This dissertation investigates police report writing at the Jackson Police Department in Northwest Arkansas. It presents three primary research questions which are addressed through qualitative methods of interview, observation, and discourse analysis: (1) In what ways does police training address report writing?; (2) What audience awareness do…

Current thinking on academic identities is heavily influenced by developments in other disciplines, notably sociology. This accords with Haggis's (2007) challenge for educational researchers to engage with current theory and methods from across the social sciences. However, the traditional sister discipline to education, psychology, seems…

In this article, the authors examine the development of the Swedish educational reform of 1991 from an international and European perspective, and from the perspective of what counts as knowledge in a recently implemented Swedish curriculum reform. With effect from 2011, the Swedish Government has significantly reshaped the curricula for…

This paper is a theoretical effort to support but complicate critiques of disaster capitalism and neoliberal strategies to profit from public education. We put into conversation a discursive analysis following Michel Foucault and a spatial analysis following Henri Lefebvre that focus on monumentalized disasters. We argue that neoliberalism carries…

This qualitative study builds on earlier research on language and identity by focusing on how Canadian Generation 1.5 university students enact their identities through talk-in-interaction. Drawing on (applied) Conversational Analysis (CA) to analyze critically the production and management of social institutions in talk-in-interaction in tandem…

In this study, we take a sociocultural perspective on teaching and learning to examine how teachers in an urban Algebra 1 classroom constructed opportunities to learn. Drawing on analyses of discourse practices, including videotaped classroom lessons as well as other classroom artifacts and telephone interviews, we describe ways that two teachers…

Learning and dialogue may naturally engender feelings and expressions of uncertainty for a variety of reasons and purposes. Yet, little research has examined how patterns of linguistic uncertainty are enacted and changed over time as students reciprocally influence one another and the dialogical system they are creating. This study describes the…

This study examines aspects of the syntax-discourse interface in near-native French. Two cleft structures--"c'est" clefts and "avoir" clefts--are examined in experimental and spontaneous conversational data from 10 adult Anglophone learners of French and ten native speakers of French. "C'est" clefts mark focus, and…

This study explores complex language in adolescents with specific language impairment (SLI) with the aim of finding out how aspects of language characteristic of typical syntactic development after childhood fare and, in particular, whether there is evidence that individuals with SLI avoid using structures whose syntactic derivation involves…

The discursive practices of adoptive parents in two online transnational adoption forums (2006-2008) and observations of five international adoption workshops suggest that what Heather Jacobson described as "culture keeping", the cultural socialization of children that retains a sense of native group identity, is more aptly characterized as…

This paper provides a critical analysis of the Australian government's education revolution policy as promulgated in the media release document, "Quality Education: The Case for an Education Revolution in our Schools". It seeks to problematize the government's claim to marry quality and equity, via an analysis of the discursive…

If mathematics is a male domain, where does this leave women who do mathematics? In a world where there is little or no discursive space in which to be female, women who enter in must do identity work in order to achieve what is often an uneasy presence. This paper builds on recent research which suggests that some undergraduate women are however…

Focusing on matters of power and difference, this article examines rhetorical theories of genre and James Gee's theory of Discourse. Although both theories offer productive ways of understanding literate practice, it is argued, they are limited in crucial respects. Genre theory offers few ways of understanding how and why some social actors have…

This article contributes to a social psychological understanding of identity by identifying some features of the interactional organization of self-praise. Early conversation analytic work on the epistemics of self-assessment and constraints against self-praise has shown that praising oneself is an interactionally delicate matter that may leave…

If for much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the "Battle of the Teutoburg Forest", fought in 9 CE between Roman armies and Germanic tribes, was predominantly a reference point for nationalist and chauvinist discourses in Germany, the first decade of the twenty-first century has seen attempts to link public remembrance with…