This paper reports a part of a study on the construction of mathematical meanings in terms of development of semiotic systems (gestures, speech in oral and written form, drawings) in a Vygotskian framework, where artefacts are used as tools of semiotic mediation. It describes a teaching experiment on perspective drawing at primary school (fourth…

Framed in theories of new literacies, this article presents the story of Carol, a ninth-grade English teacher, who constructed lessons around semiotic analysis and constructivist learning in multimodal formats as an integral part of her instruction. Her students constructed identities as more competent, literate beings through guided participation…

In this dissertation, the denaturalization of migrants in the US and Italy as represented in newspaper crime reports was identified and compared to the opposing naturalization of Italian crime organizations in Italy and Wall Street/corporate criminals in the US. This was accomplished through careful, multidisciplinary, scientific analysis of over…

From a sociocultural perspective the concept of self-regulation is associated to voluntary control over higher and culturally organized mental functions such as, for example, focusing attention, planning a course of action, solving a problem, or deliberately remembering something. Thus, the ability to self-regulate is highly related to school…

Public-private partnerships in education (ePPP) are acquiring increasing centrality in the agendas of international organizations and development agencies dealing with educational affairs. They are designed as an opportunity to correct inefficiencies in the public delivery of education and to mobilize new resources to increase the access to and…

Drawing upon observer participation in a first grade classroom, we present a systemic functional analysis of classroom communication located in relation to social semiotics, cultural historical activity theory, and ecological psychology, relating context to meaning making. Two years of observation include field notes, student assessments, audio…

Sentences that refer to categories--generic sentences (e.g., "Dogs are friendly")--are frequent in speech addressed to young children and constitute an important means of knowledge transmission. However, detecting generic meaning may be challenging for young children, since it requires attention to a multitude of morphosyntactic, semantic, and…

Scholars agree that reading pictures is a multifaceted act. Interestingly, children often look at illustrations more closely and "see" details in picture that are missed by "skipping and scanning" adults. Although the illustrations in picture books are a "source of aesthetic delight," "everything" about the illustrations conveys "information about…

Recent work addressing the phenomenon of perceptual simulation offers new and exciting avenues of investigating how to model knowledge representation. From the perspective of language, the simulation approach has given rise to new impetus to work on models of language understanding (e.g., Zwaan, 2004, and references therein), and provides a way of…

In his article, Chris Burt focuses on the relationship between time and autobiographical memory. The question Burt puts forward is whether temporal markers in reports on autobiographic memories reflect specific temporal information or result from rather complex cognitive processing of time-relevant knowledge. The aspect of time is inherent to the…

In this chapter, the historical roots of contemporary Practice Theory are unearthed in the work of semioticians, philosophers, and anthropologists. Saussure's semiotic theory is contrasted with that of Peirce, and the importance of Peirce's work for understanding the context of signs is stressed. The philosophy of language in the writings of…

This paper examines the relative values of syntactic-semantic relationships in the mental lexicon of aphasic patients, which were tested within syntagmatic and paradigmatic networks of lexical relations. Semantic relations, such as synonymy, antonomy, and hyperonymy, as well as collocational and coordinational syntactic-semantic relations, were…

The "Semantic Web" is an idea proposed by Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the "World Wide Web." The topic has been generating a great deal of interest and enthusiasm, and there is a rapidly growing body of literature dealing with it. This article attempts to explain how the Semantic Web would work, and explores short-term and long-term…

We evaluated whether prior semantic knowledge would enhance episodic learning in amnesia. Subjects studied prices that are either congruent or incongruent with prior price knowledge for grocery and household items and then performed a forced-choice recognition test for the studied prices. Consistent with a previous report, healthy controls'…

The focus in this article is on the role of symbol and metaphor in the development of student self-awareness and engagement in the process of learning. It draws on a case-study which explored the process of an inquiry-based learning project in an Indigenous learning centre in a school in New South Wales, Australia. The data used for this article…