This article explores children's use of digital popular culture as boundary objects, and the transmedial boundary work done in Swedish school-age educare (SAEC) centres. As children bring their experiences of digital media into everyday SAEC practices, they influence, and are influenced by, others around them, children as well as adults. Through…

Describes a teaching approach based on integration of the concepts of dialogue and mediation, which uses learning tasks to structure dialogue with students during classroom meetings and outside the classroom. Asserts that it promotes deep learning and diminishes the powerful voice of the teacher, allowing students and the teacher to reason…

Three classroom activities for development of second language conversation skills are described. First, each student keeps a "talk workbook" for use in an exercise in which pairs of students record their brief conversations according to specific guidelines. The workbook enhances student awareness of the importance of the conversation, illustrates…

A dialogue journal is a written conversation in which a student and teacher communicate regularly over a period of a semester or a school year. The student may write as much as he chooses on any topic, and the teacher responds, introduces new topics, offers observations, clarifies, and asks and answers questions. Teachers use dialogue journals to…

A study of the effects of the complexity of scenarios used in the Strategic Interaction Method of second language instruction had four scenarios of varying complexity performed by four university classes of students of English as a second language at varying levels. Indicators of complexity included the degree of verbalness, contextual constraint,…

The laboratory manual for a course in basic Pashto is designed to accompany a series of tapes and other instructional materials. It contains a variety of written exercises the student is to perform in response to material on the tapes, which provide listening practice on material presented in parallel textbook lessons. An answer key follows each…

A guide to Pulaar is designed for language learning by Peace Corps volunteers. It contains a pronunciation guide to the Pulaar alphabet, 12 language lessons for interpersonal and intercultural communication, and glossaries. The glossaries are in Pulaar, English, and French; all text is in English. The lessons consist of cultural information, a…

The laboratory tapescripts for a course in basic Pashto are transcriptions of instructions and exercises given on tape recordings made for use in a language laboratory. The course contains seven units, each consisting of five lessons. The laboratory tape to accompany each lesson contains instructions for completing exercises contained in the…

Dialogue journal writing is a communicative language technique that can be used effectively in the English-as-a-second-language (ESL) classroom. In this approach, the teacher responds in writing to each journal entry by the student. It is a low-cost writing-fluency activity that is relatively easy to initiate and can provide an important bridge to…