A literacy education professor teams up with a colleague whose specialization is technology and education to analyze students' contributions to a graduate course taught online for the first time. This article explains the modifications that the instructor made to a face-to-face course to adapt it to an online learning environment. The online…

Although protocol analysis can be an important tool for researchers to investigate the process of collaboration and communication, the use of this method of analysis can be time consuming. Hence, an automatic coding procedure for coding dialogue acts was developed. This procedure helps to determine the communicative function of messages in online…

Discussion boards as tools in blended "English language" learning programs have unique characteristics when compared to other synchronous and asynchronous communication tools that are different. Therefore, it is important to investigate the way they operate, their role within a given program and the students', teachers' and tutors'…

For educational philosopher and activist Paulo Freire, cultural circles are a way to generate critical conversations among "teacher-students" and "student-teachers" and can provide the motivation for critical consciousness and political action (1970). Both teachers and students learn from one another as their democratic…

Blended learning is increasingly introduced in classrooms worldwide. Nonetheless, studies are not unanimous as to its impact on student performance and its benefits to enhancing the learning experience. In this article, it is argued that a focused approach, taking into account the particular requirements of the course and the students'…

The Community of Inquiry Framework (Garrison, Anderson, & Archer, 2000) has been an important contribution to the online distance education field and has been useful in providing researchers with the construct of "teaching presence". Teaching presence as described by the framework provides insight into the types of interactions…

Although there is a push in education to increase the amount of technologies used in the classroom much of the recent literature emphasizes a need to investigate ways to improve the instructional methods used when incorporating technology in education. The focus of the present research is to investigate an instructional technique used in an…

This study was an attempt to explore how a critical literacy (CL) approach to reading development may contribute to EFL learners' personal development, and what their perceptions of a reading course with a CL orientation are. 25 B.A. freshman English Literature students participated in a reading comprehension course at Allameh Tabataba'i…

Online education is a modality of teaching that has proliferated throughout higher education in such a rapid form and without any guidelines that its quality and merit is largely unknown, hotly debated, and still evolving. Institutions have used online education as a method of reducing costs and increasing enrollments and students have flocked to…

The purpose of this research was to explore the overall perceptions of EFL teachers toward the extensive reading approach as they experienced the approach first hand. More particularly, EFL teachers' perspectives on the applicability issues of extensive reading for secondary level curriculum in Korea were captured. Also, their personal experience…

Adolescent suicide is a growing phenomenon that is not adequately addressed in graduate education. Students and clinicians who experience a patient suicide respond negatively which in turn affects perceived competence. As a result, education in adolescent suicide is warranted. Therefore, this dissertation is a graduate level course on adolescent…

Within teacher education programs, the use of discussion forums offers potential for creating learning communities whereby participants can negotiate meaning and engage in knowledge construction (Lock, 2006; Murphy, 2000). To this end, the present article draws on the findings of a larger research project which focused on a discussion forum…

This teacher research inquiry is a critical discourse analysis of second grade classroom talk about racial identity and dialect difference within the theoretical framework of moral philosophy. Participants in the study, which took place in an urban public district in a Midwestern United States city, included ten African American students and a…

Erika was a failing student at a large urban public middle school. She was poor, Hispanic, bilingual, and had repeated fourth grade. She scored low on her standardized tests and was failing several subject areas. In class, Erika was a student who sat silently with her head on her desk, and rarely turned in any of her assignments. She was a…

The first guide shows individuals how to organize a series of small-group discussions in order to help participants consider ways to prevent crime and violence in their homes, schools, and neighborhoods. Based on the concept of a study circle--small-group, democratic, and highly participatory--these groups bring people together to discuss…