Qualitative and descriptive research methods have been very common procedures for conducting research in many disciplines, including education, psychology, and social sciences. These types of research have also begun to be increasingly used in the field of second language teaching and learning. The interest in such methods, particularly in qualitative research, is motivated in part by the recognition that L2 teaching and learning is complex. To uncover this complexity, we need to not only examine how learning takes place in general or what factors affect it, but also provide more in-depth examination and understanding of individual learners and their behaviors and experiences. Qualitative and descriptive research is well suited to the study of L2 classroom teaching, where conducting tightly controlled experimental research is hardly possible, and even if controlled experimental research is conducted in such settings, the generalizability of its findings to real classroom contexts are questionable. Therefore, Language Teaching Research receives many manuscripts that report qualitative or descriptive research.

1The fact that the spoken texts of classroom interaction -particularly those involving teacher with whole class -are co-constructed relatively smoothly, despite the number of participants involved, suggests that they are organized in terms of standard strategies, embodied in typical forms of discourse that have evolved for responding to recurring types of rhetorical situation (Miller, 1984;Kamberelis, 1995). That is to say that, like written texts, they can be thought of as being constructed according to one of a set of educational genre specifications. One such rhetorical structure, the ubiquitous 'triadic dialogue' (Lemke, 1990) (also known as the IRE or IRF sequence (Mehan, 1979;Sinclair & Coulthard, 1975), has attracted considerable attention in recent years, and has variously been seen as, on the one hand, essential for the co-construction of cultural knowledge (Heap, 1985;Newman et al., 1989) and, on the other, as antithetical to the educational goal of encouraging students' intellectual-discursive initiative and creativity (Lemke, 1990;Wood, 1992).Drawing on episodes of teacher-whole-class interaction collected during a collaborative action research project, this paper will show, however, that the same basic IRF structure can take a variety of forms and be recruited by teachers for a wide variety of functions, depending on the goal of the activity that the discourse serves to mediate and, in particular, on the use that is made of the followup move. ________________________________________ 2In his seminal writings on the dialogic nature of 'utterance ', Bakhtin (1986) pointed out that all utterances both respond to what has preceded and anticipate a further response. While this is true, it is also the case that, in speech, many utterances tend to be more oriented either to what preceded or to what will follow, as is the case with the relationship that holds between the members of an 'adjacency pair', such as 'question-answer' (Sacks, Schegloff, & Jefferson, 1974). On the other hand, not all conversational 'exchanges' are limited to two 'moves', and many are much longer.There are two main reasons for this.First, as Halliday (1984) has argued, there are two basic exchange-types: a) Demand -Give-inresponse and b) Give (unsolicited) -Accept. However, a third equally basic type is frequently created by the combination of the first two: c) Demand -Give-in-Response -Accept. Where information is the 'commodity' exchanged, this gives rise to the three-move exchange structure:Question -Answer -Acknowledgement (Halliday, 1984 In this structure, however, only one participant typically initiates the exchange -the teacher; and the teacher always has the right to provide the third move, often, as above, by evaluating the student's contribution for its conformity to what he or she considers to be a correct or acceptable response.These differential rights to moves in the exchange have often been discussed in terms of the power differential between teachers and students (e.g. Lemke, 1990), and there is no doubt t...

This study examines the use of strategies and knowledge sources in L2 lexical inferencing and their relationship with inferential success. Data consist of introspective and retrospective think-aloud protocols of 21 intermediate ESL learners who attempted to infer new word meanings from context. Analysis reveals that (a) overall, the rate of success was low even when learners used the strategies and knowledge sources they had at their disposal, (b) different strategies contributed differentially to inferencing success, and (c) success was related more to the quality rather than the quantity of the strategies used. Findings challenge a unidimensional conception of the role of strategies in L2 lexical inferencing and instead support an inferencing model that distinguishes between strategies and the ability to use them appropriately and effectively in conjunction with various sources of knowledge in lexical inferencing. This article discusses the pedagogical as well as theoretical implications of the findings for an integrated model of lexical inferencing.

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The editors of both journals hope their readers will find this sharing of scholarship interesting and beneficial.This study examines the relationship between English as a second language (ESL) learners' depth of vocabulary knowledge, their lexical inferencing strategy use, and their success in deriving word meaning from context. Participants read a passage containing 10 unknown words and attempted to derive the meanings of the unknown words from context. Introspective thinkaloud protocols were used to discover the degree and types of inferencing strategies learners used. The Word-Associate Test (WAT) (Read, 1993) was used to measure the learner's depth of vocabulary knowledge. Results indicate a significant relationship between depth of vocabulary knowledge and the degree and type of strategy use and success. They reveal that (a) those who had stronger depth of vocabulary knowledge used certain strategies more frequently than those who had weaker depth of vocabulary knowledge; (b) the stronger students made more effective use of certain types of lexical inferencing strategies than their weaker counterparts; and (c) depth of vocabulary knowledge made a significant contribution to inferential success over and above the contribution made by the learner's degree of strategy use. These findings provide empirical support for the centrality of depth of vocabulary knowledge in lexical inferencing and the hypothesis that lexical inferencing is a meaning construction process that is significantly influenced by the richness of the learner's preexisting semantic system.