Search results

Purpose – People do not just interact, with each other; rather, they engage with each other using the visual and verbal instrumentations of communication at their disposal, constructing meaningful and intelligible conversations with differing degrees of precision of intention and clarity of expression. In doing this, they employ the “fundamental features of language,” described in various semiotic and structuralist theories.

Methodology – Here, we synthesize and integrate the key aspects of these language theories in an attempt to apply them to everyday conversations. The language features in question are routinely put into play by human agents to convey attitudes, emotions, opinions, and information and to achieve an engagement with the other.

Findings – Human relations, expansive in their range and intricate in their forms, demand complex instrumentations with which to conduct them. These instrumentations are essential features of the linguistic socialization of human agents, integral to both memory and habits of speech.

The impact of Covid-19 on students and teachers, on courses and programs, and on schools and universities is unparalleled in the history of education. Indeed, many authors have gone as far as to contend that the pandemic resulted in a paradigm shift in education. This chapter explores this contention by first looking at the history of paradigm shifts in education writ large, and then the implication of those shifts on teacher education, in general, and on practicum mentoring, specifically.

There has been a great deal of quantitative, survey research produced in the last thirty years which states that there is underachievement amongst ethnic minority children in English schools. This quantitative research reveals an increasingly complex picture of ethnic minority achievement and underachievement. Early work tended to simply demonstrate that ethnic minority children were underachieving in school (Little, 1972; Mabey, 1981; Mabey, 1986), this then shifted (as research became more sophisticated, gender and class were introduced as variables and pupils ceased to be simply categorised as black or white) to the identified achievement of some groups and the underachievement of others (e.g. Brent, 1994; Craft & Craft, 1983; DfES, 2003a, b; Drew & Gray, 1990; ILEA, 1990; Kysel, 1988; Sammons, 1995).