This paper is about a case study investigating into a Second Chance School in Greece as an institution for raising students' social awareness along the principles of critical pedagogy. Through the prism of symbolic interactionism, students' and teachers' negotiated perspectives formulating school and classroom culture reveal that students'…

Drawing on interviews, observations, and videorecorded data collected in a "sheltered" grade 7 social studies class in a Mid-western US city, the current paper explores the learning opportunities provided for English language learners (ELLs) and the discursive strategies used by a teacher, consciously or unconsciously, to help her students become…

A great deal of educational policy proceeds as though teachers are malleable and ever-responsive to change. Some argue they are positioned as technicians who simply implement policy. However, how teachers go about their work and respond to reform agendas may be contingent upon many factors that are both biographical in nature and workplace…

The study investigates whether the informal interactive written discourse in instant messaging (IM) is permeating the more formal writing of English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) college students, and how students' identities are constructed in terms of English multiliteracies in Taiwan. The study is designed as a qualitative case study. The…

The aim of this qualitative case study is to investigate how learning in "democratic participation" is constituted by the social interaction and conversation pattern in school democratic meetings in a Swedish primary school. According to the findings, a pupil control discourse and the Initiation-Response-Evaluation pattern dominates the…

Background: Constructivist epistemology offers an explanation of the nature of knowledge and how people learn that has emerged as a prominent approach endorsed by schools of teacher education. This perspective stands in direct contrast to the understanding of knowledge and learning based on behaviorist epistemology. These opposing epistemological…

This paper explores themes associated with teacher research and its role in enhancing and more deeply emancipating practice. Wider themes underpin how research might be understood which entails one in acknowledging political and epistemological controversies about the concept of evidence and its use in defining professionalism. Evidence-based…

Prior research on collaborative learning identifies student behaviors that significantly predict student achievement, such as giving explanations of one's thinking. Less often studied is the role of teachers' instructional practices in collaboration among students. This article investigates the extent to which teachers engage in practices that…

This study examines verbal behavior in student-teacher talk and alignment of perceptions of communication effectiveness. Heightened awareness of conversational patterns is more productive in the learning environment than the rote use of discourse markers.

This paper investigates the differences in the discursive patterning of cases in Law and Management. It examines a corpus of 271 Law and Management cases and discusses the kind of information that these two disciplines call for and how discourses are constructed in discursive hierarchical patterns. A discursive hierarchical pattern is a model…

An analysis of authentic or genuine interactions among Cameroon English speakers reveals that conversational routines in this variety of English differ a good deal from those obtained in other varieties of English, non-native varieties of English inclusive, and more specifically in native varieties of English. This paper looks at "thanking…

Seventy-seven new academics--59 at a large, public university in the UK and 18 at a medium-sized, private comprehensive university in the USA--were asked to read an extract of an article on the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) and mark the text according to categories of difficulty or dislike. Analysis of the data revealed six main…

The 5th International Conference on Language, Literature and Culture has been hosted by Mehmet Akif Ersoy University (Burdur, Turkey), in cooperation with Çankaya University (Ankara, Turkey) and Süleyman Demirel University (Isparta, Turkey). Our main aim has been to provide a forum for discussion, to facilitate integration in these fields, and to…

This dissertation reports on a qualitative investigation of two research questions: What experiences lead secondary social studies teachers to become passionate and committed to teaching toward social justice? How do these teachers conceptualize and practice teaching toward social justice in the social studies? The study, which employed a life…

In Sociocultural Theory, mediations in second language learning include (1) mediation by others (2) mediation by self (3) and mediation by artifacts, which incorporates brilliant insights for EFL contexts (Lantolf, 2000). Putting these ideas in a task-based method, the present study aimed at examining the contribution of scaffolding and private…