In this study, since no candidate received more than fifty percent of the votes in the TRNC Presidential election held on October 11, 2020, the election campaign visions of the candidates who made it to the second round and their latest commercials were analyzed using discourse analysis. For this purpose, the political advertising campaign…

During the COVID-19 pandemic, children with disabilities were confronted with ableist discourses that justified unfair policy measures. This study is concerned with the discourses recorded in a range of education documents, published during the pandemic within the Republic of Cyprus. It employs an interdisciplinary framework, informed by Critical…

Understanding how disability is socially constructed is important for establishing inclusive schools, since the ways in which educators and non-disabled nondisabled students understand disability affect their actions towards disabled students. As social interaction today is very often an interplay between online and offline communication…

Teaching material and textbooks undoubtedly operate politically and should be scrutinized concerning the knowledge that they construct and legitimize. But such scrutiny often involves new hegemonies and political complicities that also require further scrutiny. Following Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe's discourse analysis the present article…

Goal: The problem of the authenticity of teacher questions has not received sufficient attention from educational researchers interested in the intersection between dialogue and argumentation. In this paper, we adopt a definition of authentic questions as dialogical units that prompt teacher-student interactions that are both productive (i.e.,…

The current study aims to provide an understanding of how the relationships between standard and non-standard varieties of the Turkish language are perceived by young people of Turkish Cypriot descent within the context of Turkish complementary schools in London. These schools are set up by diasporic communities to fight/reverse language shift and…

This paper aims to present the pragmatic functions and the interpretations of 'taha' ([characters omitted]) (a very commonly used particle in oral Cypriot-Greek interactions) as it is used in classroom discourse. The present study collected and analysed data from a three hour recording of the participants' speech, and isolated 32 critical episodes…

The present study explores the ways in which young EFL learners draw on lived experiences, viewed as interactional experiences in L1 or L2 which they have participated in or observed, to ground their metapragmatic understandings. Building on previous research with adult (e.g. McConachy 2018) and young learners (Savic 2021; Savic and Myrset 2021),…

This article uses critical discourse analysis in order to discuss the equity and social justice implications of an envisaged education reform agenda in Cyprus, as articulated by two consultation reports commissioned by the World Bank. The reports highlight, "inter alia," the imperative to improve teaching and enhance accountability…

The Republic of Cyprus is a country characterised by a long-term conflict which resulted in the geopolitical division of the island. Greek-Cypriots and Turkish-Cypriots have lived in separation for more than 30 years until the border re-opened in 2003, allowing people to cross and visit 'the other side'. One of the crossing points is located in…

This article examines the symbolic power of language to construct and convey disabling discourses, albeit ample rhetoric, on the need to reinstate and safeguard disabled people's human rights and entitlements. The role of language and its discursive ramifications need to be explored and problematized in the light of legal mandates and…

The present article aims to examine the interplay between the transnational discourses of human rights and the particularities of local constructions and conceptualisations of human rights within the context of an ethnically divided society, Cyprus. Specifically, this interplay is examined through a qualitative study of Greek-Cypriot primary…

The paper reports on the results of a case study of a Year 9 class in a multilingual urban school. The study investigates issues of negotiation, accessibility and (legitimacy of) rights in the classroom's dominant discourse and more specifically the ways in which the Year 9 students of a Private English School in Cyprus negotiate their identity…

The present paper takes the approach of critical hermeneutics in human rights education (HRE) that has been developed theoretically and tries to operationalize it in pedagogical practice. In particular, a group of Greek-Cypriot teachers were trained in a series of workshops on how critical hermeneutical approach (CHA) could be taught in the…

This paper looks at teachers' interpretations of a recent and controversial Greek-Cypriot policy initiative, which aimed to promote "peaceful coexistence" between the two rival communities in conflict-ridden Cyprus. Specifically, it focuses on the ways in which Greek-Cypriot teachers constructed the relation between the new policy for…