The present study is an attempt to examine the relation between false-belief understanding and referential communication skills. The ability of 76 children aged 5 years to attribute false beliefs to themselves and others was examined with three false-belief tasks. The referential communication skills of the same children were assessed with two…

Instructional pragmatics in teacher education is generally focused on ways that ESOL teachers can develop the pragmatic competence of L2 learners. However, as every interaction in an English medium classroom requires a high level of pragmatic competence on the part of teachers themselves, it can also be conceptualised more broadly to encompass the…

The article addresses the long-standing issue over the role of the mother tongue in the foreign language classroom. In the first part it is argued that the mother tongue lays the cognitive foundations for all subsequent language learning. Double comprehension as the basic requirement for learning to take place is explained. The second part is…

The sustainability of many Japanese institutions of higher education is dependent on the injection of large numbers of foreigners. This requires addressing the intercultural dimensions of internationalisation. In this article, the authors contrast the literature on internationalisation in Japan ("kokusaika") with the Anglo-European…

The article reports on the first phase of a large-scale qualitative research project that explored the perceptions of training practitioners on how they understood the process by which we carry our knowledge and skill across different contexts. Clearly, this is a process of transition, where it is the individual who moves across the contexts and…

This paper argues that much contemporary educational policy makes assumptions about learning that are directly contradicted by the best research and theorising of learning that has occurred over the last decade and more. This worrying mismatch is largely attributable to adherence by policy makers (and other key stakeholders such as employers), to…

This study investigated the claim (e.g., Vosniadou & Brewer's, 1992) that children have naive ''mental models'' of the earth and believe, for example, that the earth is flat or hollow. It tested the proposal that children appear to have these misconceptions because they find the researchers' tasks and questions to be confusing and ambiguous.…

When two consonants within an English word were transposed to create a nonword, difficulty in lexical decision responses to that nonword was revealed, most strongly when the coda of the first syllable was exchanged with the onset of the second (e.g., "nakpin" derived from "napkin"), but also when onsets were exchanged between syllables (e.g.,…

Our previous studies provide some evidence of between-language effects on arithmetic performance in 2-year-olds. French-speaking children were especially biased by the use of the word "un" as a cardinal value and as an article in the singular/plural opposition (1 vs. the set 2, 3, ...). Here we evaluated the ability of a new action-based…

The gamic mode is an innovative way of authoring scholarly history that goes beyond the printed text or digital simulations by using digital game technologies to allow the reader to interact with a scholarly argument through meaningful choice and trial and error. The gamic mode makes the way in which the past is constructed as history explicit by…

Consider for a moment how launching a professional learning community is similar to starting a race. Athletes know the danger of false starts--moving before the starting signal. Until recently, a false start meant that all racers returned to the blocks to begin again, their adrenalin gone, their concentration broken. Because these effects could…

We conducted a content analysis of 34 statements of interest submitted by applicants applying for admission to an education leadership preparation program. The purpose of the analysis was to understand their orientations toward social justice. Using Kumashiro's (2000) and Apple's (2001) discussions of antioppressive education, we identified three…

Beliefs are a complex psychological construct that have potential to drive a person to make decisions and act. A person's metaphors can serve as roots of their beliefs. In this study, the metaphor construction task (MCT) was utilized to uncover beliefs about teaching and learning held by 216 educational supervisors from 10 provinces in the central…

On the third floor of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM), in Washington, D.C., inside a glass case, lie thousands of shoes. Old and mismatched, moldering after sixty years, they are what remains of countless Jews who were told to disrobe and who were subsequently murdered at Majdanek, Poland, during the final years of the…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to share the reflections of a group of five academics who started supervising practice-based doctoral students at a similar time in the same institution. Design/methodology/approach: The supervisors engaged in a collaborative research process themselves, exploring their supervision practices, due in part to…