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…

We theorize about ambiguity in mathematical communication and define a certain subset of ambiguous language usage as imprecise. For us, imprecision in classroom mathematics discourse hinders in-the-moment communication because the instance of imprecision is likely to create inconsistent interpretations of the same statement among individuals. We…

In traditional academic instruction, the classroom may be viewed as a kind of speech community composed of an expert (the teacher) and those who are at various stages of socializing into the cultural models and norms of that community (students), although this is an overly simplistic and unilinear view. In executive development programs, students…

Reflective career conversations are a necessary instrument in the career guidance of students in vocational education. These conversations help students to learn from their (work) experiences and gain a better understanding of their motives on the labour market. Research shows that in a society in which change seems to become the only constant…

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…

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…

This article draws on data from an action research project carried out in a lower secondary school environment in the Czech Republic. The project involved the implementation of a teacher professional development programme aimed at transforming teacher-student communication and reinforcing opportunities for student participation in classroom…

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…

In this paper we consider how mathematics instruction that values, attends to, and builds on students' mathematical ideas is realized through discourse. We describe interactions that build on students' thinking and in which students help to determine the direction of mathematics lessons as responsive. Using a framework we developed to characterize…

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…

Improving student learning is a constant goal within classrooms and schools, yet decisions based on a single test score may lead to less effective learning environments. Increased student learning stems from more effective and student-centered learning situations wherein students play a fundamental role in the formulation and development of their…

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,…

This paper considers how Australian young people living in relative poverty, per se, are portrayed in media reports and how a specific group of socioeconomically disadvantaged young people are constituted in teachers' classroom talk. The paper begins with the examination of several newspaper reports, part of an archive of articles concerned with…