In this paper, we exemplify the resourcefulness of using non-sanctioned ways of speaking in classroom communication within a cross-age literacy collaboration between elementary-level grade 5 and high-school level grade 9 students in Nairobi, Kenya. Our goal is two-fold: to contribute to scholarship that affirms this resourcefulness, and to respond…

In light of increasing emphasis on the importance of post-secondary education to personal economic security, there is growing interest to promote college readiness initiatives in high schools, particularly for low-income and minority students for whom the harmful effects of institutional inequities on college readiness is well-documented.…

This article shows how the professional discourse on quality assurance in higher education is building on latent meaning structures that can be competing with each other and even subvert the messages on the manifest level. Taking the case of the Austrian higher education system as an example and employing a reconstructive-interpretative approach…

In the years since the second Thatcher government (1983-87), and continuing until the present, universities in the UK have been subjected to a series of neoliberal reforms which have had a deleterious effect on academics' working conditions and on the kind of research they are required to produce. 1986 saw the introduction of regular sector wide…

Just as language reflects one's thoughts, the text of science textbooks reflects the structure of scientific knowledge and thought. Therefore, students' learning of scientific language leads to their acquisition of the structure of scientific knowledge and thought. The purposes of this study were to extract scientific semantic network from science…

Despite a seemingly fragmented interactional context, teachers and students in classrooms routinely manage to co-construct coherent, inter-related, and individually adapted learning trajectories distributed over days and weeks. The aim of this article is to explore with what interactional resources progressivity is accomplished in learning…

Sociocognitive theory views learning, including second language acquisition, as the progressive "alignment" of individuals vis-à-vis their ecosocial environments. In this article we first update sociocognitive theory in light of recent evolutionary/ecological research on learning/teaching: (a) Humans are evolutionarily "adapted to…

Two experiments explored the hypothesis that anaphors and demonstratives signal different procedural instructions: Whereas the anaphor "it" brings a concrete entity into a reader's focus, the demonstrative "this" directs the focus to a predicate proposition in a discourse representation. The findings from an online eye-tracking…

This case study is excerpted from a larger study where we explore collaborative encounters, i.e. practices and discourses, within a blended learning project where vlogging, i.e. video blogging, is used in Finnish language learning. The data has been collected in 2017-2018 during an intermediate Finnish course at the University of Toronto. In this…

The study investigated intentions and motivating factors of using impoliteness in interlanguage complaints by English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners. Empirical data were elicited by means of oral discourse completion tasks and questionnaires from 42 Indonesian learners of English. Post-structured interviews were conducted to obtain the…

The authorial stance in academic genres is conveyed with the use of linguistic conventions of disciplines, one of which is metadiscourse. The aim of this study was to compare the use of interactional metadiscourse features (IMDMs) by native academic authors of English (NAAEs) and Turkish-speaking academic authors of English (TAAEs) for the…

The higher education sector has been undergoing a far-reaching institutional re-orientation during the past two decades. Many adjustments appear to have strengthened the role of competition in the governance of higher education, but the character of the sector's emerging new political economy has frequently remained unclear. Serving as the…

This dialogic analysis, on the professional identities of five public preschool teachers from a major metropolitan school district in the United States, examines the dialogic space of participants in a context where discourses of play-based pedagogies and academic readiness were in competition. In discussing the pedagogical tensions that ensued…

This article presents an analysis of a digital video created by a student (age 13) in a classroom setting. Since sign functioning is a key focus in theories of meaning making as it occurs through language and through other modes, my analysis focuses on the relations between signifiers as they are inscribed in her video. This analysis explores new…

"Coming out" is a powerful way for individuals to disclose, constitute, and perform membership in stigmatized identity categories. The practice has now spread far beyond its LGBTQ origins. In this essay, I examine how atheists and other secularists have taken up and adapted coming out discourse to meet their situational and rhetorical…