The author traces how discourse functions in the context of a school-based, urban Aboriginal education initiative, with a focus on the construction and organization of teaching subjects. Critical discourse analysis that traces spectres reveals some of the ways that whiteness and Eurocentrism create the possibilities for, and the conditions in…

This article reports a study on an encounter between preschoolers and contemporary photography. The article has two aims: first, it elucidates preschoolers' meaning-making when viewing photographs, and second, it investigates the possible benefits of using contemporary photography as a forum for prompting children's aesthetic agency in early…

Triadic dialogue, the Initiation, Response, Evaluation sequence typical of teacher /student interactions in classrooms, has long been identified as a barrier to students' access to learning, including science learning. A large body of research on the subject has over the years led to projects and policies aimed at increasing opportunities for…

The purpose of this exploratory study was to identify the analytic frames children (ages 9 to 11) employed as they worked together to make sense of an ill-structured problem, what those same children did when their frames collided in the context of deliberative dialogue, and what they learned from the process of negotiation. Data included pre- and…

The interest in teachers' discourses and vocabularies has for a long time been studied under the rubric of knowledge, most notably teachers' professional knowledge. This interest can be traced back to Shulman's distinction between different kinds of teacher knowledge and Schwab's interest in the role of practical reasoning and judgement in…

This study reports on the analysis of a widely used "General English" textbook to explore the relationship between lexical bundles included in the text and lexical bundles identified in relevant corpora to determine the appropriateness of the text's vocabulary in relation to its stated objective. Appropriateness is examined through the…

Many students in middle and secondary school face challenges in understanding complex content expressed in disciplinary-specific discourses. Disciplinary literacy (DL) has emerged as a viable approach to these challenges. Yet, to date, the assessment of disciplinary literacy remains relatively underdeveloped. The current paper examines the…

This study reports how teaching using a systemic functional linguistics (SFL)-based appraisal system impacted English-as- a-foreign-language (EFL) students' reflective practices with text deconstruction and construction. Through qualitative content and discourse analyses of three focal EFL students'reading and writing performance, interviews, and…

The goal of this paper is to analyze the creative processes undertaken in a community of teenagers participating in entertainment workshops designed to develop digital literacies. The main goal is to outline support strategies to generate digital literacy among young people who participate in social networks. We adopt an ethnographic and action…

Marginalisation of the visual arts resulting from the marketisation of education impacts young people's access to and interaction with culture on a global stage. In England this educational disruption is characterised by inconsistent access to arts-based curricula and democratic pedagogies, where those from lower socio-economic backgrounds are at…

Appraisal/Evaluation within Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) is a rather new framework for the analysis of evaluative language, focusing on how human beings reveal their emotions directly or indirectly, how they take stances, and how they align or disalign themselves with social subjects. Through an attitudinal analysis of the system of…

Previous research has illustrated that learner initiatives have the potential to generate learning opportunities in second language (L2) classrooms. Despite a small body of recent research indicating that teachers' responses to learner initiatives play a significant role in facilitating learning opportunities in teacher-student interactions, more…

With the integration of new technologies in the foreign language classroom, the practice of collaborative writing has gained renewed attention, although some questions still remain unanswered regarding the extent to which these tools help learners in their writing when compared to more traditional learning contexts (Elola & Oskoz, 2010). In…

Diversity is a word used by many people with different meanings and interpretations. The differences in the way we understand and use the word "diversity" pose unique challenges for those who do social justice education. Students and educators may not share the same definition, connotation, or beliefs related to the idea of diversity.…

Univocal discourse, characterized by its function of conveying information from one person to another, is common in mathematics classrooms but dialogic teaching aims at students coming to participate in dialogic discourse, that is, discourse functioning to generate new meaning within a community. Many mathematical practices are directed at the…