Teaching cultural competency in the language classroom can be a challenge. This study explores the effectiveness of task-based instruction (Lee, 2000) on the learning of culture by students in college-level Spanish language courses. Students were required to record oral presentations, write essays, and make comparisons between the culture and…

The study upon which this article is based investigates teachers' literacy development methods used in nursery and reception classrooms of a British international school, and focuses specifically on children having English as an additional language (EAL). Findings from teaching observations and from interviews with teachers present the…

Much of the current literature relating to international students at university level tends to highlight their experiences from a deficit perspective and in some cases even problematises the experience for the student and university. Other studies tend to focus on recruitment and motivation rather than the lived experiences of the student, thereby…

Philanthropic involvement in education politics has become bolder and more visible. Have foundations changed funding strategies to enhance their political influence? Using data from 2000, 2005, and 2010, we investigate giving patterns among the 15 largest education foundations. Our analyses show growing support for national-level advocacy…

The author, a former school board member and currently head of nationwide parent organization, assesses the competition between charter and traditional public schools, concluding that the competition and acrimony among them does not help them deliver a better education. Policies should be focused on helping both types of schools improve education,…

STEM Studio at Hofstra University is a clinical practice site that brings together public school pupils and preservice teachers in settings with three features that lead to enhanced learning of all participants: classroom structures using multidisciplinary STEM tasks as platforms for learning; design challenge templates for diverse student…

This paper draws data from a 5-year ethnographic study of young multilingual (Mixteco/Spanish/English) children in their early childhood classrooms. In this paper, we focus on two of the children and their distinctive paths as they develop language and literacy. Using a sociocultural and multimodal theoretical framework we examine how these two…

Social support-seeking is recognised as an important strategy used by children to cope with negative emotions. However, there are important gaps in our knowledge about children's perceptions of different sources of social support, and the associations that these perceptions have with individual differences in socio-emotional functioning. The…

This paper examines how distinct trajectories of change in students' general views of group work over the duration of one single group assignment could be explained by multidimensional aspects of their experience and the overall instructional context. Science (336) and Education (377) students involved in a semester-long group assignment…

ELLs need to practice using the language in their speech. Teachers can ask students to restate the definition in their own words and provide opportunities for students to use academic vocabulary in discussions. Chunking (instead of teaching inch in isolation, also teach foot, centimeter, and yard) helps students develop their schema and mentally…

This paper examines student and teacher talk in a first grade classroom in a two-way immersion school in Central Texas. Drawing on audio and video data from a year-long study in a first grade two-way classroom and using a methodology that fuses ethnography and discourse analysis, the authors explore how pluralist discourses are constructed and…

This two and a half year study examines how non-native English-speaking Burmese refugee students from first to third grades made meaning of scientific informational texts. The study is framed by sociocultural theory and transactional theory. Primary data were drawn from 160 student retellings of scientific informational texts. Secondary data…

An experiment was conducted to examine how different response modes for practice questions and the presence or absence of cues influenced students' self-efficacy beliefs, perceived cognitive load, and performance in language recall and recognition tasks. One hundred fifty-seven 6th grade students were randomly assigned to one of four…

This study examined the development of school-related causality beliefs which are children's generalized perceptions of the utility or power of different categories of specific means in producing school outcomes. Based on the action theory perspective, we analyzed the developmental model of these beliefs as well as the trajectories of the…

The present study examined the use of narrative categories and mental state words in the fictional, personal, and hypothetical stories written by 150 children in the third, fourth, and fifth grades of primary school. There were three main results. First, children were better able to write fictional and hypothetical than personal stories, when…