Idiomaticity is central to linguistic theory. Despite the pervasiveness of idioms in language, pedagogical articles in professional journals have yet to pay attention to the benefits of idiom instruction in the second language (SL) classroom. Addressing this concern, this article reports the results of an exploratory qualitative research study…

This Southeastern state was awarded one of the first two Race to The Top (RTTT) grants the U. S. Department of Education funded. A key piece of the state's winning application was a legislative mandate to implement an intensive, quantitative, and accountability driven teacher evaluation system beginning with the 2011-2012 school year. The new law…

Idioms have long been regarded as problematic for L2 learners due to the arbitrariness of their meanings and forms. Traditional methods of teaching idioms focus on rote learning and memorization. Recent developments in cognitive linguistics research have considered idioms as analyzable expressions which are motivated by conceptual metaphors and…

Current educational statistics have pitted subgroups against one another without consideration of the actual population sizes of each group. This paper is intended to provided a clearer understanding of the current usage of sub-group comparisons in American education. (Contains 4 figures.)

Metaphors have an important place in education. In order to arrange curriculums more efficiently, one has to be aware of metaphors in those subjects. Students' have several metaphors about distance education, where most of them have no relevance with the exact meaning of the distance education. In order to reveal the common misconceptions and in…

I respond to Zeyer and Roth's ("Cultural Studies of Science Education," 2009) paper on their use of interpretive repertoire analysis to explicate Swiss middle school students' dialogic responses to environmental issues. I focus on the strategy of interpretive repertoire analysis, making sense of the stance Zeyer and Roth take with this analysis by…

This paper aims to clarify and discuss the reasons and limits of three rather popular metaphors that are used to speak of today's complex social and cultural fabric, through references to cultural anthropology, biology and genetics. In her analysis, the author considers not only the linguistic and semantic dimension of each metaphor, but also the…

This paper focuses on some of the conceptual implications of changes in youth transitions over the last 40 years. I argue that changes have often been exaggerated with researchers too enthusiastic to jump on theoretical bandwagons without due regard for empirical evidence. While I suggest that there are important changes that impact on the ways in…

Academic learning and creativity should be overlapping goals that can be simultaneously pursued in programs of advanced academics. However, efforts aimed at nurturing creativity and academic learning sometimes are represented as two related but separate paths; this separation is unnecessary and can undermine the development of creative and…

Hobbs [Hobbs, J.R., 1979. "Coherence and coreference." "Cognitive Science" 3, 67-90] claims that the interpretation of inter-sentential anaphors "falls out" as a "by-product" of using a particular coherence relation to integrate two discourse units. The article argues that this is only partly true. Taking the reader's perspective, I suggest that…

Scientifically literate citizens would be empowered to think critically about the role of science in society and use it as a tool for informed decision making and problem solving in a rapidly changing and developing world. In this study, scientific literacy was viewed as an attribute both industry and the general community could reasonably expect…

In recent years, studies have suggested that gestures influence comprehension of linguistic expressions, for example, eliciting an N400 component in response to a speech/gesture mismatch. In this paper, we investigate the role of gestural information in the understanding of metaphors. Event related potentials (ERPs) were recorded while…

Substantial evidence indicates that information is distorted during decision making, but very few studies have assessed the distortion of probability and outcome information in risky decisions. In two studies involving six binary decisions (e.g., banning blood donations from people who have visited England, because of "mad cow disease"),…

Studies of polysemy are few in number and are contradictory. Some have found differences between polysemy and homonymy (L. Frazier & K. Rayner, 1990), and others have found similarities (D. K. Klein & G. Murphy, 2001). The authors investigated this issue using the methods of D. K. Klein and G. Murphy (2001), in whose study participants judged…

This essay is my reading of "English," a novel based on author Wang Gang's experiences in Urumqi, Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, Northwest China during the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976). As a language educator, I was particularly interested in the way that Wang describes learning English in the novel. The essay focuses on three…