-solving groups, plays a central role in educational reforms informed by learning science. This study examined the quality of discourse in problem-based learning groups in a university course. The study found a low incidence of high quality dialogue (dialogic…

This research is an examination of how gender is constructed through the pedagogical practices of the teacher in one secondary English/literacy classroom. It is evident from the classroom data that the teacher talks to the male students and the female students very differently and in this way constructs gender in different and inequitable ways.…

For this study I explored an elementary classroom with particular focus on how discursive practices became cultural resources for learners in formulating identities as individuals and group members. Through a Vygotskian perspective on development and learning, I focused on how using developing resources became consequential for both the collective…

Research on teacher learning consistently documents the disjuncture between the practices beginning teachers encounter in university teacher preparation courses and those they reencounter in the K-12 classrooms in which they learn to teach. As preservice teachers enter teaching, they gravitate toward conventional K-12 practices, dismissing those…

As long as profit can be made from ignoring or cultivating the ignorance of working people, education for their children in the best sense will remain a difficult goal. This book delineates in three case studies how American myths of emancipation and upward mobility work as images of delusion. The frontier of space, the arena of sports, and the…

This study investigated similarities and differences in the requesting behavior presented by American and European speakers in English and Spanish. Two specific research questions were addressed: (1) whether European or American speakers and native or non-native speakers use the same request strategies in English and Spanish; and (2) whether…

Exploring how people create meaning from their personal experience is central to clinical practice, and is equally important in examining the development of the intern therapist's clinical skills. This study examined supervision session discussions and interns' accounts of their training experiences in order to understand how meaning and knowledge…

Six teacher-researchers (three elementary school teachers, one teacher of hearing-impaired, one Chapter One teacher, and one university researcher) investigated how their membership in a community of writers affected their perceptions of themselves as writers. Three themes emerged in transcriptions of biweekly meetings held over one school year:…

To address a need for increased discussion of the dangers of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) and an increased educative effort to prevent people from acquiring HIV infection, a study investigated one element of an AIDS campaign of the past: the "America Responds to AIDS" television and radio public service announcements…

An analysis of a televised interview, in Israel, of an actress playing a role in a play is presented as an illustration of politeness marking in modern Israeli Hebrew. The interviewer is well-known as an educated Ashkenazi Jew, the actress a singer well-known for her vocal portrayal of Sephardic Jews, and in this case playing an exaggeratedly…

A collaborative inquiry project illustrates moments when English teacher educators questioned literacy instructional practices that had become normative and acceptable within the schools and communities where their student teachers worked--practices that the teacher educators believed adversely affected the literacy growth of students in the…

A study analyzed the dinner-table discourse in a Caucasian-American, upper-middle-class two-parent family with children aged seven (female) and eight (male) for evidence of how family narrative practices socialize children into family, social, and cultural membership. It is also proposed that discourse in families both indexes and constitutes…

Individualized instruction significantly improves students' pedagogical and motivational outcomes. The study described here sought to characterize tutorial behaviors that could lead to these benefits and to consider why these behaviors should be pedagogically useful. The experiment studied 16 undergraduate and graduate university students learning…

This paper contends that rhetoric is a force for social change. It also contends that the study of persuasive discourse--how it works, what gives it force--is rhetoric. Pointing out that in the past "persuasive discourse" has meant public discourse of various kinds but that nowadays scholars usually expand the category to include…