The Swedish gender-neutral pronoun (GNP) "hen" has been in popular use since its (re)introduction to the public in 2012. Earlier research, analysing newspapers, academic papers and blogs, shows two uses of "hen": when gender is unknown and when gender is irrelevant. However, there is a lack of studies of verbal, situated, uses…

The challenges involved in navigating between home, school and academic languages, especially in a low resource context, have been well documented in the literature. Processes and strategies that allow the use of students' "language as resource" have also been suggested by research. In the context of explorations, where students work…

Academic discourse communities and learning circles are characterized by collaboration, sharing commonalities in terms of social interactions and language. The discourse of these communities is composed of jargon, common terminologies, and similarities in how they construe and communicate meaning. This study examines the extent to which discourse…

Language is a magical key that human beings hold in their hands to open the door of communication. To succeed in communication, formal links are one of the aspects of language that need to be known and used in discourse in addition to the contextual factors (Cook, 1992). Hence, systematic exposure to them is essential for satisfactory language…

To engage in critical praxis, teachers of literary response writing need concepts and methods for understanding the efficacy of teaching practices in helping students develop particular dispositions towards texts and the social issues they represent. In this article, the author uses concepts from Legitimation Code Theory (LCT) and Systemic…

To bridge the gap for English language learners (ELLs) in science, hybrid language affords the opportunity for students to communicate through various modes, including natural language, visual representations, mathematical expressions, and manual-technical operations. The purpose of this study was to investigate how ELLs use hybrid language (a) to…

This article traces the interaction of multimodal semiotic resources within and across tasks constituting a science unit on surface tension in an eighth-grade sheltered science classroom. Two discourses, operating simultaneously, realized differently motivated signs. This article follows the contribution of linguistic and extralinguistic modes…

This article is intended to highlight peer response discourse trends and to initiate a dialogue about the ways in which educators, and designers of educational environments, can play a central role in creating more democratic discourse in classrooms. We report on a research and development project involving education experts, computer engineers,…

This paper reports on the classroom languaging practices of a group of science teachers in rural and township schools in South Africa where the majority of learners learn through the medium of English, despite the fact that it is the home language of only a small minority; and learners' poor English proficiency frequently restricts their access to…

The article investigates the interplay between the meaning given to certain key expressions and pupils' understanding of science subject matter, in a qualitative study of learning.The intentional-expressive approach to the epistemological role of language use served as a theoretical frame, within the wider context of phenomenographic research on…