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This study investigates the potential of the interactive board to affect the interaction in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) classes in Greece. In Greece, the long term goals of the EFL classes are to prepare learners to cope with the demands of our times, that is, to use the target language appropriately to handle real world information in a wide range of interactional transactions. The Greek Ministry of Education, acknowledging these needs and the importance of interaction in EFL classes, proposes a syllabus that encourages communicative classrooms and activities that inspire interaction. Despite the innovations the curriculum suggests, there is research reporting that the teaching of English as a foreign language in Greece remains unchanged over the years.

Academic writing can be difficult to accomplish and disengaging to read (Monchamp 2007), the result is that often when we carry out research, our final readership can be miniscule. While reading and writing for the purposes of research should be informative, insightful, rigorous and challenging, is it also possible to make these processes entertaining or even pleasurable? Can the researcher give some personal insight into their world view and also from that of their interviewees instead of pretending that they play an entirely passive and objective role in the research process? Many qualitative researchers (Grumet 1981; Cortazzi 1993; Charmaz 1995; Ely, Vinz et al. 1997; Erben 1998; Usher 1998; Denzin and Lincoln 1998, 2003; Ellis and Bochner 1998, 2003; Richardson 1998, 2003; Bruner 2004; Perselli 2004; Antoniou and Moriarty 2006; Short, Grant et al. 2007; Sparkes 2007; Caulley 2008; Trahar 2008) have started to push the academic writing borders and explore new ways to write up research. This assignment seeks to provide a rationale for using narrative as a research method to tell the story of my research and to trial these methods on a small-scale project. A professor with an extensive writing portfolio has been interviewed in order to access some of her experiences with academic writing. The author seeks to use a emotionalist approach to the interview process by obtaining the participant’s view on their authentic experiences through open ended and unstructured interviews (Silverman 1993) with the aim of encouraging the interviewee to share their thoughts while discussing the author’s own observations and attitudes towards academic writing. This is in order to provide ideas and insight that might help other academics with their own approaches to the writing process.

Mathematical reasoning can be considered to be the pursuit of a line of enquiry to produce assertions and develop an argument to reach and justify conclusions. This involves processes such as conjecturing, generalising and forming arguments. The pursuit of a line of mathematical reasoning is not a routine process and perseverance is required to overcome difficulties. There is a lack of research on pedagogy to foster children’s perseverance in mathematical reasoning, hence this study sought to answer the research question: how can primary teachers improve children’s perseverance in mathematical reasoning? The study took place in two year 6 classes in different English schools. The study group comprised eight children, purposively selected for their limited capacity to persevere in mathematical reasoning. An action research approach was used to develop and evaluate two interventions. Data relating to the children’s cognitive and affective responses and the focus of their attention, a conative component, were collected by observation and interview. Data analysis synthesised the children’s reasoning processes with their affective responses and their conative focus. The use of this tripartite psychological classification to analyse children’s mathematical reasoning offered a new approach to analysing the interplay between cognition and affect in mathematics learning and revealed the role that engagement and focus play in both restricting and enabling children’s perseverance in mathematical reasoning. The interventions comprised providing children with representations that could be used in a provisional way and embedding a focus on generalising and convincing in mathematics lessons. These enabled children to improve their perseverance in mathematical reasoning; they were able to strive to pursue a line of enquiry and progress from making trials and spotting patterns to generalising and forming convincing arguments. This study found that children were not necessarily aware of when they encountered a difficulty. This lack of cognisance impacted on their capacity to apply the self-regulatory actions needed to monitor and adapt their use of reasoning processes. One outcome of this was that they tended towards repetitious actions, in particular, creating multiple trials even when they had spotted and formed conjectures about patterns. Their perseverance in mathematical reasoning was further compromised by their enjoyment of repetitious actions. When the children engaged in activities involving reasoning, their common affective response was pleasure, even in instances when they demonstrated limited perseverance. However, when they were able to persevere in reasoning so that they generalised and formed convincing arguments, they expressed pride and satisfaction. They attributed these emotions to their improved mathematical understanding. The bi-directional interplay between children’s cognition and affect in mathematics is discussed in literature; however, the impact of children’s focus on their cognitive understanding and affective experience augments existing literature.