Over the last few decades, both New Zealand and the intergovernmental organisation of UNESCO have widely spread the rhetoric of safety through a broad range of educational issues. This notion, in vogue since the neoliberal turn, has raised little opposition in educational debates. In this article, we use a Foucauldian lens to analyse the…

Purpose: Narrative discourse (e.g., telling anecdotes or relating personal events) comprises a key part of social interaction and is commonly affected after traumatic brain injury (TBI). Research over the past decades has enabled improved characterization of discourse impairment after TBI, but a critical lack of research into discourse…

Literature survey concerning the Learner Corpus Research (LCR) in the last 20 years has shown a paucity of studies involving specialised/discipline-specific text. Since the use of discipline-specific academic writing learner corpora is useful in determining the language pattern within the English for Specific Academic Purposes (ESAP) context, this…

Purpose: The Language Environment Analysis (LENA) system provides automated measures facilitating clinical and nonclinical research and interventions on language development, but there are only a few, scattered independent reports of these measures' validity. The objectives of the current systematic review were to (a) discover studies comparing…

This paper investigates the frequency and contextual uses of the metadiscoursal devices of evidentials, code glosses, hedges and boosters in four academic disciplines, namely, linguistics, literature, chemistry and medicine. Hyland and Hinkel's taxonomies of metadiscourse provided the search items. The data analyzed consisted of a corpus of forty…

Formality has long been of interest in the study of discourse, with periodic discussions of the best measure of formality and the relationship between formality and text categories. In this research, we explored what features predict formality as humans perceive the construct. We categorized a corpus consisting of 1,158 discourse samples published…

Objective: To examine the discursive strategies deployed by community colleges to sustain legitimacy in an evolving and contradictory institutional environment. Method: Using corpus linguistics software, I compared 1,009 mission statements from 2012-2013 with a reference corpus of 427 mission statements from 2004. Results: Keywords analysis,…

This article employs narrative analysis to examine how the media in 12 different countries characterize the "Teach for All" (TFA) teacher. Examining mass media narratives in these 12 countries illustrates that there are some remarkable commonalities in the narratives and character portraits co-constructed and propagated by the media. At…

The previous studies on abstracts (e.g., Santos, 1996; Samraj, 2002; Pho, 2008) illustrate that disciplinary variation in research article abstracts is discernible. However, the studies of abstracts from two related disciplines are still limited. The present study aimed to explore the rhetorical moves of abstracts in the fields of linguistics and…

This article, with the aim of identifying elements that constitute the characteristics of an academic space within comparative education, analyzes how comparative education has been discussed and practiced in Japan, based on a questionnaire completed by 264 members of the Japan Comparative Education Society and classification of articles published…

Academic writing, particularly writing research articles, is an indispensable part of every major in higher education. Hyland (2004) argued that a valuable means of exploring academic writing, and comparing the rhetorical features and preferences of different discourse communities, is through the metadiscourse analysis of the text. The present…

Scientific discourse is characterized by multi-semiotic construction and the resultant semantic expansions. To date, there remains a lack of analytical methods to explicate the multiplicative nature of meaning. Drawing on the theories of systemic functional linguistics, this article examines the meaning-making processes across language and…

More than a decade after Prensky's influential articulation of digital natives and immigrants, disagreement exists around these characterizations of students and the impact of such notions within higher education. Perceptions of today's undergraduate learners as tech-savvy "digital natives" (Prensky, 2001a), who both want and need the…

Studies from a range of disciplinary perspectives have highlighted how the public rhetoric of the Bush administration has shaped the representation of the conflict which has followed 9/11. However, the literature in this area raises but does not itself address the question of how the administration's use of "terror", "terrorism" and "terrorist(s)"…

A social science approach to language planning is contrasted with a language management approach to language planning. It is suggested that students of language planning need to go beyond discourse management and the social sciences if the task is to explain that language is the fundamental institution of society because to plan language is to…