Education policy in recent years has dramatically repositioned the role and status of teachers, trainee teachers and teacher education in the UK and beyond. This paper focuses specifically on education policy in England; however, it has broader significance for those interested in education and teacher education in international policy contexts.…

Purpose: Morphological regularities are an important feature of the English writing system, and exposure to written morphology may be key in the development of skilled word recognition. Our aim was to investigate children's experiences of written morphology by analyzing a large-scale corpus of children's reading materials spanning a target age…

The article presents and discusses a study that focuses upon discursive representations of sustainability in English Language Teaching (ELT) that are found on the official web-site of the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom. The study involved a corpus of texts related to sustainability in ELT that were collected on the website of the…

This paper explores the other side of standardization by looking at one of the early modern regional varieties of English that remained outside the "consensus dialect" (Wright, 2000: 6). Drawing on Agha's (2003) framework of "enregisterment," I examine a selection of literary representations of the 'northern' dialect that are…

This article contributes to existing studies that are concerned with standardisation and supralocalisation processes in the development of written English during the Early Modern English period. By focussing on and comparing civic records and letter data from important regional urban centres, notably Bristol, Coventry and York, from the period…

Since written assignments often constitute the main form of assessment in tertiary education, academic writing skills are of paramount importance to university students. The role of academic writing in turn emphasises two aspects vital for successful written production at universities: genre awareness as students are assessed on the production of…

When two people interact, reference presentation is shaped with the intention of supporting addressee understanding, allowing for ease of acceptance, thus minimizing overall collaborative effort. To date, analysis of such "audience design" has focused largely on adult-adult or adult-child interaction but seldom on adult-teenager…

This paper explores contradictory constructions of teacher work across policy discourse and professional practice. It draws from a corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis of 363 political speeches published on England's Department for Education website between 2010 and 2018, and qualitative interviews with two executive leaders working in…

The Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF) is an evaluation of teaching quality at UK universities. The aim of the TEF is to raise esteem for teaching in line with research and recognise teaching excellence. In 2017 all universities who took part in the TEF exercise were awarded ratings of gold, silver or bronze for teaching quality. These awards…

This paper investigates performative manifestations of sincerity across Anglo-Norman and Middle English. In particular, it locates adverbial sincerity markers used to qualify performative speech act verbs in late medieval letters (fourteenth and fifteenth centuries), at a point when Middle English was rapidly replacing Anglo-Norman as the…

Dialogic approaches based on active student participation, open, respectful discussion, exploring and critiquing different perspectives are increasingly found to support student learning. However, the specific productive forms of teacher-student interaction have rarely been studied systematically. A recent large-scale project explored the…

Semantic diversity -- a metric that captures variations in previous contextual experience with a word -- influences children's lexical decision and reading aloud. We investigated the effects of semantic diversity and frequency on children's reading of words embedded in sentences, while eye movements were recorded. If semantic diversity and…

The present investigation focuses on first language (L1) and second language (L2) speakers' sensitivity to lexical fixedness and compositionality of Italian word combinations. Two studies explored language users' intuitions about three types of word combinations: free combinations, collocations, and idioms. In Study 1, Italian Verb+Noun…

Increasing focus worldwide on accountability and quality assurance in universities has forced senior management to develop policies to address academic support at institutional-level. One such area is the mathematical and statistical skills that students in many disciplines need to succeed. In common with many countries, large numbers of students…

Studies of conflictual workplace discourse are rare, both in language-awareness research and discourse analysis more generally, owing partly to the difficulty in gaining access to such interactions, and arguably to the relative rarity of conflictual discourse occurring at work. The topic is therefore both under-analysed and under-theorised.…