Papers selected from a conference on evaluation in academic discourse held June, 2003, at the Certosa di Pontignano, Siena

This engaging and practical volume looks at discourse strategies and how they can be used to facilitate and enhance science teaching and learning within the classroom context, offering a synthesis of research on classroom discourse in science education as well as practical discourse strategies that can be applied to the classroom. Focusing on the connection between research and practice, this comprehensive guide unpacks and illustrates key concepts on the role of discourse in students’ thinking and learning based on empirical analysis of real conversations in a number of science classrooms. Using real-life classroom examples to extend the scope of research into science classroom discourse begun during the 1990s, Kok-Sing Tang offers original discourse strategies as explicit methods of using discourse to engage in meaning-making and work towards a specific instructional goal. This volume covers new and informative topics including how to use discourse to: Establish classroom activity and interaction Build and assess scientific content knowledge Organize and evaluate scientific narrative Enact scientific practices Coordinate the use of multimodal representations Building on more than ten years of research on classroom discourse, Discourse Strategies for Science Teaching and Learning is an ideal text for science teacher educators, pre-service science teachers, scholars, and researchers.

Conversing with others has given insights to different perspectives, helped build ideas, and solve problems. Academic conversations push students to think and learn in lasting ways. Academic conversations are back-and-forth dialogues in which students focus on a topic and explore it by building, challenging, and negotiating relevant ideas. In Academic Conversations: Classroom Talk that Fosters Critical Thinking and Content Understandings authors Jeff Zwiers and Marie Crawford address the challenges teachers face when trying to bring thoughtful, respectful, and focused conversations into the classroom. They identify five core communications skills needed to help students hold productive academic conversation across content areas: Elaborating and Clarifying Supporting Ideas with Evidence Building On and/or Challenging Ideas Paraphrasing Synthesizing This book shows teachers how to weave the cultivation of academic conversation skills and conversations into current teaching approaches. More specifically, it describes how to use conversations to build the following: Academic vocabulary and grammar Critical thinking skills such as persuasion, interpretation, consideration of multiple perspectives, evaluation, and application Literacy skills such as questioning, predicting, connecting to prior knowledge, and summarizing An academic classroom environment brimming with respect for others' ideas, equity of voice, engagement, and mutual support The ideas in this book stem from many hours of classroom practice, research, and video analysis across grade levels and content areas. Readers will find numerous practical activities for working on each conversation skill, crafting conversation-worthy tasks, and using conversations to teach and assess. Academic Conversations offers an in-depth approach to helping students develop into the future parents, teachers, and leaders who will collaborate to build a better world.

Fast-paced, practical, and innovative, this text for pre-service and in-service teachers features clear, easily accessible lessons and professional development activities to improve the delivery of academic language/literacy education across the content areas in junior/middle school and high school classrooms. Numerous hands-on tools and techniques demonstrate the effectiveness of content-area instruction for students in a wide variety of school settings, particularly English language learners, struggling readers, and other special populations of students. Based on a strong professional development model the authors have been instrumental in designing, Academic Language/Literacy Strategies for Adolescents addresses: motivation attributes of academic language vocabulary: theory and practice reading skills development grammar and writing. A wealth of charts, graphs, and lesson plans give clear examples of academic language/literacy strategies in action. The appendices – a key component of the practical applications developed in the text – include a glossary, exemplary lessons that address key content areas, and a Grammar Handbook. In this era of increased accountability, coupled with rapid demographic change and challenges to traditional curricula and pedagogical methods, educators will find this book to be a great resource.

The volume will be of central interest to anyone concerned with communication in the fields of interethnic or industrial relations.

The untold story of the root cause of America's education crisis--and the seemingly endless cycle of multigenerational poverty. It was only after years within the education reform movement that Natalie Wexler stumbled across a hidden explanation for our country's frustrating lack of progress when it comes to providing every child with a quality education. The problem wasn't one of the usual scapegoats: lazy teachers, shoddy facilities, lack of accountability. It was something no one was talking about: the elementary school curriculum's intense focus on decontextualized reading comprehension "skills" at the expense of actual knowledge. In the tradition of Dale Russakoff's The Prize and Dana Goldstein's The Teacher Wars, Wexler brings together history, research, and compelling characters to pull back the curtain on this fundamental flaw in our education system--one that fellow reformers, journalists, and policymakers have long overlooked, and of which the general public, including many parents, remains unaware. But The Knowledge Gap isn't just a story of what schools have gotten so wrong--it also follows innovative educators who are in the process of shedding their deeply ingrained habits, and describes the rewards that have come along: students who are not only excited to learn but are also acquiring the knowledge and vocabulary that will enable them to succeed. If we truly want to fix our education system and unlock the potential of our neediest children, we have no choice but to pay attention.

Papers presented at a conference held June 14-16, 2003, in Pontignano, Siena.

This volume offers readers interested in Discourse Analysis and/or Socio-Cognitive models of language a closer view of the relationship between discourse, cognition and society by disclosing how the cognitive mechanisms of discourse processing depend on shared knowledge and situated cognition. An inter- and multidisciplinary approach is proposed that combines theories and methodologies coming from Conceptual Metaphor Theory, Multimodal Metaphor Theory, Critical Discourse Analysis, Narratology, Systemic Functional Linguistics, Appraisal Theory, together with the most recent developments of Socio-Cognitive Linguistics, for the analysis of real communicative events, which range from TV reality shows, commercials, digital stories or political debates, to technical texts, architectural memorials, newspapers and autobiographical narratives. Still, several key notions are recurrent in all contributions -embodiment, multimodality, conceptual integration, metaphor, and creativity- as the fundamental constituents of discourse processing. It is only through this wide-ranging epistemological and empirical approach that the complexity of discourse strategies in real contexts, i.e. human communication, can be fully comprehended, and that discourse analysis and cognitive linguistics can be brought closer together.

7 Steps to Building a Language-Rich Interactive Classroom provides a seven step process that creates a language-rich interactive classroom environment in which all students can thrive. Topics include differentiating instruction for students at a variety of language proficiencies, keeping all students absolutely engaged, and creating powerful learning supports.