U.S. public schools are required to establish policies ensuring that English language learners have equal access to "meaningful education." This demands that districts put into place mechanisms to determine student eligibility for specialized English language services. For the most states, this federal requirement is fulfilled through…

Being challenged by opposing views in a controversial discussion can stimulate the production of more elaborate and sophisticated argumentations. According to the model of argument reappraisal (Leitão, 2000), such processes require transactivity, meaning that students do not only give reasons to support their own position (e.g., pro/contra…

This study focuses on a recording from a week of third-grade classroom sessions. The recording was used to train new teachers in a certification program and provided data for a learning community that was studying classroom discourse. The third-grade teacher was described as being "outstanding" and "culturally responsive" by…

This paper reports on a critical discourse analysis (CDA) of the New Labour (1997-2010) discourse of Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) in schools, and how it was understood and enacted by policymakers in England and in Wales within the context of devolved government across the UK. By SEL I mean universal school-based programs, located in the…

As an important yet intricate linguistic feature in English language, synonymy poses a great challenge for second language learners. Using the 100 million-word British National Corpus (BNC) as data and the software Sketch Engine (SkE) as an analyzing tool, this article compares the usage of "learn" and "acquire" used in natural…

Communication strategies (CSs) play important roles in resolving problematic second language interaction and facilitating language learning. While studies in face-to-face contexts demonstrate the benefits of communication strategy instruction (CSI), there have been few attempts to integrate computer-mediated communication and CSI. The study…

We examined how social network (SN) groups contribute to the learning of chemistry. The main goal was to determine whether chemistry learning could occur in the group discourse. The emphasis was on groups of students in the 11th and 12th grades who learn chemistry in preparation for their final external examination. A total of 1118 discourse…

Purpose: The overarching purpose of this paper is to explore the transformation of intercultural education in Cyprus in the context of European integration. More specifically, it indicates the ways in which intercultural policy has been formed by complex and often counteractive influences. The analysis draws upon policy documents collected from…

The politics of the later part of the twentieth century have been marked by the emergence of neoliberalism, which has consequently impregnated the global policy climate with neoliberal technologies of government. It is within this political scenario of hegemonic neoliberal discourse that I explore one aspect of school reform in Malta--contrived…

In this paper I report on the sociological and educational particulars of "The Biodiscovery Space" exhibition of the Life Museum of the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, using Basil Bernstein's framework of pedagogic discourse and recontextualization. Data for analysis was obtained from interviews with the exhibition…

Much research is available that details student experiences of immigration and adaptation to receiving countries and schools, but few studies analyze the metaphors used by immigrant students (IS) when talking about the immigration experience, or offer a comparative lens through which to view identity negotiation in two very different contexts. The…

In the recent years, globalization prepared a ground for English to be the lingua franca of the academia. Thus, most highly prestigious international journals have defined their medium of publications as English. However, even advanced language learners have difficulties in writing their research articles due to the lack of appropriate lexical…

Contrary to earlier studies dealing with the cultural identity development of diasporic minorities, this paper assesses the impact of homogeneity on intra-group cohesion and ethnic orientation. To this end, Oromo-Americans, an ethnic group originally located within the national borders of Ethiopia, will be compared to Armenian-Americans,…

Transmission-based language classrooms have been mostly dominated by teachers' authority, as reflected in IRF (Teacher Initiation, Student Response, Teacher Follow up/Feedback) architecture of their discourses. By contrast, Critical Pedagogy (CP) has been after fostering multivocality in and out of classroom borders. Which qualities of teacher…

This study investigates the emergence and development of the discourse-pragmatic functions of the Japanese subject markers "wa" and "ga" from a usage-based perspective (Tomasello, 2000). The use of each marker in longitudinal speech data for four Japanese children from 1;0 to 3;1 and their parents available in the CHILDES…