This paper forwards discourse analysis as a productive way to consider the ways in which the possibilities available for middle grades preservice teachers in justice-oriented teacher education programs are complicated by larger discourses relating to teacher neutrality and teacher education as a transformational narrative. To illustrate this,…

This study applies multimodal conversation analysis to examine how pupils of L2 English in Sweden make use of online translation tools (OTTs), i.e. bilingual dictionaries and Google Translate, in a range of digital collaborative writing tasks. The collection of sequences where pupils use OTTs comes from 31 hours of video-recorded data from four…

In this article, we draw on the work of Michel Foucault to analyze one student's subject development in an expository writing classroom. James, the participant, was embarking on the project of becoming a good student, as he understood it, after struggling and leaving school previously. Drawing on interviews, classroom observations and written…

This article investigates the civic writing practices of more than 11,000 students writing letters to the next president in the lead up to the 2016 U.S. election. We analyze how letter topics are associated with socioeconomic factors and reveal that 43 topics--including ones prevalent among students such as immigration, guns, and school…

This study explores one teacher's instructional method for teaching life sciences using argumentation and argumentative writing rather than simple templates for writing claims and evidence. The microethnographic discourse analytic case study reported here included the teacher and 26 "advanced" eighth-grade students in a suburban middle…

What resources do students draw on to produce literary theory in the contemporary high school English classroom? This interactional sociolinguistic study traces the production and distribution of Lexical, Structural, and Thematic resources across genre chains in reading, writing, and discussing literary theory during an intensive 3-week short…

In this article, I examine the relation between literacy events and literacy practices in classroom interaction and add to ongoing discussions in the field of NLS about the transcontextual nature of literacy and how local literacy events are linked to broader literacy practices. It specifically focuses on how the link between literacy events and…

Michel Foucault argues that power is everywhere, all of the time. He describes it as concrete, "capillary," acting in, on and through the actual body. All "knowledge" and "truth" is an effect of that power which is why power and knowledge are integrally related. Power/knowledge produces social positioning. In this…

A team of secondary school language teachers and a teacher trainer developed a new method for Dutch writing instruction. The principles underlying the method were derived from insights regarding activating instruction and self-directed student learning. The development entailed two phases. In the first phase, the exploration of actual problems in…