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While much of the recent academic literature into university seminar teaching has focused on collaborative learning involving student–student interaction, little research has been done into tutor–student interaction and how tutors interact with students during whole class, group-based and one-to-one teaching. In response to this finding, this exploratory study investigates the quality of tutor–student interaction in the teaching of an undergraduate and postgraduate engineering management class taught by the same tutor. A third-year undergraduate class of home students and a 1-year masters largely made up of international students were observed, video- and audio-recorded and analysed using a systematic interactive observation schedule and lesson transcripts. The analysis of the tutor–student discourse moves revealed the talk was largely lecturer-fronted with an emphasis on knowledge transmission and that there were few differences in the discourse practices of the tutor when teaching home and international students. In the light of the findings, the article argues for more research to be conducted into how tutors can be helped to engage in more dialogic interactions with their students in whole class, group-based and one-to-one interactions to ensure they are given the opportunity to engage in intellectually stimulating classroom talk and deep learning. The implications of the findings for the professional development of university tutors are also considered.

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This paper reports on the findings of a pilot school-based professional development programme for Tanzanian primary school teachers launched in February 2011 and evaluated in December 2012 by the Ministry of Education and Vocational Training with the support of UNICEF. The study set out to investigate the effectiveness and efficiency of the pilot programme in changing pedagogical practices before it was scaled up nationally. It was found that teachers who had participated in the school-based training showed significant differences in their pedagogical practices and demonstrated a positive attitude towards their training and their pupils, and saw teaching and learning as an interactive, communicative process. Drawing on the findings, the paper explores the challenges and the lessons learned for scaling up school-based teacher development at the national level in Tanzania and other countries in the east and southern African region.

From a cross-linguistic and cross-cultural perspective, this paper reports on the indings of an exploratory study examining the features of the academic texts produced by three groups of postgraduates: native speakers of Turkish (TL1), English (EL1) and Turkish speakers of English (EL2). To this end, the study involves a microdiscourse analysis of a corpus of ninety discussion sections of dissertations to identify and classify the choices made by the authors for expressing commitment/detachment in presenting knowledge claims. The results indicated interesting similarities and differences across the groups in the ways in which writers qualiied their level of commitment to a higher level and detachment from the claims in their writing. In other words, this can be described as a cline from the highest to the lowest, even intentionally withholding their commitment. By looking at the hedging and boosting devices contributing to the interactive side of academic writing, the discourse constructed by Turkish L1 writers appeared to be slightly less interpersonal but highly authoritative overall. In contrast, the results suggested that the Turkish writers of English were similar to their English L1 counterparts in terms of building a signiicantly more cautious strategy for presenting knowledge claims and making use of relatively fewer boosting devices when presenting their claims. It is hoped that the implications of the indings can be useful for teaching of academic writing to postgraduates within the contexts of the study.