The ACTFL Oral Proficiency Interview (OPI) and accompanying proficiency guidelines have become a mainstay in academic foreign language assessment. In 2006, an asynchronous electronic interface of the OPI was made available in which candidates are asked to record themselves responding to questions delivered aurally via computer, labeled the Oral…

The article explores how people born in Estonia in the 1970s contextualize their memories about their Soviet childhood in the context of school. Focusing on small group of people who grew up in the Soviet Estonia, we argue that in biographical narratives, school is treated as the representative of the Soviet regime. Nostalgic reminiscences from…

The national curriculum reformers, regarded as members of the social elites and intellectuals, projected their vision of identity onto the curriculum which they constructed and influenced the next generation's national consciousness. In the tangled relationship between politics and education, the selection of the reformers in a sense dictates the…

This article concerns policy implementation and examines the processes of translation through which policy may be enacted at local level. In particular, it focuses on education policy and constructions of teacher professionalism, drawing on a framework of critical logics--social, political and fantasmatic--which examine different dimensions of…

While it is well recognized that students are prone to difficulties when performing linguistic-to-algebra translations, the nature of students' difficulties remain an issue of contention. Moreover, the literature indicates that these difficulties are not easily remediated by domain-specific instruction. Some have opined that this is the case…

For Vygotsky, language is a cultural-psychological concept emerged from social interactions and is applied for higher cognitive functions such as thinking, meaning making, and knowledge construction. In this study, a sociocultural perspective was applied to analyze the language produced by 40 sophomore Iranian EFL learners during dialogic…

A growing program of research in science education acknowledges the beginnings of disciplinary reasoning in students' ideas and seeks to inform instruction that responds productively to these disciplinary progenitors in the moment to foster their development into sophisticated scientific practice. This dissertation examines secondary school…

This narrative case study examined the relationship between teacher identity and elementary science teaching. Teacher identity was described using a modification of Gee's framework incorporating three perspectives: the teachers' self-described identity, the researchers' view of teacher identity, and the students' views of teacher identity. Over…

This article contributes to the study of language maintenance as an everyday activity in binational-bilingual families. By embedding the question of language maintenance into a language socialization framework and adopting a conversation-analytic approach to language alternation, three excerpts of mealtime interactions in Russian-French speaking…

Twenty years after democracy, the legacy of apartheid and hitherto unmet challenges of resourcing and teacher development are reflected in a severely inequitable and underperforming education system. This paper focuses on second language writing in the middle years of schooling when 80% of learners face a double challenge: to move from…

Despite the importance of advising experiences, very little is known about the interpersonal communication dynamics of these interactions. This study addresses that knowledge gap by providing an analysis of audio recordings of advising sessions as they occurred in the offices of five academic advisors who met with undergraduate advisees (n= 28).…

The present study analyses bilingual conversations taking place in binational families living in the UK. The focus is on two Polish/English stepfamilies, where the Polish mothers' concern with preserving and developing their children's linguistic and cultural identity collides with the English partner's limited knowledge of Polish. While the paper…

Learning to argue is a key academic purpose for both first and second language students. It has been claimed that computer mediated asynchronous text-based conferencing is a useful medium for developing argumentation skills (Andriessen, Baker, & Suthers, 2003). This paper reports on two research studies which explore this claim. One study focused…

Language tests in immigration contexts typically perform a gate-keeping role in decisions about whether an applicant should be granted residence or citizenship in a new country. In refugee contexts, so-called language tests or language analyses also play a gate-keeping role, but a more ambitious one; namely that of providing answers to questions…

This dissertation develops a theoretical and empirical framework for the model of metalinguistic community, a community of positioned social actors engaged primarily in discourse about language and cultural symbols tied to language. Building upon the notions of speech community (Duranti, 1994; Gumperz, 1968; Morgan, 2004), linguistic community…