The contemporary South African subject English classroom is a complex space requiring ongoing attention to issues of cultural and linguistic diversity, and frequently manifesting the need to work across historically constructed differences in race, ethnicity and socioeconomic status. This article reports on one aspect of a broader research…

Teacher education is effective when pre-service teachers are able to transfer knowledge from content areas to practice. This study investigates the extent to which curriculum and assessment designs, along with teaching practices, supported pre-service teachers to transfer knowledge gained about language from a first-year course into a second-year…

Teachers working with increasingly diverse student populations are expected, for the first time in American history, to bring all students to high levels of proficiency. American graduates must compete with graduates from other nations, given the realities of the 21st century global economy. American teachers must possess 21st century skills in…

Many studies have explored the difficulties faced by foreign language learners when they begin the learning journey from survival to advanced level. Most of these investigations, however, tend to focus on what makes the road to fluency strewn with obstacles and challenges; no significant attention has been paid to what makes the journey…

This article provides micro analysis of one representative incident from a larger qualitative study to examine how third-grade bilingual students and their teacher negotiated academic disciplinary and popular culture discourses in a social studies unit on Jamestown and Pocahontas. Informed by discourse and linguistic analyses, this study explores…

This critical ethnographic study explores how two teacher candidates in English education used specific and varied literacy practices to enact their social justice priorities at a troubled high school in a high-need district. Data include interviews before and after the student teaching experience; observations of teaching, blogs, journals, and…

This article shows how various dialogic discourse strategies were used in read-alouds of English science information books in a 2nd-grade bilingual classroom. Using a variety of discursive strategies, Ibett encouraged her Spanish-speaking students to provide explanations and reasoning related to science ideas. Similarly, she used intertextual…

Informed and inspired by neo-Vygotskian theory, this article outlines a study exploiting a contemporary conceptualization of Wells's (2002) joint activity system model as an exploratory framework for examining and depicting the social-cultural-historical contradictions in second-language (L2) learners' joint activity. The participants were a pair…

Support for children with special educational needs in inclusive classrooms is increasingly provided by teaching assistants (TAs). They often have a direct pedagogical role, taking responsibility for instruction in mathematics. The quality of TAs' oral skills is crucial for learning but has rarely been researched. Using conversation analysis, this…

With the modernization of Chinese society, beginning in the early-20th century, the Chinese language has experienced a fundamental change that has transformed Chinese pedagogic practices. Modern Chinese discourses, whether of social or scientific practices or on China's intellectual heritage, are largely articulated in westernized discourses that…

Educational discourse, like other fields, is not neutral. Through policy documents it has ideological functions of transmitting dominant cultures and serving certain sectional interest groups. In Zimbabwe 1998 was characterized by radical political discontent as witnessed by a rise in student activism and the formation of the main political…

This study attempts to explore the nature and the potential of various discourse structures and linguistic functions that may facilitate students' learning in English classes co-taught by a native English-speaking teacher (NEST) and a local English teacher in Taiwanese elementary schools. Considering the nature of the study, the author employed a…

This study responds to the Italian Ministry of Education mandate that, starting the 2013-2014 academic year, CLIL be implemented in the "final" year of high school, during content time, by content teachers with C1-level competence in English. This decision raises numerous concerns, at least in Calabria: most content teachers have, at…

The purpose of this investigation was to examine, from a cross-cultural perspective, students' epistemological patterns of reasoning about socioscientific issues (SSI), and to identify potential interactions of cultural and scientific identity. Mediating factors associated with students' argumentation and discourse about SSI, as well as the…

This article presents an ethnographic study of how bilingual teachers and children use their home language, TexMex, to mediate academic content and standard languages. From the premise that TESOL educators can benefit from a fuller understanding of students' linguistic repertoires, the study describes language practices in a second-grade classroom…