This paper identifies three underlying discourses on the nature of sexuality evident in two Department of Education curriculum documents on sexuality education in Victoria, Australia, over the past 15 years. These discourses are a cultural "preservation" perspective, a risk minimisation perspective, and a view that sexual expression…

Using a case study approach, this article examines the challenges faced by a cooperating teacher and student teacher during their collaborative planning conversations. I draw on several analytical frameworks, including sociolinguistics, speech act theory and discourse analysis, to analyze the cooperating and student teacher's efforts and struggles…

This paper explores the discourse of whole class teaching in Kenyan and Nigerian primary school English lessons. Twenty lessons were analysed using a system of discourse analysis focusing on the teacher-led three-part exchange sequence of Initiation-Response-Feedback (IRF). The focus of the analysis was on the first and third part of the IRF…

The life history method, which achieved a prominent position in the Chicago tradition of sociological research in the early 1920s, has been widely adopted for educational inquiries since the 1980s. The power of the life history method in illuminating subjective teacher experiences in social historical contexts has made it "probably the only…

In this article, the authors explore the ways in which a selection of student teachers from two universities in Canada expressed their feelings of preparedness to teach literacy in elementary classrooms. The student teachers had experienced various approaches to literacy teaching as they progressed through their teacher education program. These…

This article addresses two key challenges that globalization poses to literacy research: the need for new models of literacy and literacy education, and the stakes of adopting multiliteracies pedagogies in different contexts--that is, the tensions between competing hegemonic discourses of collective identity in the public sphere of ethnolinguistic…

The issue of agency bedevils contemporary composition theorists and practitioners. In theory, scholars such as Lester Faigley, James Berlin, and Patricia Bizzell have critiqued the foundation priority of thought to language, yet their emphasis on language has cast disturbing doubts on the origins of an individual's thoughts. In practice, the…

This number of a journal devoted to ideas for teachers of English as a second language (ESL) contains the following articles: (1) "Using Authentic Discourse in Teaching the Conditional" by Helen Hoyt Schmidt, (2) "Better Communication through Summarizations" by John Battaglia, (3) "A Look at Discourse Analysis" by…

This study investigates topic units and suggests some practical applications to the teaching of composition to native speakers and second language learners. A topic unit is a structural unit beyond the sentence. It is composed of clauses and consists of two parts -- a head proposition and a set of comments. The head proposition consists of the…

Two points--that arrangement is as important as invention in the study of rhetoric and that coherence, vital to arrangement, can be more fully understood through discourse analysis--are argued in this paper. Following a brief review of the literature that stresses the importance of arrangement and the contributions of linguistic research to…

Students learn, understand, and retain knowledge best when they discover it themselves. In the area of semantics, the study of how meaning is conveyed through language, explicit knowledge may appear to be obvious once it becomes conscious, but unless people are explicitly aware of their implicit knowledge and assumptions, they may be at their…

Noting that identifying and inferring cause and effect relationships is critical to the receptive language use of both listeners and readers, this paper describes the various constructions used to express cause and effect and discusses the problems in comprehending them. Various sections of the paper discuss (1) the form of cause and effect…

Students asked to write directions for assembling a tinkertoy structure learned valuable writing skills as well as critical ability. (JH)

Suggests that the teaching of translation should be given an increased importance in language study curricular revisions because it develops very usable language skills, makes the students aware of cultural differences, and can help in the study of literary criticism as a way to perform text "deconstruction." (Author/SED)

This paper uses data from two mathematics lessons to explore the nature of progressive discourse and examine critical features of teacher actions that contribute to mathematics classrooms functioning as communities of inquiry. Features found to promote progressive discourse include a focus on the conceptual elements of the curriculum and the use…