This paper addresses the question of how teachers learn from experience during their pre-service course and early years of teaching. It outlines a theoretical framework that may help us better understand how teachers’ professional identities emerge in practice. The framework adapts Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development, and Valsiner’s Zone of Free Movement and Zone of Promoted Action, to the ...

As a distinct socially constructed genre, wedding invitations (WIs) offer a fruitful site for investigating how two areas of genre knowledge (i.e., form and content) change over time under the influence of sociocultural forces. Through the examination of 100 Iranian WIs dating from 1970s to the present time, the study investigated the trajectories of change through time within the social semiot...

This paper considers some methodological problems in representing interactions between young children, technology and practitioners. It is based on work for an ESRC TLRP-funded project Interplay: Play, Learning and ICT in Pre-School Settings, the purpose of which is to identify ways of enhancing young children’s learning with a range of technologies. Sociocultural theory underpins the research ...

PURPOSE/OBJECTIVES To examine variations in cultural and health beliefs about mammography screening among a socioeconomically diverse sample of African American and Caucasian women and to identify which set of beliefs predicted mammography screening adherence. DESIGN Descriptive, retrospective, cross-sectional study. SETTING Community-based organizations and public housing. SAMPLE 111 Afr...

This study reports on research article (RA) authors’ definitional understanding and sociocultural perceptions of intertextuality and plagiarism in academic writing. To meet this end, a questionnaire, consisting of three sections, was constructed and emailed to Iranian RA authors who have published in leading international and local applied linguistics journals. The findings of the first two sec...

Examining the planning of cemeteries in the urbanism system of Iran does not show a goodcondition. In fact, cemeteries in the most Persian cities have become large-scale open spaces outside the city. This couldcause irreparable damage to the cities because of the partial and/or improper use of the capacity of urban lands. Alongwith this, historical cemeteries within the cities have been abandon...