Multiplayer online games form complex semiotic ecologies that include game-generated texts, player-to-player communication and collaboration, and associated websites that support in-game play. This article describes an exploratory study of the massively multiplayer online game (MMO) "World of Warcraft" ("WoW"), with specific…

Teaching and learning piano poses challenges when the student is clinically blind. This article addresses the following question: What can be learned from a case study of teaching piano successfully to a student who is blind? The article has three purposes. The first is to document the achievements of a young student who met these challenges. The…

This case study of an American professor's teaching experience in Sweden analyzes classroom communication using relational dialectics theory and cultural values theory. Tensions of hierarchy vs. equality and autonomy vs. connection were described through classroom processes such as greeting practices, dress, grading, attendance, gendered language…

In the attempt to evaluate the quality of teacher talk, recent communicative approaches have suggested that the modification of teacher classroom speech and the functional distribution of teacher talk in terms of pedagogical goals should be considered (Seedhouse: 1996). This study investigates the relationship between language use and pedagogic…

In White Kids, Mary Bucholtz investigates how white teenagers use language to display identities based on race and youth culture. Focusing on three youth styles--preppies, hip hop fans, and nerds--Bucholtz shows how white youth use a wealth of linguistic resources, from social labels to slang, from Valley Girl speech to African American English,…

This dissertation represents a study of the formation of "-sja" passives of Russian verbs of governing and wanting. I explore five imperfective verbs of governing: "zavedovat" "manage"; "komandovat" "command"; "pravit" "govern"; "rukovdit" "direct"; and "upravljat" "manage"; as well as four imperfective verbs of wanting: "iskat" "seek"; "trebovat"…

In this welcome second edition of "The Effective Teacher's Guide to Autism and Communication Difficulties", best-selling author Michael Farrell addresses how teachers and others can develop provision for students with autism and students that have difficulties with speech, grammar, meaning, use of language and comprehension. Updated and expanded,…

With clinical purposes in mind, a review of the proximaldistal opposition is carried out in order to define a universal parameter of variability in semiotic procedures. By taking into consideration different--although notionally inter-related--senses of the proximaldistal opposition, a cluster of semiotic properties is proposed, which initially…

Using Jack Goody and Ian Watt's theory of literacy as a normalizing agent, I show how the presence of the English language and "English Only" values and policies have affected the Amish and their home language, Pennsylvania Dutch, and their religious language, "High" German. These changes are seen as detrimental to the Amish…

As many educators can attest, the quality of teacher-student relationships often has enormous impact on student success at every level. When teacher-student relationships improve, concurrent improvements in classroom behavior such as reductions in aggression and increases in compliance with rules can be expected. Students have also shown…

This study examines interactions from trials in the Syariah court in Malaysia. It focuses on the types of questioning, the choice of language and the linguistic resources employed in this particular context. In the discourse of law, questioning has been a prominent concern particularly in cross-examination and can be considered one of the key…

The study of bullshit, what the author calls "taurascatics", has been making a splash of late. It was Harry Frankfurt who tossed the stone: his essay "On Bullshit" came out in "Raritan" in 1986, hit the "New York Times" best-seller list as a book in 1995, and has been adopted, adapted, and criticized across the academy since. The ripples spread…

This article uses a conversation analytic framework to explore reproaches in classroom interaction. The data used is naturally occurring Finnish classroom interaction (students aged 13-15). The analysis focuses on reproaches that are used in order to silence students and in which gendered address terms are included. In the data occurrences, the…

Relatively little attention has been paid to questions of how language acts in and through the interactions of language in situations where people are encouraged to learn to be active in contexts of work. This paper argues that detailed analysis is needed to understand how activation through language acts in the shaping and governing of workers.…

This article offers a particular analytic method from systemic functional linguistics, "thematic analysis," which reveals the mathematical meaning potentials construed in discourse. Addressing concerns that discourse analysis is too often content-free, thematic analysis provides a way to represent semantic structures of mathematical content,…