Usage of definite and indefinite articles is known to vary across different varieties of English, especially in the outer circle. As a semantic/pragmatic category, definiteness is notoriously slippery to define -- is it uniqueness, familiarity, inclusiveness or identifiability? Literature has shown that the lack of an agreed definition can…

Empirical evidence describes the negative outcomes people with mental health disorders experience due to societal stigma. The aim of this study was to examine the role of gender and rural-urban living in perceptions about mental illness. Participants completed the Day's Mental Illness Stigma Scale, a nationally validated instrument for measuring…

Familiarity and distance is an issue that is much discussed in ethnographic fieldwork. This paper focuses on the topic of balancing familiarity and distance when the researcher is directly or indirectly part of the field, which in the study consists of an adult education context of two different teacher-training courses for upper secondary…

Attitude is a multidimensional and complex notion that considerably empowers or limits the major life activities of humans. Health professionals' attitudes toward people with disabilities are significant factors in the rehabilitation process. Soon after completing their coursework, the final-year students from health science meet the patients and…

The participation of students with severe disabilities in school-based extracurricular activities provides students with opportunities to experience a full inclusive school event. Typically, however, students with severe disabilities remain underrepresented in extracurricular involvement as compared to their peers without disabilities (Agran et…

This paper adopts an ethnomethodological, conversation analytic approach to analyze the social organization of the instruction-giving sequences that were accomplished by a teacher of Italian as a foreign language during the last phase of a writing task conducted in pairs. Specifically, the paper explores the linguistic, prosodic and embodied…

In this brief article, David Gies shares two observations about renowned Spanish author Carmen Martín Gaite based on his nearly 20 years of interactions with her.

In their move to school, children and their family are faced with significant changes in their relationships, environment and routine. In this article, the experiences of a group of children transitioning into a new entrant (NE) school classroom from their early childhood centre (ECE) are discussed. As they began adapting to the new social and…

Research on children's peer interactions shows many benefits for children's development especially in developing children's social competence. Drawing on a case study data from a study that investigated peer interactions among under-three year old children in three Malaysian childcare centers, this paper provides a picture of how the children's…

This study aims to examine the possibility of implementing the Augmented Reality (AR) application in higher education by answering three questions: Which extended faculty at the Saudi Electronic University are familiar with such applications, what the perceptions do they hold toward using it in education, and what barriers do they believe may…

Previous investigations of satire posit that satire comprehension is influenced by prior knowledge, satirical strategies, and other demographic features, such as age. However, these claims have not yet been tested using online processing techniques. In this study we investigate satire processing using newspaper headlines from the satirical…

The use of social media in initial teacher education offers connection to a community of learners. As teacher educators we planned to use Twitter with pre-service teachers (PSTs). But at the end of the semester it was revealed that PSTs insisted on using a different platform; offering valuable perspectives and insights into the boundaries that are…

This study examines second language (L2) learners' perspectives regarding the affordances and challenges of using the Data-Driven Learning (DDL) to identify the properties of near-synonymous words. Employing a convergent mixed-method design, this study deciphers the perceptions of 40 undergraduate L2 learners majoring in English language teaching.…

Barriers to transfer students include lost credit caused by lack of curricular alignment across institutions of higher learning. This is particularly evident in series courses like introductory biology. We propose to streamline transfer issues using a shared set of course-level learning outcomes (CLOs) developed collaboratively by faculty across…

Despite holding wide-ranging experiences with constant velocity and non-zero acceleration, students wrestling with physical science concepts struggle to demarcate the two distinct characteristics of motion. In fact, this prior experience and loose familiarity with associated terminology often act as an obstacle toward a deep and robust…