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Communication through social media is a phenomenon whose relevance has involved the consideration of online discourse in the language teaching context. This article explores the functionality of Twitter (now called "X") for science dissemination within the teaching and learning of English as a foreign language. To do this, 100 tweets from the accounts @WWF and @Greenpeace were gathered and analysed from the perspective of digital discourse analysis and communicative language teaching. I argue that using these tweets encourages the development of key competencies, provides room for the practice of integrated skills, and enhances the application of 21st-century skills. Conclusively, science dissemination tweets may be considered adequate for teaching and learning English.

Goal: The problem of the authenticity of teacher questions has not received sufficient attention from educational researchers interested in the intersection between dialogue and argumentation. In this paper, we adopt a definition of authentic questions as dialogical units that prompt teacher-student interactions that are both productive (i.e., several students participating) and constructive (i.e., students produce arguments of high complexity). Our goal is to analyze whether and how specific types of dialogue prompts can encourage students' engagement in more sophisticated argumentative interactions, as manifested through the construction of high-complexity arguments. Method: We describe the implementation of our analytical approach to a large corpus of classroom interactions from five European countries. The corpus was segmented into dialogical sequences, which were then coded according to the argumentation dialogue goal expressed in the sequence. We also coded students' arguments according to Toulmin's elements and distinguished between low- and high-complexity arguments from a structural point of view. Findings: Our findings show the predominance of the so-called Discovery questions as prompts that are both productive and constructive and Inquiry questions as prompts of argumentative constructive interactions. We discuss the importance of these findings for teacher professional development purposes.

The climate crisis and the environmental emergency are a sign of uncertainty for the future of the planet. European and national educational directives establish the framework of action and the commitments that must be made by each agent to reach the new sustainable paradigm which is based on circularity. The school, as an institution of social transformation, faces a reproductive framework that feeds the consumer socio-economic structure, covering up the urgency of the problem. The aim is to identify the forces for change to improve the intervention mechanisms in the educational field in Spain aimed at fostering the involvement and the participation of young people. The qualitative methodology combines discourse analysis using Grounded Theory and prospective analysis using the scenario method. By means of a validated questionnaire, semi-structured interviews and focus groups are conducted with technicians and managers, trainers of trainers, teachers, and researchers (n=53). The discourse of the agents and legislation on education and sustainability are analysed to generate substantive theory. By means of the theorization obtained, drivers and constraints are identified, establishing a probability and impact matrix that allows for the visualization of three possible futures. It concludes with a set of recommendations to strengthen the desired scenario and to reduce the possibilities of the dystopian scenario.

Disinformation has become a core concept in communications research, related to media, technological and political phenomena that complexify its definition and diagnosis. Although its approach has been mainly quantitative, focus groups have also been used to understand the perception of the audience of this particular issue. This research is part of this second group of studies, and attempts to investigate the notions and discourses on disinformation in the case of Spain. For this purpose, seven discussion groups were conducted, with a structural sample constructed according to employment situation, ideology and age. The results show a perception of the communicative ecosystem structured in two chronological poles, which contrasts a past of reduced information supply -- associated with traditional media -- with a current informational environment where there is more media diversity, but also less trust in them. The groups point to the overabundance of information and associated disinformation with decontextualisation, low-quality journalism and the economic and political interests of different actors. Discourses outline a scenario of decline in journalism and the public sphere, which is perceived as polarised and emotional. Disinformation is therefore perceived as a multidimensional phenomenon that is associated with issues of major democratic transcendence rather than merely sending hoaxes through the Internet.

Democracy is based on individuals' ability to give their opinions freely. To do this, they must have access to a multitude of reliable information sources (Dahl, 1998), and this greatly depends on the characteristics of their media environments. Today, one of the main issues individuals face is the significant amount of disinformation circulating through social networks. This study focuses on parliamentary disinformation. It examines how parliamentarians contribute to generating information disorder (Wardle & Derakhshan, 2017) in the digital public space. Through an exploratory content analysis--a descriptive content analysis of 2,307 messages posted on Twitter accounts of parliamentary spokespeople and representatives of the main list of each political party in the Spanish Lower House of Parliament--we explore disinformation rhetoric. The results allow us to conclude that, while the volume of messages shared by parliamentarians on issues susceptible to disinformation is relatively low (14% of tweets), both the themes of the tweets (COVID-19, sex-based violence, migrants or LGBTI), as well as their tone and argumentative and discursive lines, contribute to generating distrust through institutional criticism or their peers. The study deepens current knowledge of the disinformation generated by political elites, key agents of the construction of polarising narratives.

This article presents a comparative analysis of educational policy documents on leadership and teacher development in Spain, Colombia, and Mexico, countries that are represented in the International Study of Teacher Leadership (ISTL) (Webber, 2018). We are comparing public policies in three participating countries that do not declare an explicit discourse on teacher leadership. This work presents some elements to answer whether teacher reflexivity is an essential attribute of teacher leadership, especially in highly complex contexts. To answer this question, we explored content on reflexivity in central public policy documents related to teachers and their professional development. We also reviewed academic materials related to teacher leadership. The results show that reflection is an appropriate category to explore the association between the international discourse on teacher leadership -- especially in highly complex contexts --and the discourse in these countries on teacher development, without making any reference to the concept of teacher leadership.

A considerable body of research within the interaction framework (Long, 1996) has centred on the language-related episodes (LREs) which occur when learners topicalize a specific linguistic item while they are engaged in meaning-focused tasks. Several studies have shown that the production of LREs may be influenced by the proficiency level of the learners (Kim & McDonough, 2008; Leeser, 2004). Sociocultural theory (Lantolf & Appel, 1994) has also explored collaborative work and the effect that pairing learners with the same proficiency levels or different "patterns of interaction" (Storch, 2002) has on the production of LREs (e.g., Mozaffari, 2017; Storch & Aldosari 2013), but little research has compared the effect of the pair formation method (student-selected vs. proficiency-matched) on young learners' production of LREs and pair dynamics. This study compares young CLIL learners (aged 10-12) in student-selected and proficiency-matched pairs in task-based interaction. Results indicate that learners produce more meaning-based than form-based LREs, regardless of their pair formation method. The percentage of meaning-based LREs which are resolved accurately is much higher in proficiency-matched dyads than in student-selected ones. As for the patterns of interaction (Storch, 2002), the dynamics of proficiency-matched dyads are of a more collaborative nature than those of self-selected pairs.

The benefits of task-based interaction in Second Language Learning (SLL) have been made increasingly evident in the literature. However, unlike adult studies, only recently has interaction research on EFL children grown in popularity. Most children-based research has focused primarily on Negotiation of Meaning, while other age-related aspects, including a more comprehensive analysis of how adults and children perform and resolve tasks, remain relatively unexplored. This paper addresses this gap by analysing the similarities and differences in the task-related strategies of twenty children aged 8 and 9 and fourteen adult L1-Spanish EFL learners at low levels of competence in paired interaction. Results provide evidence of clear age-related differences, as adults were more consistent and approached the task in a more predictable and efficient fashion. Findings also point to task repetition as a key factor leading to a more successful performance in both groups, even more markedly in the case of children.

Undergraduate students' engagement with mathematical discourse when defining geometric solids is analysed and compared with what their lecturers expect them to do. The theory of commognition is adopted as the theoretical framework, which permits the characterisation and comparison of their discursive activities, and may lead to the identification of potential commognitive conflicts. The participants were forty-five undergraduate students (primary preservice teachers) and their lecturers. A worksheet with questions about defining geometric solids was used as a data collection instrument. The students, in small groups, had to discuss and write their answers, and the lecturers were asked what they expected from their students. Results show three main areas of mismatch between students' engagement in mathematical discourse and what their lecturers expected from them. There is no clear consensus across the students on how to define or on what a definition is or on which criterion to use when selecting a definition.

While research on Western multimedia platforms, such as YouTube, is prolific and interdisciplinary, Asian portals remain unknown. We explore this field by analyzing the juvenile and intercultural uses of a popular visualization system in Japan and China, known as "danmaku" or "danmu". This technology inserts dynamic and contextualized comments on a photogram, with several typographical possibilities. Based on a corpus of 1,590 comments on "The Ministry of Time", collected from a fandom platform with millions of users, we analyzed the topics that arouse the most interest among Chinese fans. We combine content analysis, which incorporates coding and counting techniques of the categories with the most interventions (n>16), with multimodal discourse analysis (TV series, Asian platform and user comments). Results show that the viewers are most interested in the film genre (time travel), the characters, the plot, certain sociocultural contents, and the Spanish language. Their discussions address issues of interculturality, some topics that are taboo in China and the fandom culture in Asia. Our study illustrates the potential of participation, communication, and learning in Asian social media, and constitutes an interesting and innovative contribution to the field of media and digital literacy, with various suggestions to promote intercultural competence with the use of popular culture.

This paper explores the interactions of a groupwork team composed of both local and exchange students, with heterogeneous competence in English, in an English-medium CLIL context at a technical university in Catalonia. Plurilingual and multimodal conversation analysis is used to trace how the students jointly complete an academic task. The research conducted specifically analyses how students categorise themselves and each other in terms of their expertise, and the procedures and resources the students deploy to accomplish the task. The data show that participants' heterogeneous linguistic repertoires are not an obstacle for successfully completing the task, for constructing subject knowledge, or for establishing a climate of mutual understanding and cooperation. The analysis refers to the tension emerging in the data between the interactional principles of progressivity --actions oriented towards task completion--and intersubjectivity--actions oriented towards resolving communicative difficulties. It also focuses on how co-participants mobilise diverse resources from their communicative repertoires, including plurilingual resources, gesture and material artefacts, in managing the task. The main argument put forward is that in instructional environments in which students are expected to build subject matter knowledge using languages that they are simultaneously learning (e.g. CLIL), considering their whole communicative repertoires as valuable resources for their learning is a promising approach.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the production of pragmatic markers (PMs) by multilingual students in a CLIL context. Previous studies have analyzed pragmatic competence in multilingual settings (e.g., Cenoz, 2003; Martín-Laguna & Alcón-Soler, 2015; Portolés, 2015; Safont & Portolés, 2016). However, to the best of our knowledge, no previous study has investigated the use of PMs across languages at the oral level in the multilingual classroom. As suggested by Nashaat-Sobhy (2017, p. 69), there is a need for studies that support or refute whether CLIL helps students communicate more appropriately. In an attempt to fill this gap, the overall aim of this research study is to explore how multilingual students use PMs across languages--namely Spanish, Catalan and English--in terms of frequency and type of PM. Participants were 19 Spanish students in an instructional context where three languages are in contact, namely English, Catalan and Spanish. They completed a language background questionnaire and comparable oral decision-making tasks carried out in pairs, one task in each of the target languages. The analysis explored the frequency and type of PMs (i.e. textual and interpersonal markers). Findings revealed significant differences in the frequency and type of both interpersonal and textual PMs across the three languages, shedding some light on the particular characteristics of the pragmatic competence of multilingual learners in a CLIL setting.

As academic language skills develop, young learners are able to rise to the challenge of increasingly complex communication in increasingly formal settings (Snow, 2014; Uccelli et al., 2015). Studies suggest that CLIL contexts may favour the development of academic language skills (Dalton-Puffer, 2007; Nikula, 2007; Marsh, 2008; Pasqual Peña, 2010) to a greater extent than non-CLIL contexts. However, research that attempts to test this assumption has so far tended to do so from a pragmalinguistic perspective (Lorenzo & Rodríguez, 2014; Lorenzo, 2017). This paper takes a sociopragmatic approach to exploring the differences between CLIL and non-CLIL contexts regarding how they facilitate the development of early academic language skills. That is, how the communicative intentions that underlie CLIL and non-CLIL classroom discourse may help or hinder the development of such skills. The data were collected by observing classroom discourse in CLIL and EFL primary-school lessons, in Spanish-based and Catalan-based linguistic models. The method followed was to apply a taxonomy of the sociopragmatic level of academic language (Henrichs, 2010) to determine the quality of the conversational style and intersubjective cooperation found in the discourse. The results indicate that CLIL classroom discourse is characterised by the sort of conversational style that facilitates the development of academic language skills. However, in terms of intersubjective cooperation the results are somewhat inconclusive. Based on these results, the study suggests raising awareness of the role of conversational style in classroom discourse so as to boost the quality of teacher-student interactions in primary-school CLIL contexts and, thus, contribute to an identified need for continuous improvement of CLIL pedagogies and teacher training (Lorenzo, 2007; de Graaff et al., 2007).

From a commognitive approach, this article focuses on the discourse generated by preservice primary teachers who are solving didactic-mathematical tasks. Our aims are to study the characteristics of the aforementioned discourse and, through these characteristics, identify whether a discourse close to the one of primary teachers is beginning to emerge. The sources of data were audio-recordings of group discussions and group reports. Two different discourses were identified in our results. One is the discourse generated by pre-service teachers when adopt the role of students of any level who have to solve a task proposed in the classroom. The other discourse is linked to the adoption of a role close to their future professional work. If we consider that the acquisition of a specific discourse enables future teachers to integrate into the community of practice of primary teachers, the role of the different discourses becomes a relevant element in teacher education.

This paper represents a multimodal analysis of the paraverbal (prosodic and gesture) features of expressive female political speech in Latin America and Spain. The language corpus consisted of public speeches delivered by Spanish-speaking female politicians Eva Peron, Christina de Kirchner and Manuela Carmena. The article includes an overview of theoretical approaches to female speech studies and follows current trends in modern sociolinguistics, which, on the one hand, accumulate the classical techniques (particularly, experimental methods) of studying the gender-related specifics of the oral female speech based on social standing, age and professional affiliation, and, on the other hand, reflect the latest approaches to the contrastive analysis of socio-political discourse in the "Spanish-Speaking World" (Spain and Latin America). This contributes to the study of gender, speech effect and comparative issues. We offer an audiovisual analysis method for studying voice and kinetic means of the expressive speech of female politicians in Spain and Latin America. This allows determining the ethno-specific correlates of expressiveness in a speech of female politicians at the verbal and paraverbal levels and building an updated model of female political expressiveness based on the integrity of its verbal and paraverbal categories.

Although critical attention has focused on Ariel, Sylvia Plath's earlier poems are also worth examining since they reveal significant details concerning the writer's evolution towards that final achievement. After getting married in June 1956, Plath and Hughes travelled to Spain and settled in Benidorm for their honeymoon. It is the poems derived from that period and Plath's response to the alien setting that are analyzed in this paper. The corpus of "Spanish poems" and its most salient motifs will be identified and examined to assess the emotional and artistic response of Plath's encounter with Spain in her work. A rhetorical analysis of these poems will be carried out but biographical data from Plath's journals, correspondence and prose will also be considered. Finally, two later poems will be examined to demonstrate that Spain left its imprint in Plath's mind, supplying suggestive imagery which turned the Spanish landscape into a violent mindscape.

The aim of this research is to identify and analyse the ubiquitous learning acquired through blending education settings devoted to the "lifelong training of trainers" and how these contribute to the development of a conscious, critic and engaged citizenship. Through active exploration of the learning process, the study analyses the "soft skills" acquired which enhance performance in work and daily life, with the purpose of detecting the process of ubiquitous learning often overlooked in formal education. To this end, the study case presented here draws upon a data triangulation of qualitative and quantitative multisource information (questionnaires, interviews, participant observation, discussion groups, individual and collective diaries) which includes the study of the semantic networks consisting of learners' own utterances. The results obtained indicate that the soft skills related to the capacity of self-development, the use of innovative resources, the enhancement of social cooperation, the ability to meet cognitive and social challenges, and the functional learning as produced though expanded learning, have the potential to pave the way for the empowerment of peoples, communities and social movements. But this form of expanded learning, as open, collaborative, democratic and committed learning, must be actively supported if future generations are not only to be consumers but also cooperative producers in a socially shared world.

According to recommendations of the UN Secretary General's Global Education First Initiative, countries and regions require a number of structural changes if they are to implement educational policies and practice based on global citizenship education, and to promote respect and responsibility across cultures. In this paper, we present the first results of a three-year project to compare existing educational policies, strategies and school curricula in ten European Union (EU) countries (Austria, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, France, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Spain, Portugal, UK) to ascertain the current level of such structural changes. Through a comparative policy analysis, we investigated whether, to what extent, and how global citizenship education is integrated within primary school curricula. The article focuses on national governmental agencies--specifically two main bodies in each country, the ministries of foreign affairs and education--and their political discourses. We argue that the gap between the two traditions, with separate approaches, purposes, concepts and bureaucracies, represents a strategic political challenge for the introduction of global citizenship education in primary schools.

The construction, visualization and stabilization of public problems require the mobilization of civil society groups concerned about these issues to actively engage in the demand for actions and policies. This paper explores the institutional campaigns against human trafficking and sexual exploitation in Spain between 2008 and 2017 and their role in helping to shape this issue as a matter of public concern. Our aim is to identify the ideological basis of these campaigns through their representations of predominant actors, which have been systematized to identify possible mistakes and to help determine more effective actions with a greater capacity for mobilization. We applied a mixed content analysis combined with a semiotic model to evaluate the presence or absence of the different actors and their relevance in each case. Several lines of discourse have been reiterated across the 50 campaigns analysed: Curbing the demand for prostitution as a priority objective; the centrality of victims in the representations; the role of the consumer of paid sex as an accomplice to the crime; and the correlation between prostitution and human trafficking. We will also examine how these issues relate to the broader dispute on the status of prostitution in Spain. This will require a conceptual shift away from educational and social-oriented communication towards the structural causes, collective responsibility and transformative justice frameworks.

The main objective of this research is to analyze the content of YouTuber's videos that have the greatest impact on adolescents and their relationship with the construction of identity. The YouTube platform is one of the most commonly used by Spanish teenagers and around 70% of young people between 14 and 17 years of age prefer this network. YouTubers are perceived by young people as their equals, close people who share similar traits to their own, which facilitates rapid identification. A qualitative analysis of the content of 22 videos on the YouTube platform was carried out using the Atlas.ti program. The analysis led to several emerging codes related to the construction of adolescent personal identity. Most of the messages relating to personal identity were aimed at transmitting the self-impression of the YouTuber and the relationship of that self-impression with his gender identity, sexual orientation, and vocational identity. Also, family and peers appeared in the videos, especially as providers of social support. Teen followers include messages to support YouTubers, express their identification with the messages and use comment spaces to describe their own experiences, expressing the same concerns in the configuration of their identity. It is necessary to take into account this new space of interrelation to understand the development of young people's identity.

The present study investigates whether learner set up in interaction, namely in pairs or small groups, influences the frequency and outcome of lexical language-related episodes (LREs) and L2 vocabulary learning. Thirty Spanish English as a foreign language (EFL) university learners took part in the study. They worked in four groups and seven pairs on the same collaborative writing task. Research was carried out on the course of five weeks as a pre- and post- vocabulary task and an individual writing task were administered to assess vocabulary learning and retention. The quantitative analysis of the data showed that there was no significant difference between the performance of pairs and groups, although the latter produced slightly more lexical LREs than pairs and were able to solve most of them correctly. However, from a qualitative point of view, the findings suggest that small group work leads to slightly better results than pair work as the different members obtain benefits from their peers' linguistic knowledge.

This article employs narrative analysis to examine how the media in 12 different countries characterize the "Teach for All" (TFA) teacher. Examining mass media narratives in these 12 countries illustrates that there are some remarkable commonalities in the narratives and character portraits co-constructed and propagated by the media. At the core of these narratives is the notion of a problem in education. This problem justifies the creation and emergence of a character, commonly constructed in opposition to traditionally certified teachers, who embodies the characteristics and attributes of the contemporary neoliberal subject. This article discusses the implications of this character's widespread representation; namely, how does the character construction influence the broader public perception about education and how is it contributing to the (re)imagination of the role of the teacher?

The inclusion and the Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) configure a field of great scientific interest in the current society. In this context, the attitudes of the teachers towards the ICT play an important role. The present article gathers the results of a study whose purpose was to determine how a teacher will use and integrate the "Information and Communication Technologies" (ICT) in inclusive classrooms. This will also identify the factors that promote good educational practices supported by ICT. Towards this we prepared a case study of multiple cases. The questionnaire and group discussion are the techniques that are used for collecting required information. To validate the questionnaire, it was used the expert judgment method selected by the "Coefficient expert Competence" procedure or also named "K coefficient." The Reliability was established by Cronbach's Alpha method with a value of 0.87. The result shows that teachers in general have a positive attitude towards ICT, especially the male teachers with greater possibilities of interaction with ICT. This will also promote inclusive and cultures policies between networks of schools and it is presented as an important factor in developing good educational practice with the support of ICT.

Numerous studies hold that interaction has beneficial effects on second language acquisition among adults and children in second language contexts. However, data from children learning English as a foreign language are still unavailable. In order to fill this research niche, this study examines the conversational interactions of 8 pairs of young (ages 7-8) learners of English as a foreign language while playing a game in the classroom. The objective is to document which conversational strategies these learners use and to compare them to those previously reported for other populations. The analysis of our data shows that these children negotiate significantly less than other populations but use a variety of strategies to negotiate for meaning. Also, they resort to the L1 on some occasions and use explicit correction quite often. In light of these results we will argue in favour of using these types of interactive activities in the classroom.

Curent national curicula, the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages, and EFL materials highlight the importance of the students' development of oral skils. This study stems from a cros-sectional survey of the teaching of oral skils in Secondary Education in a Spanish local context (Aragón) caried out in 2012 on both teachers and students of English. The present paper focuses on the answers obtained from the group of teachers in order to provide a snapshot of their attitudes, beliefs and expectations regarding the teaching, learning and asesment of oral skils, as well as the implementation of some measures aimed at increasing the required level of oral competence in the foreign language. Teachers' answers reveal that in spite of what is indicated in language policies, oral skils are not suficiently practiced and/or assesed; that students are still reluctant to engage in oral activites and do not, therefore, reach the required level in these skills.

This paper addresses the issue of corrective feedback (CF), a topic widely investigated in the last few decades (Sheen, 2011), and instructional context. We observed and recorded the oral interaction of an intact class of thirty Spanish intermediate-level high-school learners and two teachers in two settings: a traditional form-oriented English as a Foreign Language (EFL) classroom and a meaning-oriented Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) classroom (Dalton-Puffer, 2011). Corrective feedback episodes (CFE; Lyster, 1994) were used as the unit of analysis. The findings of the study indicate that there are differences in the type, quantity and manner of CFE between the two learning contexts. Although no significant difference in the proportion of learners' uptake was found between the EFL and CLIL contexts, a qualitative analysis of the data indicated that the teachers' attitude toward CF influenced subsequent learner uptake. Implications for further research on CF, learner uptake and instructional context are suggested.

The main goal of this paper is to analyze adolescents' experiences when they play SimCity (EA, 2008), a commercial videogame, in an innovative learning environment designed around the concept of participatory culture. By using this video game in the classroom and machinima productions created in relation to the game, we sought to generate a critical and reflective approach, related both to the content of the game and to the audiovisual discourse through which its messages are formulated. Adopting an ethnographic, action research and discourse analysis approach, we analyze the practices, conversations and multimedia productions generated in a workshop where the teacher and the research team worked together. The students were in their third year of high school, and the group comprised boys and girls in a language compensatory program. All sessions were video recorded. The analysis of the conversations and activities in the classroom revealed a process in which the teacher and the researcher shared difficulties and participated to facilitate the students' learning through the use of digital instruments. From this perspective, this article aims to provide educational strategies that help foster critical thinking by using commercial video games in the classroom.

This study examines the linguistic resources by which foreign language (L2) learners express their ideological positions in online discussions taking place in a telecollaborative encounter during one semester. More specifically, the study attempts to decipher how L2 learners discuss and argue their points of view regarding their first culture, their second culture, and the topic in general, depending on the issue under discussion (immigration and nationalism or patriotism) and to the country where the learners were based (US or Spain). Twenty-four learners, organized into six groups, each with two students from the US and two from Spain, participated in three online forums. For the analysis, learners' postings were subjected to quantitative and qualitative content analysis applying two discourse-semantic subsystems of the Appraisal framework, Engagement--the linguistic resources used to reflect the writer's position and willingness to recognize alternative positions--and Attitude--the linguistic resources used to indicate positive or negative assessment of people, places, things, and states of affairs. This study concludes that there were clear differences in the discursive styles between both sets of learners and topics. Overall, for instance, the learners employed more monoglossic statements when discussing nationalism or patriotism rather than immigration and Spain-based learners made more use of judgment markers than their US-based counterparts did.

Interactive relationships in online learning communities can influence the process and quality of knowledge building. The aim of this study is to empirically investigate the relationships between network structures and social knowledge building in an asynchronous writing environment through discussion forums in a learning management system. The quality of the knowledge construction process is evaluated through content analysis, and the network structures are analyzed using a social network analysis of the response relations among participants during online discussions. Structural equation modeling is used to analyze relations between network structures and knowledge construction. Working on data extracted from a 6-week distance-learning experiment, we analyzed how 10 groups developed collaborative learning social networks when participants worked together on case resolution. The results show a positive correlation between cohesion and centralization, and the positive influence of the cohesion index and the centralization index on social presence and cognitive presence in knowledge building. However, this must be understood within the context of social networks in which messages sent to all group members occupy the center. This underlines the need for reinforcing participations that are directed to the group as a whole, and the importance of the fact the network contains both central and intermediate members. By contrast, we propose that the combination of analysis techniques used is a good option for this type of study while recognizing that it is necessary to continue validating the instruments in terms of their own theoretical suppositions. (Contains 2 figures and 3 tables.)

This paper reports on an empirical and descriptive investigation into how teachers and learners use technology in three prototypical learning activities in a higher educational online learning environment. Additionally, the relationship between the educational uses of technology and the overall educational patterns of interaction between teachers and learners, and among learners themselves was analysed. Detailed teacher and learner self-reports about their teaching and learning activity; the asynchronous written messages teachers and learners sent as educational interaction in the online learning environment; and documents produced by students were all obtained. The results from the three learning activities indicated six overall educational uses of technology in an online learning environment. Moreover, the results also indicated differences in technology usage in some different patterns of educational interaction in each learning activity. In conclusion, we argue that the notion of technology educational affordance is useful as an effective bridge between the real use of technology and instructional aims. Therefore the distribution of educational uses of technology is not only related to some attributes of both technology and instruction but also to its interaction. (Contains 1 figure and 7 tables.)

This article analyses an experience in collaborative learning in an asynchronous writing environment through discussion forums on a WebCt platform of the University of Huelva's virtual campus, and was part of an innovative teaching project in 2007-08. The main objectives are to describe the processes of collaborative knowledge construction and the relevance of many-to-many communication in collective case resolution in asynchronous writing contexts. Two cases were selected for the experience, and two analytical approaches were adopted: discourse analysis and social network analysis. The results show that in the Case A group, where speech occurrence was less prevalent, the social network analysis markers show considerable cohesion and low levels of network centrality. By contrast, speech prevalence was greater in the Case B group and the network centrality markers were higher, although the group was less cohesive. These results lead to the hypothesis that many-to-many communication is more important in collective knowledge generation processes than dyadic or triadic communication. (Contains 6 figures and 4 tables.)

Knowledge Building is approached in this study from an organizational perspective, with a focus on the nature of school-university-government partnerships to support research-based educational innovation. The paper starts with an overview of what is known about effective partnerships and elaborates a conceptual framework for Knowledge Building partnerships based on a review of literature and two case studies of school-university-government partnerships. In one case, a Ministry of Education wanted to bring more vitality into schools of small remote villages, and in the other case another Ministry of Education wanted to renew its school-based international cooperation profile. Emerging from this work is a three-component model for going to scale with Knowledge Building partnerships: Knowledge Building as a shared vision; symmetric knowledge advancement; and multi-level, research-based innovation. Characteristics of, and conditions for, effective partnerships for Knowledge Building are elaborated, and an emerging model is developed to help communities establish effective partnerships and contribute to this evolving model. (Contains 1 figure.)

The aim of this work is to analyse how Spanish readers react to English discourse markers in a text. We carry out an empirical study in which we ask three research question: (a) if there is any relationship between presence of discourse markers or absence of discourse markers and reading comprehension in English as a foreign language, (b) if there is any relationship between the readers' proficiency in English and the effect of the presence or absence of discourse markers on reading comprehension and, (c) if there is any relationship between the readers' age, sex, competence as learners and as learners of English, and the effect of the presence or absence of discourse markers on reading comprehension. The results obtained show that discourse markers enhance reading comprehension in foreign language reading, and that the more successful students tend to use discourse markers as aids to help their reading comprehension. This latter result is nevertheless limited by the possible effect of the readers' familiarity with the topic of the text and points to a need for further investigation. (Contains 12 footnotes and 5 tables.)

This article describes research undertaken in order to design a methodology for the reticular representation of knowledge of a specific discourse community. To achieve this goal, a representative corpus of the scientific production of the members of this discourse community (Universidad Politecnica de Valencia, UPV) was created. This article presents the practical analysis (frequency, keyword, collocation and cluster analysis) that was carried out in the initial phases of the study aimed at establishing the theoretical and practical background and framework for our network analysis of the scientific discourse of the UPV. In the methodology section, the processes that have allowed us to extract from the corpus the linguistic elements needed to develop co-occurrence matrices, as well as the computer tools used in the research, are described. From these co-occurrence matrices, semantic networks of subject and discipline knowledge were generated. Finally, based on the results obtained, we suggest that it may be viable to extract and to represent the intellectual capital of an academic institution using corpus linguistic methods in combination with the formulations of network theory. (Contains 5 tables and 9 figures.)

Using the global discourse of human rights as a basis, the purpose of this article is to analyse how education for citizenship and human rights has been implemented in Spain in recent years. In addition, discourse analysis and the theory of social movements have been used to study the mobilisation that arose against this instruction, showing how the neoconservative Catholic sectors of Spanish society encouraged Catholics to engage in conscientious objection and civil disobedience in order to gradually achieve the removal of Education for Citizenship and Human Rights from Spanish curricula.

The global dominance of English as the principal language of international interchange in the teacher education field has, perhaps, diverted English-speaking scholars from the task of reviewing discourses in non-English languages. Taking as its focus the issue of professional knowledge in ITE, the present article considers scholarship predominantly of Spanish origin--to a lesser extent Portuguese and Latin American also--in an effort to begin to form an understanding of both historical antecedents and more recent approaches to professional knowledge in a Hispanic context. While the remit of the present article is one of introducing the work and ideas of significant scholars, it ends in pointing towards the need for further research in seeking to identify more fully what might be distinctive about the Hispanic contribution to a global discussion in the face of new 21st-century realities in teacher education and society more generally.

This is an empirical study in which we explore child foreign language learners' interactional strategy use, uptake, and lexical acquisition in synchronous computer-mediated communication (SCMC). The study was carried out with 16 10-year-old Spanish English as a foreign language learners paired with age- and proficiency-matched English native speaker peers who worked together over a 5-week period on three communicative jigsaw tasks. Results show that during text-based SCMC, the children negotiated for meaning in ways that coincided with and differed from studies of young learners' face-to-face communication. Successful uptake of target lexis occurred infrequently despite high rates of negotiation, although the children's lexical knowledge improved significantly over time. Analyses of the chat scripts revealed that the learners noticed and retained additional lexical items embedded in the task and used during the interaction. They had not been the focus of negotiation, but were useful for task completion. Participation in SCMC also raised the children's awareness of gaps in their lexical knowledge and stimulated their attempts to fill those gaps outside the classroom. The results are discussed and implications suggested for implementing SCMC in instructional settings.