Composition courses have a contentious relationship with textbooks. On one hand, textbooks grant legitimacy to a eld that historically struggled with its image of being in service to other elds. On the other hand, in a course designed to teach students authorial agency, discursive sensitivity, audience awareness, and the dialogic nature of…

The study presents an exploration of how interpersonal relationships are created in a speech text. It investigated former President Muhammadu Buhari's Independence Day speech using mood structural analysis. The analysis aimed to explore the power of using mood structure in addressing Nigerians about the President's programs and policies during the…

There is continuing interest in using the best available research evidence to inform public health policy. However, all too often efforts to do so rely on mechanistic and unrealistic views of the process by which public policy is made. As a result, traditional dyadic knowledge translation (KT) approaches may not be particularly effective when…

The main argument of this paper is that the Virtual Linguistic Landscape (VLL) of advertising allows the utilisation of persuasion strategies that transcend the traditional separation of named languages to produce the maximum effect on potential customers. The paper challenges the segregational view of language, which assumes that communication…

Power distance (PD), a cultural value denoting acceptance of asymmetrical power relationships, influences the force of rhetoric used by a writer to address their reader. However, AI technologies such as ChatGPT lack an explicit awareness of PD, which could affect the quality of AI-generated persuasive texts used for language learning. To…

One of the problematic features of the "skills discourse" is the view that skills are decontextualized bits of knowledge and disposition. Instead, how skills such as communication are defined and used are shaped by cultural, political, and situational factors. In this article, we integrate theory from communication studies, critical…

Being up front with students about Standard English as "the language of power" allows them to learn valuable lessons about Standard and non-Standard English dialects. In this article, the author describes an eighth-grade language unit that helps students understand the value of dialects and standardized English. The author concludes that the…

This paper explores the potential for conducting collaborative and critical research in higher education which problematises the role and practices of the academy in maintaining exclusion. It begins with a brief discussion of UK government discourse on widening participation, and contrasts this with the research literature which indicates the…

Applies M. Foucault's account of power-discourse and its relationship to its owners to aspects of late 19th/early 20th centuries, when new technologies have multiplied the capacity of power-discourse to intervene in lives. Identifies industrial urban crowd as a target for discourse; considers this conjunction in light of Foucault's theories.…

Notes that feminist interventions are communicative acts that bring attention to shifting power relations within a specific discursive context. Argues that enacting feminist interventions in online environments changes the online community's identity and narrow sense of audience, and that creating feminist multimedia helps ensure a more human,…

Offers a case study describing how the rhetorical expertise of a young woman (at the lowest professional level in a male-dominated bureaucratic organization) gave her the power to revise the processes by which her organization did its work, to rewrite the job descriptions of the managers within the organization, and to create a unique role for…

The authors describe ethical issues they have encountered when teachers develop narratives about their own practice and then again when these narratives are later explored using drama techniques. Specifically, they look at the developmental process itself, both in the creation of the original narrative and the subsequent creation of a dramatic…