This longitudinal study examines the acquisition of subject pronouns in third language (L3) production. Participants were 90 Basque-Spanish bilingual students, learning English as a third language in a formal setting in the Basque Country. All the participants, who had received the same amount of exposure to English, were divided into three groups…

Though it has been rightly said that what is wrong with education cannot be fixed with technology; there is no doubt that modern life is dominated by technology. There is universal recognition of the need to use Information and Communication Technology (ICT) in education as we enter the era of globalization where the free flow of information via…

This study reports the development and evaluation of a web-based interactive writing environment designed for elementary school students. The environment includes three writing themes, "story pass on", "story chameleon" and "thousand ideas", to encourage reading comprehension, creativity and problem-solving skills of…

This paper reports the results of two interventions involving the integrated study of mathematics and technology practice to girls in Years 6 and 7. The focus of the study was to look at factors that contributed to girls' disengagement with mathematics study and seek pedagogical solutions for this. The key mathematics concepts embedded in the two…

This research study investigated the potential of Internet technology to provide a dynamic and autonomous language-learning environment for adult distance language learners. The study focused on five essential characteristics of dynamic language learning and observed the online study activity of the students in relation to these. Learners were…

This article explores the relationship between teachers perceptions of administrative practice in high schools and students perceptions of the school, teachers and their own performance. It was found that where decision making is perceived by teachers as collegial, collaborative, co-operative and consultative and providing adequate opportunities…

The washback effect of tests on teaching has attracted considerable attention over recent years, but the critical question of how this translates into washback on learning remains under-explored. To address this issue, questionnaires relating to academic writing instruction were distributed to 108 learners from mainland China preparing for…

Within the broad theoretical context provided by debates on the South African education reforms and the civic engagement agenda in higher education, this article focuses on service learning in higher education and portrays complex relationships between the service-learning office and different existing structures within and outside the University…

Mathematics educators are concerned about students' lack of ability to translate mathematical word problems into computable forms. Researchers argue that linguistic problems lie at the root of students' difficulties with mathematical word problems. The issue becomes more complicated for bilingual students. It is argued that if students study…

This article explores why university reform is central to the Labour government's project to create a "modern" Britain. During the passage of the 2004 Higher Education Act the government created a policy narrative which redefined the role and purpose of universities. It framed their futures as corporations, based more on an economic than…

A common report from anecdotal writing over many generations of educators is that it is the teacher who usually learns the most during the process of gathering content materials, designing, teaching and evaluating student performance. In this project we address this issue by developing an innovative instructional design in which collaborative…

In 2002 the language policy for teaching mathematics in Malaysia was changed from the national language Malay, to English, to be implemented from the beginning of 2003. This gave the curriculum developers and importantly the teachers just six months to prepare for this change. This small study investigated how after 18 months, 22 secondary…

Given the important role of the affective variables in the process of learning, this paper examines ways of overcoming negative effects (i.e. anxiety, boredom) of the contextual factors. Exemplifying the uses of humor through context-specific, purpose-driven jokes, it maintains that humor can be utilized to produce a resourceful, encouraging and…

Language planning for international scientific communication needs to be understood in the context of some general language policy for the larger field of science and higher education. The academic field is a sociological and sociolinguistic field of production and circulation of science. This field contains monolingual and bi- or multilingual…

In this paper, we demonstrate the dialectical relationship between micro and macro language planning: macro planning influences micro planning and yet macro planning results (or should result) from micro planning. The relation between the two planning perspectives is illustrated within the framework of Language Management Theory (Jernudd &…