This article examines media coverage of a high school Native American mascot controversy. Discourse analysis of media documents and artifacts was utilized to explore how the issue was socially constructed for public consumption. Critical race feminism was used as a framework to examine how media discourses can oversimplify the complex interaction…

The argument here proceeds from an understanding that learning in drama is about participating in forms of cultural production whilst simultaneously engaging thought and feeling to make sense of aspects of contemporary life. In contemporary culture, acts of war and terror are mediated through television and digitised media and are thereby given…

Mainstream ESL pedagogy has been dominated by monolingual methods for the past century, but the default teaching mode in many EFL contexts is in fact bilingual. A challenge we currently face is to find fresh ways of describing such bilingual teaching. This paper attempts to begin to do so by taking the notions of scaffolding and…

This investigation focused on two research questions. The first question examined what specific instructional strategies for teaching vocabulary appear most frequently in current content area textbooks. The second question built on the first and used that information to develop a survey that was administered to secondary-level preservice teachers…

Scholars tend to explain or predict China English's rhetorical strategies on the basis of Chinese discourse and cultural preferences. This inference model, I argue, falls short in studying the Chinese variety of English because, first, it essentializes both China English and Chinese, treating their discursive strategies as two easily…

It has been increasingly recognised that classroom discourse plays an important social role as a semiotic mediator of knowledge construction with respect to curriculum content. The assumption is that through active verbal engagement with a topic of interest, students are enabled to master the modes of language use associated with schooling--the…

Despite a strong tradition of viewing "coded equivalence" as the underlying principle of linguistic semiotics, it lacks the power needed to understand and explain language as an empirical phenomenon characterized by complex dynamics. Applying the biology of cognition to the nature of the human cognitive/linguistic capacity as rooted in the…

Children's early word learning is not usually considered creative in the same sense as artistic productions of later life. Yet early word learning is a creative response to the intrinsic instability of word meaning. As the child acts to participate in her community, she strives for intersubjectivity, manifest in neologisms and under- and…

The culture of modern science continues to establish its public identity by appealing to values and historical conceptions that reflect its appropriation of various religious ideals during its formative period, most especially in the rhetoric of Francis Bacon. These elements have persisted because they continue to achieve similar goals, but the…

The particular forms of relative clauses (RCs) in Mandarin Chinese lead to particular cognitive, semantic, pragmatic, and discourse constraints on speakers and writers. In this study, analyses of oral and written Mandarin Chinese narratives demonstrate that SS structures (subject head noun phrase [NP] modified by a subject RC) are produced more…

Assuming that dynamic features of Dynamic Geometry Software may provide a basic representation of both variation and functional dependency, and taking the Vygotskian perspective of semiotic mediation, a teaching experiment was designed with the aim of introducing students to the idea of function. This paper focuses on the use of the Trace tool and…

The argument for a pedagogy of input oriented learning for the development of speaking competence (Sharwood-Smith, 1986; Bardovi-Harlig and Salsbury, 2004; Eslami-Rasekh, 2005) has been of increasing interest in Applied Linguistics circles. It has also been argued that multimedia applications, in particular DVDs, provide language learners with…

To estimate Flynn effects (FEs) on forms of declarative memory (episodic, semantic) and visuospatial ability (Block Design) time-sequential analyses of data for Swedish adult samples (35-80 years) assessed on either of four occasions (1989, 1994, 1999, 2004; n = 2995) were conducted. The results demonstrated cognitive gains across occasions,…

The present study investigated verbal recall of semantically preserved and degraded words and nonwords by taking into consideration the status of one's semantic short-term memory (STM). Two experiments were conducted on 2 Chinese individuals with aphasia. The first experiment showed that they had largely preserved phonological processing abilities…

Both the polyvalent notions of culture and development have been central for building psychological theories. In the present paper, both notions are discussed within the framework of general developmental science and thus from a necessarily systemic perspective. Development is surely culturally informed, yet the process of cultivation is largely…