This article presents a case study of a fourth-grade teacher, Kathy Topaz (all names are pseudonyms), her seventeen students, and the ways that they talked about and rehearsed essay-writing through speech across the school year in an inclusive fourth grade class. With increased focus on informational writing and opinion writing in curriculum and…

We contend that the classroom-discourse routine of IRE/F (teacher initiation, student response, teacher evaluation/follow-up) is a genre of argumentation that is both collaborative and implicit because teachers and students cooperate during IRE/F exchanges not only to make and mirror knowledge claims but also to suppress justification for those…

Drawing on sequential and multimodal analysis of video-recorded classroom interactions, the paper examines in detail the interactional practices and verbal and bodily displays that serve to (re-)establish a congruency between the teacher's expectation with regard to the participants' relative knowledge and the students' actual knowledge claims. By…

Teaching that is responsive to students' ideas can create opportunities for rigorous sense-making talk by young learners. Yet we have few accounts of how thoughtful attempts at responsive teaching unfold across units of instruction in elementary science classrooms and have only begun to understand how responsiveness encourages rigor in…

Dialogic Literary Gatherings (DLGs), first implemented by Ramon Flecha, have proved to be a "successful educational action" (SEA) for inclusion, social cohesion and raising children's attainment in several European and Latin American countries. This article reports their implementation in England and their consistent and dramatic…

The authors, working from a "new literacies studies" perspective, suggest that educators can better teach their students if they develop their own knowledge of the purposes, types, and language conventions students use in their informal out-of-school literacy practices. The purpose of this study was to identify the literacy practices…

Neoliberal policy objectives perpetuate an audit culture at both school and system levels. The associated focus on performativity and accountability can result in reductive and procedural interpretations of classroom assessment for learning (AfL) practices. Set in a New Zealand AfL professional development context, this research takes an…

This study utilized a multilevel model to examine the relationship between teacher attributes, school context, and the characteristics of the discourse within novice elementary mathematics lessons. MKT and teacher beliefs were significant predictors of the level of student explanation within teachers' lessons while school SES and perceived levels…

This paper presents an exploratory analysis of treatment-control differences in the quality of classroom interactions in 4th through 7th grade urban classrooms. Word Generation (WG) is a research-based academic language program for middle school students designed to teach novel vocabulary and literacy through language arts, math, science, and…

Despite historical national efforts to improve elementary science education, science instruction continues to be marginalized, varying by state. This study was designed to address the ongoing challenge of educating elementary preservice teachers (PSTs) to teach science. Elementary PSTs are one of the science education community's major links…

At the time of writing, primary English education is, once again, at a crossroads. Within the context of a continuing focus on underachievement in writing for key groups of learners and a large body of research, which suggests that classroom talk is a powerful means of improving children's success in all areas of the curriculum including writing,…