Adopting a qualitative case study methodology, the present study illuminates how two multilingual students enrolled in a U.S. community college ESL class negotiated the sociocultural norms valued in their multiple communities to make investment in learning English in college. Drawing on Gee's theory of Discourse and identity (1996) and Norton's…

Recently leaders in many Asian countries have advocated for student-centred reform agendas. However, bringing about pedagogical change is not simply a technical issue of implementing practices designed elsewhere but is a more substantive issue concerned with local cultural values and context. Researchers have claimed that to sustain the reform,…

Racialized multicultural discourses emerge in the TESOL classroom via textbook representations of immigrant success stories and perceived racial and cultural differences among students. Although liberal multicultural discourses may be well intentioned, these discourses warrant closer examination for the ways in which they can essentialize cultural…

This paper addresses potentially problematic classroom episodes in which someone foregrounds a social division that is normally taken for granted. It illustrates the way in which linguistic ethnography can unpack the layered processes that collide in the breaking of silence, showing how linguistic form and practice, individual positioning, local…

In this paper, we present an analysis of "pleasure" in sex and relationships education (SRE) in England. Drawing together two distinct sources of data and different but complementary analytical frameworks, we argue that pleasure is largely absent within SRE and that this discursive silence serves to produce highly gendered and…

This study looks at a case study research on a language awareness workshop in a New York public school with a dual language (Spanish/English) program. A learner-centred lesson, taught in Spanish, focused on basic personal information exchanges for in-service teachers who taught only in English and who had some limited knowledge of Spanish. The…

Enactment of policy on diversity and learning in Australian schools is evident in "diversity talk" in daily discourses of school teachers. From policy documents to daily staffroom conversations, there is extensive use in contemporary Western educational discourse of ethnolinguistic categories. The categorization of students to groups on…

Many scholars have conducted research into ways to improve EFL learners' writing proficiency by seeking to address several problems related to achieving this goal (Darani, 2014; Lu, 2013; Thomas, Thomas, & Moltow, 2015; Wang, 2013). However, the issues of learner identity in written communication and the role of the language EFL writers use as…

This dissertation study focused on complications and opportunities that surface for classroom learning in the intersections of a teacher's methods, students' literacies, and digital space. Though researchers have discussed adolescents' literacies and participation in out-of-school digital spaces, there persists a need to explore and document the…

As stated by Valero-Garcés (2006, p. 38), the new scenario including public service providers and users who are not fluent in the language used by the former has opened up new ways of linguistic and cultural mediation in current multicultural and multilingual societies. As a consequence, there is an ever increasing need for translators and…

Studies have shown an association between argumentative discourse in science class, better understanding of science concepts, and improved academic performance. However, there is lack of research on how argumentation can increase student motivation. This mixed methods concurrent nested study uses Bandura's construct of motivation and concepts of…

Though this exercise was originally designed for a first year course in women's studies that emphasizes representations of girls and women, it is also entirely appropriate to students considering matters of gender and sexuality in the fields of media studies, communications, sociology, political science, and cultural studies. This teaching…

This study analyzed the emergency protocol and violence prevention methods utilized at an American university. The four research questions were: (1) What are the sources of violence at the university? a. How has the university addressed these sources? (2) What constitutes an emergency in the eyes of the university? (3) How do emergency protocols…

The purposes of this naturalistic, descriptive study were to examine the stories that children in one first grade classroom told in a storytelling circle, how the children's knowledge, in-school experiences, and out-of-school experiences were reflected in their stories, and how the children used their knowledge and experiences as tools to…

The three structural possibilities marking a noun with an English article are "a," "the," and "Ø" (the absence of an article). Although these structural possibilities are simple, they encode a multitude of semantic and pragmatic functions, and it is these complex form-function interactions that this study explores and…