The purpose of this study is to analyse pupil welfare team meetings as an institutional context for handling dilemmas of schooling. Our focus is on how difficulties encountered by teachers and pupils are categorized and accounted for by team members (teachers, school administrators, and various experts). As a discourse community, the pupil welfare…

This article draws from an ethnographic research project looking at the communicative practices of children and parents in a multilingual area of London. One focus in the study was on participants' use of narrative to convey cultural identities. Narratives in the families were evoked through shared discussions of artifacts and objects displayed…

This article employs rhetoric to examine the poetic dimensions of one performed narrative in teaching. The analysis stems from a larger study of oral narratives in classroom talk during a Holocaust unit in a middle school language arts classroom. A corpus of seventy-five teacher and student narratives was transcribed and analyzed for the broader…

In this article, we examine collaborative discourse in an informal undergraduate study group in which students focus on their lecture notes. Several decades of educational research have demonstrated that collaborative groups contribute to enhanced learning, and recent work has explored how external representations--such as those that appear in…

This paper presents data collected from small discussion groups in English classrooms. The project from which this research is taken examines the processes of pupils' learning through talk-related activities and contributes to debates about boys' relative under-achievement in comparison to girls. Although the project as a whole looked at the…

In contrast to the commonsense discourse of youth-as-unruly widely circulating in the West, the kind of discourse which has become part of the Singapore public and academic imagination is one that mobilizes constructions of youth as narrowly achievement-oriented, as "exam-smart muggers", who "lack an enquiring mind". This study attempts to…

The primary goal of this study is to identify intra-textual linguistic variation in university classroom talk, applying corpus-based techniques to the analysis. First, based on the automatically identified vocabulary patterns in classroom talk a large number of class sessions are segmented into smaller units of analysis. Second, the co-occurring…

Photographs are the most frequent inscriptions in high school biology textbooks. However, little is known about how students make sense of and learn from photographs; even less is known about the different resources available for making sense of photographs when they appear in lectures. In this study, the use of photographs during lectures and…

This study examined the discourse of teacher supervision/mentoring, specifically within the context of the post-observation meeting. The analysis of six transcripts of post-observation meetings from one semester in a small university Intensive English Program revealed a variety of politeness strategies employed by supervisors in the delivery of…

This paper examines a discussion among a teacher and four Latin-American women in a family literacy class who engage for the first time in the practice of peer-editing a learner's text. In the analysis, it becomes evident that they have different ideas of and responses to the text. Whereas the teacher's focus is on revising the textual elements,…

Providing examples is part of the daily routine that classroom teachers carry out in the course of their lessons, and yet we rarely examine how examples are produced and what kinds of work they do in the lively context of classroom interaction. The present study inquires into how instructional examples are portrayed in prior literature by…

This article describes an investigation based on a corpus of original and redrafted versions of extracts from reflective narratives by 15-year-old secondary school students in the UK. It builds on the established research on sentence combining with respect to students' writing development. The findings are discussed in relation to the use of…

This study uses systemic functional linguistics and the related critical discourse analysis to examine intertextual links between four eighth-grade students' talk in informal conversations as they generated ideas for the characters of their narrative writing. Data sources included classroom observations, students' drafts and polished writing,…

This study investigates the role of cultural beliefs and practices in teaching. The focus is the process of socialization by which students learn to deal with mistakes. Analyzed are teacher-student interactions surrounding mistakes videotaped in 30 Italian and 30 U.S. eighth-grade mathematics lessons. These are complemented by interviews with…