Opportunities for incidental vocabulary acquisition were explored in a 121,000-word corpus of teacher talk addressed to advanced adult learners of English as a second language (ESL) in a communicatively-oriented conversation class. In contrast to previous studies that relied on short excerpts, the corpus contained all of the teacher speech the learners were exposed to during a 9-week session. L...

This study examined the relation between the amount of mathematical input in the speech of preschool or day-care teachers and the growth of children's conventional mathematical knowledge over the school year. Three main findings emerged. First, there were marked individual differences in children's conventional mathematical knowledge by 4 years of age that were associated with socioeconomic sta...

This research explores the ability of grade 2 students to engage in productive discussion about the state of their knowledge building using group-level feedback tools to support their metadiscourse. Two aspects of knowledge work were common to the comparison and experimental classes: BKnowledge Building talk^ (KB talk) involving teacher-student discussions and the use of Knowledge Forum, an onl...

Few studies investigate how teacher discourse moves relate to subsequent student in real-time small-group reading instruction with multilingual learners (MLLs). Grounded sociocultural theory and classroom research, this study examines fourth-grade MLLs engage reasoning during text-based discussions. We argue that by examining holistically - beyond speaker turns we can capture teacher-talk facil...