Purpose: We sought to identify codes and themes in the mission statements of Kentucky's school districts and examine the relationship between district characteristics and the mission statements. Design/methodology/approach: We undertook a mixed methods design, specifically, a sequential transformative strategy with a theoretical lens overlaying…

This paper reports on an out of school creative writing collaboration between a grandmother (the author) and her then eleven-year-old granddaughter, and suggests ways in which this may be relevant to writing in school. The narrative is framed and analysed in the light of Donald Graves' concepts of process writing. The paper highlights the…

The sentence structure complexity and clause positioning (Staveley, 2013) represent the striking features of the writing style of the 19th century British fiction writers. The present syntactic study brings detailed quantitative and qualitative syntactic analyses of peripheral sentence elements, sentence (stance) adverbials, occurring in the…

In Study 1, 103 children ages 4 through 10 answered questions about their concept of and belief in luck, and completed a story task assessing their use of luck as an explanation for events. The interview captured a curvilinear trajectory of children's belief in luck from tentative belief at age 4 to full belief at age 6, weakening belief at age 8,…

Comics, which attract attention with their adaptation to changing conditions in the historical process, are increasing their popularity both in current life and in the field of education. They can be used as a powerful supplementary teaching tool concretizing abstract concepts, especially in lessons such as Science. They can also be used to convey…

This article presents a longitudinal panel study analyzing the evolution of a sample of more than 1000 informants in the language practices with peers during the period between the end of primary education and the end of secondary education in Catalonia. Results led to the identification of five clusters of informants according to their linguistic…

This paper is about identifying a nuance of social meaning which, I demonstrate, was conveyed in the Early and Late Modern period by the suffix "-oon." The history of non-native suffix "-oon" is presented by means of assembling non-native suffix "-oon" vocabulary in date order and sorting according to etymology. It…

The overarching goal of this literature review is to improve the understanding of the importance of oral language to critical emergent literacy skills and explore available assessment measures for use within the classroom. An overview of the components of language (i.e., content, form, and use) is provided. Measures of oral language gleaned from a…

A growing body of recent research suggests that verbal categories, particularly labels, impact categorization and perception. These findings are commonly interpreted as demonstrating the involvement of language on cognition; however, whether these assumptions hold true for grammatical structures has yet to be investigated. In the present study, we…

The language we use over the course of conversation changes as we establish common ground and learn what our partner finds meaningful. Here we draw upon recent advances in natural language processing to provide a finer-grained characterization of the dynamics of this learning process. We release an open corpus (>15,000 utterances) of extended…

Strong empirical evidence exists indicating language can influence students' beliefs about ability. Professional literature for teachers offers practical advice on how to adjust their classroom-based talk to support student achievement by orienting students toward an incremental theory of ability. Yet, little empirical work has been done to…

This experimental study tested whether a professor's form of address (FOA) and email signature influenced students' perceptions of the professor's credibility, approachability, and likability. Guided by communication accommodation theory, the study investigated the likelihood that students would reciprocate a professor's FOA in email…

Making liberal democratic values meaningful to study in schools is a more complex issue than being a question of turning values into explicit educational goals (Schleicher) or of curing a motivational deficit (Critchley). Since values seem to play an important role in the practices and commitments of people's everyday lives, values are calling for…

Speakers of many languages prefer allocentric frames of reference (FoRs) when talking about small-scale space, using words like "east" or "downhill." Ethnographic work has suggested that this preference is also reflected in how such speakers gesture. Here, we investigate this possibility with a field experiment in Juchitán,…

Currently there is a great variety of musical styles that coexist in our society. We can access music in very different ways and with immediacy never before imagined. For teenagers, music is a key element in defining their identity, socializing and taking refuge in their inner world. This communication focuses on the analysis of songs from the…