Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to map, characterize and conceptualize the press discourse of NGO-school interactions within public education in Israel and in England. Design/methodology/approach: The study is based on a corpus of articles published in key elite and popular daily newspapers in Israel and in England. The data were analyzed…

This article reviews the growing number of studies that have drawn on positioning theory in exploring the interactional dynamics of classroom discourse. It discusses key concepts of the theory, provides an overview of empirical studies that focus on student positioning, in 'mainstream' content classrooms and classrooms that include learners or…

Analyses of 34 cases of direct reported thought found in ordinary Korean conversations illustrate a routine practice in the use of reported thought-reenacting a prior thought to demonstrate how the speaker's current stance originated. Often, such thoughts are not simply momentary, isolated thoughts in passing but are consequential thoughts…

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 conversational research interview constitutes a complex and fraught context for personal accounts, and the methodological literature of the past few decades has acknowledged this. Theoretical discussions about representation, ethics, and power in interviews have been extended in empirical studies of actual interaction. Particularly useful for…

Argues that a major difficulty in formalizing linguistic dialogue interaction is the uncertainty arising from various factors. Advances proposals for capturing at least some of those factors in logical representations: topic/subtopic arrangement; semantic allocation; participants' competence; discourse goals; semantic, psychological, and pragmatic…

Notes that, since fictional discourse need not reflect prevailing systems of meaning and norms or values, readers gain detachment from their own presuppositions; by constituting and formulating text-sense, readers are constituting and formulating their own cognition and becoming aware of the operations for doing so. (FL)

Noting that the growth of linguistics as a discipline has been accompanied by an awareness of the relevance of linguistic research to the study and teaching of reading, this paper examines four points at which linguists and reading researchers have met. The four areas reviewed are: (1) linguistic methods in teaching reading, (2) sociolinguistics…

Noting that a shared social reality that is constituted, sustained, and modified in symbolic interaction is central to life in an organization, this paper contends that contemporary developments in rhetorical theory make possible careful descriptions of how discourse functions in maintaining and changing that social reality. The paper demonstrates…

This paper proposes a general principle of topic resources as a key principle of conversation. The first section of the paper offers a discussion of the notion of cohesion as a condition in which interactants perceive that their utterances are related to one another and presents the "given-new" strategy (in which the interactants…

This paper advocates the view of readability as an interaction between text structure and the cognitive processes and structures possessed by a reader. A simulation model of prose comprehension that yields predictions of both propositional recall and text readability based on the frequencies of different processing events is discussed. The paper…

This article explores some roles for conversation analysis (CA) as an approach to second and foreign language learning by examining the initial segment of a Gesprachsrunde, a dyadic conversation-for-learning conducted between a beginning learner of German as a foreign language and a native speaker of German. The analysis focuses on the situated…

Drawing upon the philosophical and technical frameworks of discourse analysis, this paper suggests the rules governing linguistic choices in constructing negotiation. First, it clarifies the philosophical assumptions underlying different approaches to analysis, specifying a conceptual focus, particularly with regard to the situation and the…

This paper focuses on political change in Venezuela from a critical discourse analysis perspective that emphasizes the roles of the participants in the interaction to show how, with their actions, they are affected and affect others. An interactional approach based on Firth's categories of context (Firth, 1951) and conversational analysis is used…

Discusses focusing, the manner in which speakers center attention on a particular element of discourse, and describes a process model of focusing that specifies what syntactic, semantic, and world knowledge constraints are needed for a hearer to track a speaker's focus in a discourse. (FL)