This is a qualitative study which examines students' language use from a gender perspective. The survey was done through observation analyzed using Dell Hymes method, Ethnography of Communication. The focus is on how these students speak and also if the teacher's didactics have any impact on the classroom interactions. The results show a clear gender difference in how the language is used and the teacher's didactics may be one reason why these differences occur in classrooms.

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This qualitative case study examined a researcher-designed professional development intervention focused on improving teachers’ understanding of the interactions among students and between students and teachers in the teachers’ own classrooms. Participating teachers collaborated with the researcher in determining what they would observe and collaborated with each other in making sense of what they saw. The study analyzed participants’ discourse to characterize what they saw, how they worked together, what they found helpful in the intervention, and how they benefited. The study took place over a three-month period at a Canadian Community College in Qatar committed to guiding its faculty in adopting a learner-centred approach. Four participants worked in pairs to share and discuss video of their own classes in action as they sought to adopt the desired learner-centred approach. After a Group Training Session led by the researcher to develop a Video Analysis Framework, the pairs worked through two iterations of individual video recording and selection of a ten-minute clip for sharing, followed by paired analysis of the clips. The researcher recorded the training session, the paired discussions, interviews, and focus group discussion. Data from transcriptions and researcher field notes were analyzed inductively and connected closely with findings from the literature on the benefits of video analysis in enhancing the effectiveness of teacher-directed professional development. Faculty participants benefited from the intervention in a variety of ways. Production, selection, and discussion of video of participants' own class sessions drew participants into focused reflection on student interactions, which led to heightened awareness of phenomena important to participants in becoming learner-centred teachers. Sharing perspectives with their peers generated consensus in interpretation. Iterations led to higher levels of inference and the emergence of a problem-solving approach in making sense of phenomena. Motivated by video analysis, participants experimented with what they considered to be improved teaching techniques. Participants demonstrated significant risk-taking, enhanced peer professional relationships, and ownership and autonomy in professional development. / Thesis (Master, Education) -- Queen's University, 2012-01-31 16:50:24.598

Thesis (M. Ed. (Mathematics Education)) -- University of Limpopo, 2017 / The qualitative study reported here was aimed at documenting and describing how agency is enacted through students‟ interactions in a mathematics classroom. A case study design was adopted and focused on a grade 11 mathematics class with all the students being participants. These participants were purposefully selected as they formed the class which was allocated to me for dayto-day mathematics teaching. The research question which the study sought to address was: how is agency enacted through students‟ interactions in a mathematics classroom? The classroom in which data was generated adopted a sociocultural perspective as a referent for its practice. Due to this perspective, agency was thus employed as conceptualised by Pickering (1995). Data was generated through interviews and participant observation. However, the interviews were not employed in their „tradition‟ view, but were mostly like focus-group interviews in nature. Data also emerged from classroom discussions, when students in their groups, worked through learning activities. These interactions together with the interviews were audio recorded. Meanwhile, observation data was recorded in a researcher journal in which entries were made after each lesson. Data was analysed following Polkinghorne‟s (1995) narrative analysis of eventful data. During the analysis the researcher listened to the audio records a number of times, and then transcribed all the audio into text. This was followed by reading through the textual data which led to a selection of excerpts used in data analysis. It was found that agency was enacted during student-material interactions, as students engaged in the „dance of agency‟ when deciding on learning a new approach or using an old one to respond to questions. Furthermore, agency was enacted during student-student interactions when students initiated either group or whole class discussion and they were able to sustain the discussions to completion without the teacher‟s intrusion. Finally, during teacher-student interactions, students accounted for their actions and shared their experience and decision making process.

This was a multi-faceted mixed methods study that investigated several aspects associated to class size and the perceived effects on student achievement in Title I elementary schools. The data collection in this study was conducted through two separate phases. The first qualitative phase was a case study that was comprised of teacher interviews and classroom observations. The case study took place at a Title I school in Central Virginia, chosen for its diverse representativeness of the student population. Classroom interactions were coded during five-minute segments in each full-day classroom observation, as well as field notes made for specific types of instructional methods being used within each Title I classroom: individualized instruction, small group instruction, connecting personally with students, and incorporating technology into daily instruction. While a majority of the interactions within each classroom were positive, patterns emerged within the negative interactions that occurred. Interview responses indicated that the perceived ideal class size for Title I schools is 12-18 students, as well as provided explanations behind the perceived effects of class size on student achievement. Findings from the first phase were used to create a survey that was distributed during the second qualitative phase of this study. This survey was distributed to the larger Title I teacher population within the same school district to generalize the findings from the case study. Finally, systematic student assessment data was collected to compare the perceived effects of class size to the observed effects of class size on student achievement data. Although the findings from the student achievement data were inconclusive, there were several factors associated to class size that are discussed to explain the observed effects on student achievement data in the case study Title I school.

Research has established a close link between talk and cognition; that talk is central to the meaning-making process and thus to learning science. However, the challenge is shifting teacher pedagogical practices to those that promote meaningful learner talk and mediate substantive engagement with science concepts. Research suggests that long-term school based teacher support programmes do bring about changes in teacher beliefs and classroom practices. My study was part of a five year project to investigate teaching strategies for the implementation of South Africa’s new science curriculum in Soweto high schools. Taking a socio-cultural perspective I sought to understand the use of science talk as a tool for teachers to mediate meaningful engagement with and understanding of high school science. I investigated teacher-learner interactions in three experienced teachers’ classrooms following their participation in the intervention programme. I wanted to understand how they used talk to create dialogic discourse and how meaning making was negotiated within this discourse. Taking a collaborative research approach I used case study methodology to collect and analyse observational data from each teachers’ lessons. Data analysis was informed by Mortimer and Scott’s model for analysing classroom interactions and Toulmin’s Argument Pattern (TAP). My findings indicated that classrooms had become interactive. Although teachers took up a largely authoritative stance there was tendency to a dialogic communicative approach. That is, while traditional IRE discourse persisted, there was significant evidence that teachers created dialogic discourse (eliciting and taking up learners’ ideas). Teachers both opened up and shut down talk, through evaluative and elaborative feedback, respectively. I observed the emergence of spontaneous argumentation in two teachers’ lessons. Argumentation differed from forms reported in literature in two significant ways. First, arguments were co-constructed by the teacher and learners and secondly, an unusual form of argumentation to make sense of conventional science concepts as opposed to the usual argumentation on socio-scientific issues as observed in local South African studies so far. Whereas most argumentation research has focused on the structure of arguments constructed by individual participants, I observed arguments co-constructed collaboratively by several participants. These findings have been published in a peer reviewed journal. A further, unrecorded finding for South Africa was engagement in talk within hybrid spaces, which are combinations of formal scientific ways of talking with context-based and culturally informed forms of talk. Lastly, science talk was enriched in these classrooms by linking it to other forms of engagement, such as reading, writing, practical activities and computer technology. This too has not been reported in South Africa. Some methodological findings emanating from my study included the positive effects of the model adopted by the Project on Implementation of Curriculum Change (ICC Project). The project employed a model of sustained on-site teacher support, systematic teacher-researcher collaboration, co-teaching and modelling of teaching strategies. I also discuss the implications of my findings for teacher professional development as well as for science teacher education in South Africa and further afield.

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Notre travail de recherche traite de la problématique du contact de langues dans l'enseignement et l'apprentissage du français, en l'occurrence en milieu scolaire guyanais. Ainsi, l'objectif de notre travail de recherche est d'une part comprendre comment les phénomènes de contact de langues s'opèrent dans les situations d'apprentissage de type exolingue c'est-à-dire là où le jeune apprenant fait l'expérience de l'apprentissage d'une langue non maternelle dès le niveau préscolaire et d'autre part, voir comment les adultes (enseignants - atsem) ont recours à des codes linguistiques hétérogènes pour communiquer en classe. Notre travail de recherche est guidé par une problématique précise : « Quel est le rôle de l'alternance codique dans les pratiques de transmission de connaissances, linguistiques et extra-linguistiques ? ». Cette question représente l'ossature de notre recherche et de celle-ci se dégagent plusieurs lignes directrices à savoir en quoi l'alternance se présente comme une ressource langagière dans les échanges didactiques en contexte exolingue. Cette recherche emprunte essentiellement les apports de la linguistique suisse dans laquelle s'inscrivent les travaux de Jean-François de Pietro (1988) et Bernard Py (1986, 2004, 2005) sur le contact de langues, l'apprentissage et l'interaction et Marinette Matthey (2003) sur l'acquisition des langues secondes à l'école. Sur la base d'une démarche fondée sur une approche ethnographique, nous partons de l'observation et de la description des réalités socio-culturelles des situations de communication en classe culturellement signifiantes pour en décrire soigneusement les pratiques d'enseignement et d'apprentissage. Notre recherche se réclame avant tout d'un positionnement d'inspiration interactionniste, dans la mesure où nous cherchons notamment à appréhender un objet attaché aux interactions, à travers lesquelles se négocient et se construisent les connaissances et les compétences lors du passage d'une langue à l'autre. / Our research deals with the problem of the contact of languages in the teaching and learning of french, in this case in the Guyanese school environment. Thus, the objective of our research work is to understand how the phenomena of contact of languages that occur in learning situations of exolingual type, that is to say where the young learner is doing the experience of learning a non-maternal language from the pre-school level on the other hand, and how adults (teachers-atsem) use heterogeneous linguistic codes to communicate in the classroom. Our research work is guided by a specific problem: "What is the role of code-switching in the practices of transmission of knowledge, linguistic and extra-linguistic? ". This question represents the backbone of our research and it gives rise to several guidelines on how alternation presents itself as a linguistic resource in didactic exchanges in exolingual contexts. This research essentially borrows from the contributions of Swiss linguistics in the work of Bernard Py (1986, 2004, 2005) on language contact, learning and interaction and Marinette Matthey (2003) on acquisition of second languages at school. Based on an ethnographic approach, we start from the observation and description of the socio-cultural realities of culturally meaningful classroom communication situations in order to describe carefully the teaching and learning practices. Our research focuses above all on a positioning of interactionist inspiration, insofar as we seek in particular to grasp an object attached to the interactions, through which knowledge and skills are negotiated and constructed during the passage of a language to the other.

<p><font face="Times New Roman" size="3"><font face="Times New Roman" size="3"> <p align="left">The aim of the study was to investigate the nature of biology practical work and associated discourses in two Namibian secondary schools. The purposive sample consisted of three biology teachers and 36 grade 11 students who enrolled for NSSC Higher- and Ordinary-level biology in 2004 and 2005. The study adopted a descriptive and an in-depth qualitative design involving the use of interviews and observation schedules (Video Observation Quoting Schedules-VOQS). The quality of VOQS instruments were established through a panel of independent experts who critically assessed the quality of the items and later discussed to reach consensus. Their rating of the items helped in the establishment of interrater reliability.</p> </font></font></p>

<p><font face="Times New Roman" size="3"><font face="Times New Roman" size="3"> <p align="left">The aim of the study was to investigate the nature of biology practical work and associated discourses in two Namibian secondary schools. The purposive sample consisted of three biology teachers and 36 grade 11 students who enrolled for NSSC Higher- and Ordinary-level biology in 2004 and 2005. The study adopted a descriptive and an in-depth qualitative design involving the use of interviews and observation schedules (Video Observation Quoting Schedules-VOQS). The quality of VOQS instruments were established through a panel of independent experts who critically assessed the quality of the items and later discussed to reach consensus. Their rating of the items helped in the establishment of interrater reliability.</p> </font></font></p>