I came of age as an economist in the classroom of Haiti. The extremes of wealth and deep, pervasive destitution there troubled me. At that time—around 1984—development economics was undergoing a sea change, parallel to the one that had taken place in macroeconomic theory in the 1970s. The frameworks of “redistribution with growth” and the “basic needs approach” to development were in the proces...

this study examined naturally-occurring university classroom interactions at iranian universities and provided an analysis of silence patterns as politeness strategies used by male and female students. since empirical studies of silence in classroom settings are scarce, this paper aimed to explain such phenomena using participant interviews, classroom observation and detailed discourse analysis...

In this paper we analyze a selection of narrative-oriented software tools which can benefit young people’s foreign language learning by fostering creativity, encouraging the use of target language and helping to develop communication skills, all within a motivating context. Using these programs students can create various types of narrative, including “talking” storyboards, interactive stories,...

Software-mediated learning requires adjustments in the teaching and learning process. In particular active learning facilitated through interactive learning software differs from traditional instructor-oriented, classroom-based teaching. We present behaviour analysis techniques for Web-mediated learning. Motivation, acceptance of the learning approach and technology, learning organisation and a...

Quality of Classroom Life is considered as a serious issue in academia around the world, and it has recently received global inquiry in EFL and ESL contexts. However, no questionnaire has been developed to assess the Iranian students’ and teachers’ attitudes towards the quality of life in the classroom. After developing a conceptual framework, the final draft of the developed questionnaire with...

Drawing from ethnographic research data and couched in critical care research, the author introduces the concept of ‘interruptive caring’ – a critical approach to caring that both transforms deficit-oriented school practices and challenges the underlying ideologies that inform and rationalize the inequitable power imbalances that operate within a school system. The author examines the concept o...

The author presents an overview of an emerging field that looks at the impact of video games on civic engagement. Some video games have explicit civics-related content and engage players in simulations of civically related projects, but most others do not. However, research has shown that video game playing engages players in civically oriented experiences that previous research has found to pr...

We present a natural language interface for Japanese that relies on semantically driven parsing in that it applies syntactic analysis only if necessary for disambiguation. For this purpose we utilize a categorial parser which also analyzes incomplete or ungrammatical input e ciently. The complete linguistic analysis is performed by means of deductive object-oriented database (DOOD) technology s...

Based on our experience using active learning methods to teach object-oriented software design we propose a game-based approach to take the classroom experience into a virtual environment. The different pedagogical approaches that our active method supports, have motivated us to tailor an architecture that supports the creation of different variations of role-play environments, ranging from ope...