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…

Helping preservice teachers use hybrid language representations in science is important if they are to become scientifically literate and able to engage in the discourse for understanding scientifiyc issues. Using hybrid language representations based on the framework of computer-supported collaborative learning, the teacher educator applied the…

Etymologically, the word 'sarcasm' is derived from the Greek "sarkazein," meaning "to speak bitterly or sneer", or, more literally, "to tear flesh" ("sarcasm," 2014). Sarcasm, then, is far from a benign feature of language, and there appears to be an inherent acerbity, or even a note of provocation, located…

This study aims to analyze positive remarks linguistically manifested through English intensifiers, i.e. very and so, and their collocates in café reviews. The appraisal framework primarily focuses on the feelings or attitudes of speakers or writers. It plays a part in providing communicative resources whereby speech functions are performed…

As new communication technologies enter the classroom, teachers must attend to how digital platforms impact the interpersonal practices of teaching and learning. In this article, I study email exchanges with three of my students--Jorge, Adriana, and Jason--over the course of one year in an 11th-grade English class at River High School, a…

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 article argues that a modified version of Bourdieu's "habitus" concept can generate insights into moral culture and the ways people use culture to make changes in their lives. If revised in light of recent findings from cognitive neuroscience, the habitus allows for the analysis of culture as embodied cognitive structures linking individuals…

Two questionnaire experiments were conducted to investigate the effects of 2 styles (hyperbole and orthographically deviant writing style) on the perception of hiniku, 'quasi-irony', and oseji, 'quasi-flattery', in the Japanese language. In each experiment, stories were constructed in which a speaker made a remark evaluating the addressee's…

This study investigated how the participants of an online learning course employed figurative language to express their emotions and feelings during the learning experience. Textual analysis was carried out in the social and metacognitive discussion areas as those related to the expression of the social dimension. Its aim was to analyze the…

This qualitative study explored the meanings of chat room conversations through observations of teenagers using the Internet. Adolescent girls were a focus because of their shaky sense of self. Participants in ten chat rooms included 534 individuals. Six themes, emerging from analyzing 2526 utterances [descriptive statements], included (a)…

This submission contains the Proceedings of the 2005 Annual Meeting of the Canadian Mathematics Education Study Group (CMESG), held at the University of Ottawa in Ottawa, Ontario. The CMESG is a group of mathematicians and mathematics educators who meet annually to discuss mathematics education issues at all levels of learning. The aims of the…