Though attention to academic language is a key component of the Teacher Performance Assessment and the new Common Core Standards, little has been researched regarding how pre-service teachers build academic language knowledge and integrate it into their practice teaching experience. This study focuses on the construction and delivery of academic…

As schools, classrooms, and districts move toward more sophisticated instructional technologies to successfully implement higher college- and career-ready standards, educator-preparation programs must act quickly to equip future educators with the necessary skills to use technology effectively to personalize instruction and increase student…

The research centered on secondary mathematics teachers' beliefs, attitudes, knowledge base, and practices in meeting the academic and language needs of English language learners. Using socio-cultural theory and social practice theory to frame the study, the research design employed a mixed methods approach incorporating self-reported surveys,…

The central research question for this dissertation is: "How do overseas Christian ESOL teachers describe putting their religious beliefs into practice in their profession?" Specifically, the focus is on mostly evangelical Christian English language teachers who have earned a TESOL certificate and who at the time of this project were…

In this presentation, we introduce a conceptual framework for in-service professional development--the Whole Teacher approach, which attends simultaneously to the attitudes, knowledge, and practice of a teacher's growth. Putting the framework in operation, we describe a project designed to improve teachers' competence and increase children's…

Despite claims that the use of corpus tools can have a major impact in language classrooms (e.g., Conrad, 2000, 2004; Davies, 2004; O'Keefe, McCarthy, & Carter, 2007; Sinclair, 2004b; Tsui, 2004), many language teachers express apparent apathy or even resistance towards adding corpus tools to their repertoire (Cortes, 2013b). This study…

Hispanic and Latino students are regarded as one of the most uneducated and educationally at-risk and disadvantaged groups in the United States, yet few studies have focused on teaching and learning in classrooms where they are making significant academic gains due to high quality teachers. Current research in this area lacks strong theoretical…

The purpose of this study was to explore one Indiana elementary teacher's perceptions of her Latino immigrant students as they become English-language proficient by providing an in-depth analysis of a 4th and 5th grade teacher at a local school. Findings are based on interviews with the focus teacher and with the personnel she works with such as…

Teacher education is an essential professional development for student teachers. The knowledge of both subject matter and how to teach provides some guidance on how teachers make sense of their learning. Teaching expectation is an important topic that has been discussed by educational researchers in order to explain not only why students choose…

Professional development--formal in-service training to upgrade the content knowledge and pedagogical skills of teachers--is widely viewed as an important means of improving teaching and learning. While many interventions "include" professional development, professional development was the central intervention of the two recent research and…

In these complicated new times, many new teachers begin their careers in urban and other schools with increasingly diverse student populations. And as people know, many new teachers leave those schools--and some leave teaching altogether--after just a few years in the field. In today's world, policy makers, politicians, educational leaders, the…

For over a decade, professional learning communities (PLCs) have been touted as an effective way to build upon the knowledge and skills of experienced teachers, yet much of the evidence base is derived from self-reports by practitioners. Although several generations of school reform (the standards movement, No Child Left Behind, and now the Common…

The aim of this study is to investigate pre-service teachers' understanding of and difficulties with some core concepts in the special theory of relativity. The pre-service teachers (n = 185) from the Departments of Physics Education and Elementary Science Education at Dokuz Eylul University (in Turkey) participated. Both quantitative and…

The interconnected conceptual areas of teacher knowledge and teacher beliefs (included by some authors under the rubric of teacher cognition) have been debated in the field of language education intensively for the last two decades, during which time the terminology used in the discussions has been interpreted in a variety of different ways.…

Since PreK-12 student achievement is the primary focus of schools, all teachers are called to serve as teachers leaders and improve learning on their campuses. Rather than waiting until they have gained experience, teachers can begin acquiring the knowledge, skills, and dispositions of teacher leaders during their preservice programs. Drawing upon…