This ethnographic study interrogates youth understandings of the concept of "monstrosity" as presented in young adult speculative fiction novels and as it pertains to contemporary U.S. politics. The monster is a popular figure in fiction for adolescents, and it often serves a metaphorical political function within its narratives. This…

Metonymic and metaphoric language are thoroughly present in everyday language, so much so that they hold in themselves strong explanatory capacity to uncover and even influence underlying individual or social/cultural ideological systems and beliefs about the world around us (Catalano & Waugh, 2013; 2014; Lakoff & Johnson, 1980). The…

In the first case study, a piece of recent BBC news reported on Chinese netizens leaving random but funny comments on a Western website attracted people's attention. A closer look at those comments reveals that understanding the Chinese netizens' comments requires metaphorical and cultural knowledge. This study starts with theoretical explanations…

Despite the growing interest in examining the link between peer-peer collaborative dialogue and second language (L2) development in recent years (Swain, Brooks, & Tocalli-Beller, 2002), much of the empirical work in this regard focused on face-to-face communication, leaving the operationalization of collaborative dialogue in text-based…

This qualitative inquiry explored the personal reading interests of 42 10th-grade students as they selected and began reading a novel. The study's goal was to inform those interested in supporting students' reading interests of what students from one rural school could and could not verbalize about their personal reading interests. The…