Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) sees discourse as a form of "social practice", in which language use is seen at the same time as socially influenced and influential. Another characteristic of CDA is that it is engaged and committed; it intervenes in social practice and attempts to reveal connections between language use, power, and ideology. The…

Choice of address forms, a socially crucial feature in German communication, is context-dependent on situations (a) where the unmarked form of address is "du" (T), (b) where it is "Sie" (V), and (c) where the two systems (a and b) coexist. The first two situations are, apart from their fuzzy edges, rather clearcut. The third situation, however,…

This article is concerned with the violence done in and to education. It does not address physical violence in schools, but is interested in cultural, emotional and psychological violence in schools and education systems. It asks three questions: is education inherently violent? If so, how serious a problem is this? How should spiritual education…

Recent turbulence in the corporate world resulting from cross-border mergers and acquisitions and advances in communication technology has meant major changes for internal communication in multinational companies. For example, in Finnish-Swedish mergers the common corporate language is increasingly English even though Swedish has traditionally…

Metaphors can be powerful teaching and learning tools which may help us to understand novel, complex or abstract concepts using familiar language and thought structures. Academics routinely use metaphors in their university teaching to explain new or difficult ideas to students. In this article the authors argue that tertiary teachers' metaphors…

The Preschool Language Assessment Instrument (PLAI) was designed as a diagnostic tool for 3- to 6-year-old children to assess children's abilities to use language to solve thinking problems typically posed by teachers. The PLAI was developed after observing middle-class teachers in preschool classrooms encourage children to use language in…

While rhetoric is conventionally associated with argumentation and discussions of discrete language forms (such as pronouns) which are usually housed in lingustics, clearly there are forms of rhetoric that are not obviously propositional. Moreover, sometimes very small language units can be deployed to great persuasive effect. Muriel Rukeyser's…

There are three distinct ways that the metaphor of "clarity" is employed in rhetorical history and in daily interchanges, correlating to three ways of looking at language, in turn correlating to three approaches to teaching writing. What is being proposed is more of a taxonomy than a pedagogy, but this taxonomy is important because of…

In the course of evaluating the Educational Partnerships Program of the Office of Educational Research and Improvement, researchers often heard the aphorism "It takes a whole village to raise a child." The village image appeared a powerful metaphor for program participants. This paper develops the hypothesis that the language and…

The claims for the huge numbers of students suffering from the "latest scams" in literacy education--learning disability, dyslexia, attention deficit disorder, at risk, and hypoglycemia--are driven by political, economic, and social profits with minimal concern for children. While such problems exist, the phrases used to describe these…

Three arguments lead to the conclusion that the English of business is the business of English. First, reluctance to fully appreciate the English of Business stems in part from a serious misunderstanding about the development of written language in the Western tradition. While studying folktales and the origins of myths has made an awareness of…

Since the emergence of the concept of communicative competence, the language teaching field has focused on teaching appropriate language use in addition to general linguistic elements. Speech act studies have contributed to providing appropriate models for second and foreign language learners. In this paper, the effort toward the creation and use…

Jean-Francois Lyotard is considered by many as the pre-eminent non-Marxist philosopher of the "postmodern condition." This paper offers Lyotard's intellectual biography, describes his political writings and subsequent turn to philosophy, and discusses his views on capitalism in the postmodern condition and the problem of the legitimation…

A study examined the linguistic forms in the discourse of speakers during a language test to indicate why they use certain specific forms over others. Ten children were given the Grammatical Analysis of Elicited Language--Simple Sentence Level Test (GAEL), a language proficiency test for hearing-impaired children in the age group of 4 to 8 years.…

In the early 1980s, Shakeshaft and Hanson reviewed the 10 volumes of "Educational Administration Quarterly" (EAQ) that were published during the 1970s for evidence of androcentric bias. Androcentric bias is said to occur when the theory and research is informed by the male perspective. The underlying assumption is that the experience of…