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…

The full text of the speech given by President Barack Hussein Obama in Chicago after he won a second term in office as US President has been broken into its minimal communicative speech acts. This strategy has been used to analyse and understand how the whole speech is consistent with the cooperative maxims of Quality, Quantity, Relation and…

Mira Bai, a saint-poet of North India is an important figure in medieval Hindi literature. Her "bhajan"-s (songs) profoundly represent the transforming of consciousness working through conceptual metaphors which fall in the realm of religious poetry wherein target domains are generally abstract. Since, the working of the mind is more…

On the basis of the three metafunctions in Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL): experiential, interpersonal and textual, the paper makes an analysis of the current news "ROK, DPRK Agree to Defuse Tension after Talks" on China Daily. The paper finds out that the political news has unique features in terms of experiential, interpersonal…

This article applies conversation analysis to classroom talk-in-interaction where pupils respond to poetry they have heard. The phenomenon of repeating in discussion details from the poem, including patterns of delivery, is considered and named echo to distinguish it from quotation in writing. The phenomenon is significant to the pedagogy of…

This paper represents some suggestions towards discourse-analytic approaches for ESL/EFL education, with the focus on identifying the textual forms which can contribute to the textual difficulty. Textual difficulty/comprehensibility, rather than being purely text-based or reader-dependent, is certainly a matter of interaction between text and…

This article addresses the relationship among theories related to classroom language and literacy events by first examining the researcher's theoretical perspective on discourse and sociocultural theories of learning development. The analytical heuristic for a microethnographic approach using a variety of theoretical tools is discussed and…

The present paper argues the use of "narratives" as the most appropriate evaluation method in cases of atypical language production. Narrative as a genre has an ecological validity that other genres used in language research and evaluation do not have. Narratives develop naturally from very early, they are independent of education and academic…

Metadiscourse is a new and interesting field of inquiry which is believed to play a vital role in organizing and producing persuasive writing, based on the norms and expectations of people involved. Metadiscourse embodies the idea that writing and speaking are more than just the communication of ideas and presentation of ideational meaning. Rather…

The aim of this paper is to provide a brief critical analysis of the adult literacy curriculum as one element of the Skills for Life Strategy and to consider how it has been used to legitimise a dominant adult literacy policy based on economic and political rationales. The term critical has many meanings. Here it is used to explore how the adult…

This paper presents some aspects of polyphonic theory, which contests the idea of the unique speaking subject and claims that several voices can be manifest in one utterance. The theory is related to the analysis of a coherent text consisting of several utterances. The notions of enunciator, speaker, enunciation, and utterance are defined in…

The paper examines co-occurrences of the major theme types with the various lateral verbs, as outlined in G. Kress and R. Hodge (1979), primarily unmarked/participant themes, other (non-participant) noun group themes, and marked themes. The data consist of 60 editorials from 2 major British newspapers, "The Times" and "The…

Argues that an understanding of professional and popular science writers' goals provides a basis for both explaining and evaluating their language use. Suggests that charges normally made against both types of writing deflect attention from the obstacles writers face and the ways in which they use language to overcome these obstacles. (KEH)

Explores the possible applications of text linguistics in the field of translation teaching, focusing on the analysis of discourse texture within Functional Sentence Perspective and Theme-Rheme Theory. It is concluded that texture provides the means for the realization of discourse intentions (context). (OD)

Examines the nature of early school reading material and its distinct discourse structures, which are used to present possible social worlds and characters to children. Argues that understanding the interpretive challenges and problems that such texts present to children aids teachers in enhancing literacy. (RAE)