Inspired by neo-institutional theory, we explore whether the semantics of diversity appears to be global and universal through computer-assisted content analysis of 2378 publications. Diversity discourses are dominant, but only in the USA and Canada, UK and Ireland and Europe, not being present in Asia, Africa, the Middle East and Latin America.…

Environmental issue is one of the public concerns pertaining to human welfare. English language education is supposed to take its part to contribute to the sustainable development. In this study, a corpus comprising 12 series of English language textbooks used in Chinese universities (48 volumes/books) was constructed to examine the extent to…

The present study examined the role of hedges in a referential communication task. Pairs of participants received an identical set of cards, each card displaying a geometric configuration (a "tangram"). One participant, the director, instructed their partner, the matcher, to reproduce a series of predetermined tangram sequences using…

This research draws on Legitimation Code Theory (LCT) to understand the epistemic dimension of the higher education classroom discourse of a professor who is well evaluated by his students. In expository science classroom discourse, concepts are loaded with different meanings, a process that is called "condensation of meanings" in LCT,…

Objective: Media framing of health issues reflects public opinion and impacts readers' perceptions and behavior. This study examines how meditation -- a recommended stress coping strategy for college students -- is framed in campus newspapers from 1997-2018. Participants: A total of 494 articles were analyzed. Methods: Semantic network analysis…

China has had an ambivalent policy for the learning and teaching of English as a foreign language (EFL) over much of its history. The explicit and implicit implementation of language policy has had a significant impact on the content of EFL textbooks and the ideologies underlying them. However, studies exploring such ideologies remain sensitive…

The definitions of internationalisation have been contested and require contextualisation. Despite the long-standing practice of and research on higher education internationalisation in Mainland China, ambiguities regarding the concept persist. This study examines academic discourses on the internationalisation of Chinese higher education. It…

The study of discourse markers has attracted the attention of researchers as a facet of linguistics since the 19th century. The focus of research has been based on the theoretical status of discourse markers in relation to how they are used and for what reasons, explored in different contexts and settings; however, few studies have been conducted…

This article examines theoretical and methodological issues raised when Legitimation Code Theory (LCT) is used to investigate knowledge-building practices in online and face-to-face teaching environments where English is the medium of instruction (EMI) in non-Anglophone higher education (HE) contexts. The article introduces two dimensions of LCT,…

Anticipatory "it" pattern, which encodes interpersonal stance, plays a crucial role in academic writing. While previous studies have been explored the overuse and the underuse of this pattern among English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners and published writers, there has been limited exploration of how EFL learners use the…

Young law students often get confused over the appropriateness and logic of using different terms in contracts and contractual clauses. This improper understanding of the right usage in the initial years usually sustains in their profession as well. Consequently, vague terms and ambiguities often become the root causes of contract interpretation…

The goal of this research is to make a theoretical reflection about connections that contributes to the development of the model for mathematical connections originally proposed by Businskas, and extended with the contributions of other researchers. This model is used in the most relevant investigations in this field. As a consequence of the…

Debates on the philosophical interpretations of quantum physics have motivated a renewed interest in how secondary and lower undergraduate students interpret quantum phenomena. In an attempt to contribute to this effort, this paper examines the dynamics of perspective in quantum physics in the context of teacher education. The goal of the study is…

Comprehension substantially benefits from attending to, thinking about, and mentally representing the sources of any presented information. Such processes require mental effort and unfortunately people do not always engage in such activities. The current article presents a nascent, evolving model of discourse comprehension that formalizes…

We consider how the existence of different signifiers for mathematical objects in different languages manifests in discourse about those objects. Based on the observation that there is a common signifier "derivative" in English used for both the derivative at a point and the derivative function and two phonetically and semantically…