Heightened concerns about the health of the teaching profession highlight the importance of studying the early teacher pipeline. This exploratory, descriptive article examines preservice teachers' expressed motivation for pursuing a teaching career. Using data from a large teacher education program in Texas, we use a natural language processing…

Research in discourse processing has provided us with a strong foundation for understanding the characteristics of text and discourse, as well as their influence on our processing and representation of texts. However, recent advances in computational techniques have allowed researchers to examine discourse processes in new ways. The purpose of the…

The translation of political discourse differs from the translation of texts in non-political contexts in which political discourse is highly profiled in terms of political sensitivity and policy orientation. It may potentially influence global peace and security. Understanding the features of translating China's political discourse from Chinese…

Grammar has always been considered by language learners as well as by those engaged in language education as an essential component of language, and their expectations from and planning for any language education programs have been conditioned accordingly. The definitions of the term grammar and its categories in all languages go back to…

For academic success, it is increasingly important that students of all ages can produce and comprehend expository discourse. This article provides guidance to clinicians and educators on using language sample analysis (LSA) to assess the expository language abilities of students across grades. Focusing on microstructural and macrostructural…

This paper draws from comparative rhetoric and contrastive stylistics and, by resorting to corpus linguistics methodologies, looks into possible quantitative descriptions of rhetorical deviations that are present in source texts within different language pairs and genres, in an attempt to map patterns of deviation, actual or expected, in…

Intergovernmental organizations (IOs) increasingly promote global citizenship education (GCE) and related topics. This paper analyses the body of scholarship on GCE that focuses on teachers and interprets the development of environment-related education (ERE) within the GCE discourse. Using a novel, data-rich methodology employing Natural Language…

Today, L.S. Vygotsky's concept of a 'zone of proximal development' (ZPD) is often used to just mean best practices in early years teaching, like scaffolding. But in his original theory, the zones linked age periods distinguished by age-specific neoformations -- one of which was the formation of concepts at adolescence. So Vygotsky rejected Stern's…

Video Remote Interpreting (VRI) is a modality of interpreting where the interpreter interacts with the other parties-at-talk through an audiovisual link without sharing the same physical interactional space. In dialogue settings, existing research on VRI has mostly drawn on the analysis of verbal behaviour to explore the dynamics of these…

Discourse coherence is a common phenomenon in linguistic studies, and plays an important role in discourse analysis. As a common and extremely important type of language phenomena, discourse coherence has drawn more and more scholars' attention, but they emphasis on partial discourse coherence, paying a little attention to holistic coherence. The…

This article on interactional competence provides an overview of the historical influences that have shaped theoretical conceptualisations of this construct as it relates to spoken language use, leading to the current view of it as involving both cognitive and social dimensions, and then describes its operationalisation in tests and assessment…

Researchers in the field of instructed second language acquisition have been examining the issue of how learners interact with input by conducting research measuring particular kinds of instructional interventions (input-oriented and meaning-based). These interventions include such things as input flood, textual enhancement and processing…

ESL learners can find it challenging to use English in a way that is pragmatically appropriate to the situation and interlocutor. In this article, we explore the impact of increased proficiency on learners' pragmatic performance. ESL learners in Australia at four proficiency levels completed three role plays, and we analysed how the learners…

Functional Discourse Grammar (FDG), as a theory of the organization of natural languages, seeks to attain pragmatic, typological and cognitive adequacy. The attempt to achieve cognitive adequacy has been fraught with problems stemming from the vagueness of the concept and the difficulty of adapting to trends in psycholinguistics. Specifically,…

For learners to communicate efficiently in the L2, they must avoid pragmatic failure. In many cases, teachers' praxis centres on the learner's performance in the L2 or his role as a speaker, which neglects the importance of his role as interpreter of utterances. Assuming that, as hearers, learners also have a responsibility to avoid…