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...

Teachers’ judgments in their ability to motivate students and promote learning can play a vital role in determining a student’s performance in the classroom and once a belief has been held for a long time, it can become difficult to change. Utilising a sample of 467 beginner and final year pre-service teachers training to become primary (elementary) and secondary teachers, the aim of this study...

African countries, like other UNESCO member countries, commited themselves during the 2000 Dakar Global Forum to ensure quality education for all. It is a twofold challenge to equitably enhance access to and improve the quality of education. An exercise which requires inter alia, an inventive spirit, a review of existing policies and practices and an exchange of good ones particularly in the ar...

An important development in higher education is the increased learning possibilities brought by ICT. Many academics seem reluctant to embrace technology. An online teacher training program was followed by 73 academics from nine higher educational institutions. Data were gathered using the Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPACK) model and the Teacher Beliefs and Intentions questionna...

The UK Centre for Astrobiology (UKCA) was set up in 2011 as a virtual center to contribute to astrobiology research, education, and outreach. After 5 years, we describe this center and its work in each of these areas. Its research has focused on studying life in extreme environments, the limits of life on Earth, and implications for habitability elsewhere. Among its research infrastructure proj...

Field work in a teacher training program was focussed on the collection and presentation of data showing changes in the environment depending on variable factors. The observations should be possible to use as models for studies performed by children at school. The instructions were sparse and many of the observations from the first visit to the sites were impossible to repeat. The first four ob...

What do I expect when stating that "I am going to be a teacher"? Social roles, including professional roles, often become part of people's identity and thus, of the self. As people typically strive for maintaining a positive sense of self, threats to one's role identity are likely to induce stress. In line with these considerations, Semmer et al. recently (e.g., Semmer et al., 2007, 2015) intro...