As academic interest in Chinese complementary schools has grown, insufficient attention has been paid to the role and experiences of teachers working in these schools. This paper has drawn from accounts of Chinese complementary schoolteachers in London, together with the author's personal experiences of working as a teacher in one such school. The…

We use the theory of communities of practice and the concept of accountable disciplinary knowledge to describe how a learning community develops in the context of an upper-division physics laboratory course. The change in accountable disciplinary knowledge motivates students' enculturation into a community of practice. The enculturation process is…

Drawing on research in constrained online discussion environments and strategy instruction, this approach combines explicit instruction on discussion strategies with the use of post type labels. In a trial of this approach in an online course, students actively used the discussion strategies and post type labels in their discussions. Analysis of…

Around the mid-2000s a crisis discourse emerged in educational policy-making in the EU and in Sweden. Using the EU and Sweden as empirical references, this article explores how this crisis discourse has been and is employed by politicians and NGOs. Discourse Institutionalism is used as an overall theoretical framework focusing on how the crisis…

This dissertation uses theoretical explorations and participant conversations to consider the constitutive possibilities of ethnographic writing that works between students, faculty, and communities and uses those possibilities to describe the philosophy and key elements of an ethnographic composition pedagogy. The project begins with an…

This dissertation explores how teaching Spanish and English as second languages in the United States has been traditionally defined, the common assumptions that are held about each context, and the influence these assumptions have on instructional practices and student learning. In order to explore how teaching English and Spanish is constructed…

The first day of a course has great potential to set the tone for the entire course, planting the seeds for habits of mind and questioning and setting in motion expectations for classroom discourse. Rather than let the first meeting contain little besides going over the syllabus, the instructor (Lesser) decided to use two sustained open-ended…

The goal of this article is to differentiate initiation from indoctrination, and to return a positive significance to the notion of initiation, as a pedagogy that contributes not only to the perpetuation of a particular form of life or community, but that provides the next generation with means to advance that knowledge beyond its existing…

The potential of computer-mediated communication (CMC) for language learning resides mainly in the possibility that learners have to engage with other speakers of the language, including L1 speakers. The inclusion of CMC in the L2 classroom provides an opportunity for students to utilize authentic language in real interaction, rather than the more…

This paper combines the use of corpus techniques with discourse analysis in order to investigate adverbials of result in the writing of advanced academic student writers. It focuses in detail on the phraseology and functions of "thus," "therefore," "then," "hence," "so" and "consequently." Two corpora of native-speaker theses are examined: 190,000…

This article offers an analysis of the dozens using Black feminist theory. The dozens are a ritualized verbal game of insults that historically have used sexual offenses against Black women as the vehicle for insults. Rather than simply viewing the dozens as a cultural phenomenon, the article draws a connection between its occurrence in West…

In this paper we describe an action-research project that our research team proposed to a group of teachers working in a special education school. The main idea was to introduce new methods to teach reading and writing in their school, mainly constructivist-based ones on teaching the function of writing text. In this paper we focus on the process…

Media provides a material site for girls' identity formation and presents conflicting images of femininity, which challenge young women's self-expression and physicality development. The "problem" with girls' physicality has not been resolved, but rather complicated by discourses of new femininities in sport, fitness and health promoted…

This paper investigates the ways in which discourses of teacher accountability were negotiated by teachers within hearings held for the Australian Inquiry into Boys' Education. In the Inquiry context, dominant interpretative repertoires positioned teachers as obliged to "acknowledge', "address" and "actively respond" to an…

Within the Australian education system, Aboriginal students' use of non-standard English features is often viewed simplistically as evidence of non-attainment of literacy and oral-English milestones. One reason for this is the widespread use of assessment tools which fail to differentiate between native-English speakers and students who are…