Erard's (2004) publication in the "New York Times" of a journalistic history of the filled pause serves as the occasion for this critical review of the past half-century of research on the filled pause. Historically, the various phonetic realizations or instantiations of the filled pause have been presented with an odd recurrent admixture of the…

This paper presents an analysis of the potential problems of importing media communication in the form of a television programme from another culture. In Hong Kong, as elsewhere in the world, the local television companies frequently buy successful television programmes from, for example, the USA or Britain with the expectation that they will be…

The focus of this article is on the war rhetoric of the Bush administration as reflected in the speeches of President Bush. What was explored is how presidential speeches drew on a variety of rhetorical techniques, from role-taking and punctuation to the adoption of the paranoid style. The purpose of these techniques is to nullify voices of…

This paper considers the generic structure of "Conclusion" chapters in PhD theses or dissertations. From a corpus of 45 PhD theses covering a range of disciplines, chapters playing a concluding role were identified and analysed for their functional moves and steps. Most "Conclusions" were found to restate purpose, consolidate research space with a…

In 1999, the Italian Arte Povera artist Michelangelo Pistoletto and other artists laid the foundations of The University of Ideas (UNIDEE), an exceptional international artist-in-residence programme with a strong ideological foundation. As a sociologist of culture I had the opportunity to do research in the huge organization for a month by doing…

Situated in the context of a one year in-service professional development program for mentors in Israel, this study explored the process and content of mentors' professional conversations as opportunities for collaboratively constructing knowledge about mentoring. The analysis of the monthly conversations, conducted throughout an entire academic…

Inspired by poststructuralist insights and the critical literature on the topic of school-based sexuality education, this paper is derived from a close examination of the Relationships and Sexuality Education (RSE) resource materials devised for teachers involved in delivering the programme in Irish schools. It seeks critically to uncover how…

This study explores narratives of female teacher educators in Israel--Israeli-born Jews and Jewish immigrants--within the framework of critical discourse analysis. The oral narratives were obtained through personal in-depth interviews with six female teacher educators who work at two teacher education colleges in Israel. The findings reveal that…

Psycholinguistics, discourse patterns, and English as a second language were addressed in creating a theoretical framework for examining language in relationships. The Language Relationship Questionnaire was designed to provide an inventory language and its roles in relationships. (Contains 1 figure.)

In this cross-sectional investigation, syntactic development was compared in conversational versus expository discourse in 120 typically developing children, adolescents, and adults, age 7 to 49 years. Each participant was asked to discuss common topics such as school, family, and friends to elicit conversational discourse and to explain the rules…

This paper is part of an ongoing study of discursive behaviour both at home and at school. The overall goal of the analysis presented was to explore the level of dialogicity (Linell, 1998) manifest in Israeli classrooms. This quest was motivated by a sociocultural inclination towards learning, which places instructive dialogue at the core of…

In order to examine more closely the ways that children use socially constructed dialogue to mediate task mastery a hierarchical set of computer tasks were presented in an animated game format (ToonTalk) to three adult/child (US Kindergarten) dyads over five sessions. Transcriptions of the adult-child talk were used to determine (1) the types of…

Only recently have African nations begun to make their way towards establishing genuinely autonomous education systems incorporating elements of indigenous culture. The present study examines the historical development of curriculum in British West Africa in its links with the educational activities of the early Christian missionaries and the…

The success of policies to attract adults back to the learning of mathematics, at various levels, is often linked to questions of motivation. However, motivations depend on relevant beliefs, attitudes and emotions about mathematics--which themselves reflect, together with experiences with maths in school and in the home, wider cultural discourses…

This article draws on two previous studies by the authors, both based on interviews with European-American individuals, to document white experiences with multiculturalism, race, and cultural differences. We consider recent developments in research on whiteness and offer a perspective on racial identities defined as discursively enacted…