Institutional ethnography (IE) is a feminist approach to research focusing on the organising power of texts and language. This paper explores "how" to analyse texts in IE while considering the importance of reflexivity and accountability to feminist research. Based on a five year study of UK university audit processes, I developed a…

This article traces the history of college writing and suggests a different way ahead. To show why we need this approach, the article historicizes the start of postsecondary English as a paradoxical one, committed to egalitarian ideals while privileging narrow and exclusive English usage. To offer an alternative approach, the article synthesizes…

Metadiscourse studies, inspired by Halliday's interpersonal metafunction of language, have dominated academic discourse analysis. They tended to exclude the ideational metafunction in discourse and to reduce the reader/analyst to a concordance programme that scans texts for lists of pre-established, but not always clearly defined, linguistic…

Academic language is the formal language that is common in books and at school, but that students are unlikely to encounter in everyday conversations with friends and family. Not only is academic language critical to school achievement but it is also foundational for the true comprehension of contentrich subjects. Academic language should permeate…

Verb use and the production of verb argument structure in the written texts of children in elementary school is a key stepping stone towards academic writing success that has remained relatively unexplored and is a notable gap in our understanding of writing development. To evaluate the role of verbs in the written narrative texts of children, we…