Academic writing is rested on a view of academic negotiation between writers and readers in which writers ultimately aim to gain credibility in their academic discipline. In doing so, they utilize a wide range of linguistic devices based on cultural and disciplinary norms to communicate with readers and convince the readers about the truth of…

This study is about graduate students' discourse practices in classroom text-based synchronous computer mediated discussions (SCMD). Cultural historical activity theory (in short, Activity Theory) is the primary theoretical lens through which the data are analyzed. Engeström's (1987) Activity System model among the various theoretical positions or…

In this article, we describe a project on reasoning about socio-scientific issues (SSIs), involving French and Australian pre-service science teachers engaged in on-line discussion and development of a wiki. In the research, we developed frameworks for looking at the quality of reasoning about "socially acute" sustainability questions.…

Academic criticism is defined in this paper as a statement which reflects a discrepancy between the stance of a researcher/author, on the one hand, and that of another researcher or the discourse community as a whole, on the other (Salager-Meyer & Alcaraz Ariza, 2003). Despite researchers' awareness of the potential difficulty academic criticism…