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When people are ill, they want to know what is happening to them and how they can get better. Current health policies support patients’ access to health information and encourage them to take part in decisions regarding their health. But little is known about how patients learn and the difficulties they may encounter in the process. This paper discusses the information-searching and learning strategies of 45 adults living in the north-west of England. At the time of participating in the research, all but two of them were students in adult basic education or English classes. The qualitative interviews revealed a variety of strategies for learning about health and disease, including using the Internet and health books and asking others for support. Learning that was reported was informal and incidental. It was always embedded in the wider activities of dealing with ill-health and treatment. Learning could be constrained by various factors, including the severity of the illness, the hierarchical nature of the health care context and fear. Learning included gaining medical knowledge and learning to engage with specific texts, such as websites. The paper concludes with some comments on the role of adult education classes in supporting learning about health. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper the sociocultural notion of ‘scaffolding’ and the way in which various ‘scaffolding’ strategies support students' learning are examined through classroom data. A distinction is made between scaffolding at a macro level, consisting of a planned, 'designed-in' approach to a unit of work in a subject discipline and the lessons that constitute it, and contingent scaffolding that operates at a micro level or ‘at the point of need’. By drawing on Systemic Functional Linguistic (SFL) theory it has been possible to articulate the kinds of discourse and multimodal strategies that constitute the nature of scaffolding and then examine the ways in which these function in the discourse to support student learning in the local and immediate context. In addition, this paper identifies an Induction genre that provides foundational understandings about the study of history for apprentice historians. This is supported by two post-foundational lessons that form a Macrogenre. This Macrogenre reinforces the application of focus questions that are fundamental to historical study and an approach to answering these questions that is consistent with the methodology of the subject. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Teachers' understandings of second language learning influence their practices in the classroom. This paper analyzes interview and classroom data collected during a yearlong ethnographic study of two high school English language development classes to identify (1) what the teachers understood about second language (L2) development and L2 academic writing, and (2) to what extent these perspectives manifested in the teachers' writing instruction. Analyses suggest that both the teachers felt that language could be learned inductively through exposure to models and that writing instruction should focus on essay structure and correctness. Their teaching, however, was also constrained by accountability pressures from high stakes writing assessments. I argue that the teachers' approaches reflected a restrictive understanding not aligned with a situated perspective on language and writing development and therefore denied their multilingual students' opportunities to learn academic language for writing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Language learning and teaching of endangered languages have many features and needs that are quite different from the teaching of world languages. Groups whose languages are endangered try to turn language loss around; many new language teaching and learning strategies are emerging, to suit the special needs and goals of language revitalization. The teaching of 'foreign languages', 'majority languages', 'heritage languages' and endangered languages is compared in this paper. Because of the paucity of language teaching resources for endangered languages, and especially because of the special goals of learning for language revitalization, individuals and communities and the professionals who work with them are developing novel ways of teaching and learning their ancestral language, to meet the goals of language learners and their communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents findings from a study of teaching and learning strategies co-constructed by peers in a Spanish/English dual language first grade classroom. Grounded in sociocultural theory and developed using ethnographic approaches to data collection and analysis, the study analyses the children's mediation of their own and each other's language learning within and across languages, focusing on strategies that support learning. The strategies are analysed within the context of teaching/learning interactions in a Dual Language Programme with attention given to the children's ongoing negotiation of the linguistic roles of novice, expert, and dual language expert when working in mixed groups in the English and Spanish classrooms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article draws on research carried out in a Chinese complementary school in Scotland. The research focused on children's experience of learning to read Chinese and on the strategies that they used to support their learning. Here, I provide an account of one particular aspect of this research, namely the creation of a dialogic space for gathering and interpreting data through the setting up of six reading conferences between individual students and their teacher. The reading conferences involved two broad activities. First, each child was asked to read aloud a passage written in Chinese. This was followed by a think-aloud session which took the form of a three-way dialogue between the child, the teacher and me (as the researcher). In this article, I show how the reading conferences unfolded by drawing on one example of an eight-year old boy of Hong Kong heritage. I also detail some of the insights into his learning strategies that emerged from the three-way dialogue during the think-aloud sessions. The article concludes with reflection on: (1) the particular advantages that accrue from creating such dialogic spaces for research, especially at the stage of data interpretation; and (2) on the value of dialogic methodology in educational settings characterised by considerable linguistic and cultural diversity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]