Talking Science discusses the role of language in teaching and in communication of scientific and technical subjects. It identifies and analyzes the many strategies teachers and students use to communicate about science and to influence one another's beliefs and behavior. Special emphasis is placed on analyzing patterns of social interaction, the role of language and semantics in communicating scientific concepts, and the social values and interests which lie behind these patterns of communication. Working from transcripts of recordings made in real science classrooms, this volume goes beyond...

This volume explores in detail the ways that working with word processing interacts with the social processes of classrooms to shape participants' theories and practices of writing. It offers an expanded image of the ways teachers construct writing curricula that includes word processing, and reveals an interactive, long-term relationship between the writing contexts teachers and children construct and the capacities and requirements of writing tools. The volume also builds an analytic framework for thinking and talking about teachers, students and technology, which captures the dynamic...

This is the first in-depth study of gender issues in early literacy learning. It provides vivid portraits of the difficulties that both boys and girls experience in learning to read and write at home and in classrooms due to gendered divisions of labor in families and schools. The portraits are based on data from a three-year ethnographic study, in which "learning biographies" were constructed for thirteen children from their entry into kindergarten until the completion of second grade. The biographies show that in learning to read and write, children construct gendered identities and...